France Invented Cuisine. France Has Also Tried the Juice Cleanse. These Facts Require Reconciliation.
PARIS — France has a paradox named after it. The French Paradox — the observation that the French consume significant quantities of saturated fat, wine, and cheese and yet have lower rates of cardiovascular disease than populations with theoretically healthier diets — has been studied extensively since the 1990s and has produced various explanations including portion size, the Mediterranean diet’s benefits, the role of wine’s resveratrol, and the more boring but probably accurate observation that the French eat real food, slowly, in social contexts, without snacking between meals. This paradox has not prevented France from, periodically, importing and attempting diet fads from other cultures, presumably because the rational mind knows that the paradox is fine but the human desire for a simple solution with a branded name is universal.
The Juice Cleanse Experiment
The juice cleanse arrived in Paris in the early 2010s as an export from the American wellness industry and was received by the French body and the French digestive system with the ambivalence appropriate for something that had replaced meals with liquids in a country where meals are architectural events. The juice cleanse bar opened in the Marais. The juice cleanse was purchased, tried, and in a significant number of cases terminated early by people who found that removing solid food from their diet while continuing to live a Parisian life — which involves walking past boulangeries at all times, being in proximity to cheese at regular intervals, and attending social dinners where the table’s opinion of your juice cleanse would be expressed — was not sustainable in this specific environment. The juice, it was noted, was very good juice. The cheese was still cheese. The cheese won.
The Intermittent Fasting French Version
Intermittent fasting — eating within a specific window of the day — has gained significant traction in France, partly because it is compatible with the French meal structure, which has always concentrated eating into specific periods (lunch at noon, dinner at eight) and already incorporated long overnight fasts by default. The French person who adopts intermittent fasting discovers, with some satisfaction, that they were already doing approximately this and that the wellness industry has given a name and a brand to something French culture has practiced since the structure of the working day was established. According to INSERM, France’s national medical research institute, French meal timing studies show naturally occurring eating windows that correspond to intermittent fasting protocols without the protocol being adopted. France was doing this before it had a name. France is comfortable with this discovery.
The Regime Francais
The French approach to diet, when diet is required, tends toward the medical rather than the fashionable: the GP referral to a nutritionist, the specific adjustment to existing eating patterns, the targeted reduction of specific elements rather than the wholesale dietary replacement that characterises the imported fad. The nutritionist visit, subsidised by the health system, produces a personalised plan that works with French food culture rather than against it. The person who leaves with this plan is not on a “cleanse.” They are eating slightly less of something specific, slightly more of something else, continuing to attend the family Sunday lunch, continuing to order the cheese. The approach is boring, effective, and consistent with France’s general preference for the proven tool over the fashionable one. The diet fad entertains briefly. The nutritionist plan works. France eventually uses the one that works.
Eat well, always, at Virtuosal.com.
