TOP 100 SCIENCE SITES
| |||
|
| |||
| |||
|
| |||
| Ian Sample on a Commons inquiry into homeopathy Ian Sample on the MPs' investigation into whether there is sufficient evidence to dispense homeopathy on the NHSIan Sample guardian.co.uk |
Fish kill blamed on algae bloom Hundreds of fish have died at a lagoon at Bargara, east of Bundaberg, in southern Queensland. abc.net.au |
Synchrotron appoints new committee head A New Zealand professor has been appointed to be the new head of the scientific advisory committee (SAC) for the Australian Synchrotron. abc.net.au |
In pictures Scientists follow narwhals; strange, unicorn-like whales news.bbc.co.uk |
The French secret of fat | Agnès Poirier We French eat four times as much butter and 60% more cheese than the average American, but we stay thin. How do we do it?Never have I learnt so much about food's nutrient content and chemical formulas as in my years spent in Britain and North America. Revealingly, food in those two countries is reduced to unappealing scientific denominations such as "saturated fats", "fatty acids", "trans fats", "monounsaturates" and "TFAs", to name just a few mentioned in today's Guardian article about how more than a thin spread of butter a day is bad for you.Growing up in France, I never thought about food in those clinical terms, and even as a teenager concerned with my looks, never did I view cuisine as the temple of the triumvirate protein-lipid-glucid. Food, to most of my compatriots, is a matter of colours, savours and flavours. The emergence of the terms gluten-free, fat-free and sugar-free in the 1980 was an Anglo-Saxon deformity. Why would you want to eat a tasteless fat-free pizza or a sugar-free blueberry muffin? Just don't them or eat the real thing. The notion of pleasure seemed to have never existed.As a child and still now whenever I can get my hands on it, I'd eat spoonfuls of salted butter by Jean-Yves Bordier from St Malo: so good, it stands alone and doesn't need to be spread on bread. My huge daily intake of butter still baffles my British friends, who have graded it as "suicidal level".However, since when has butter been bad for you? There is nothing I like more than half a loaf of quatre-quarts, a Breton recipe made of a quarter eggs, a quarter butter, a quarter flour and a quarter sugar. With cheese, I have a particular fondness for Chaource and Brillat-Savarin, a triple-cream creation from the famous Androuet brothers. Named after the great 18th-century epicurean and gastronome, it is so rich that they call it the "foie gras of cheese". The (English) man of my life used to scowl – while savouring it with delight – "do you want to kill me or what?" each time I brought Brillat-Savarin back from Paris. In Brittany, Kouig Amman, literally "butter cake", is a must. Need I go on? My diet is very rich and yet I am thin. So, is this what they call the French paradox? Could be.Wikipedia says: "The average French person consumed 108 grams per day of fat from animal sources in 2002 while the average American consumed only 72. The French eat four times as much butter, 60% more cheese and nearly three times as much pork. Although the French consume only slightly more fat overall (171g/day v 157g/day), they consume much more saturated fat because Americans consume a far larger proportion of fat in the form of vegetable oil, with most of that being soybean oil. However, according to data from the British Heart Foundation in 1999, rate of death from coronary heart disease among males aged 35–74 years was 115 per 100,000 people in the US, but only 83 per 100,000 in France."For the Franco-American guru Mireille Guiliano, the paradox lies mainly in smaller portions, the conviviality and sharing of food, and the pleasure taken from such experience. I guess she's probably right. The less obsessed you are with calories and the more you are with choosing the best and simplest products, the better you feel and the thinner you are. Essayez donc!Food & drinkFranceNutritionNutritionAgnès Poirierguardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010 | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds guardian.co.uk |