Eating chocolate, drinking wine and staying slim - impossible surely. Mais non, says Alva MacSharry
When researchers recently sat down to design a diet for the over-55s that would fight cardiovascular disease, they came up with something that made French people exclaim - "Eh, beh - oui! C'est evident!"
What is so evident to the French and more lately to health researchers at the University Medical Centre in Rotterdam, is that a heady cocktail of chocolate, garlic, wine, almonds, fish, fruit and vegetables is very, very good for your heart.
Simply eating these ingredients every day will, the researchers claim, stave off heart disease in men for nearly seven extra years, and in women for nearly five. And with cardiovascular disease the main cause of death in the western world, that is no small benefit.
The researchers, reporting in the British Medical Journal, were attempting to mimic the predicted effects of the Polypill, a mixture of drugs which, similarly, promises to stave off heart disease, and for a similar length of time. The major problems with the Polypill would be cost, and the possible side-affects of the medicines.
With funding from, among others, the Netherlands Heart Foundation, the "Polymeal" researchers set about trawling through research on foods and cardiovascular disease.
They narrowed their study down to the six apparently most effective foods - red wine, fish, dark chocolate, almonds, fruit and vegetables, and garlic. Eat these daily and you will make your heart glad, they found.
Specifically, drinking 150ml of wine (or red grape-juice) a day, eating 114g of fish (4oz) four times a week, and 100g of chocolate, 68g of almonds, 400g of fruit and veg and 2.7g of garlic a day will reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease by 75 per cent in their over-55 target group, they claim.
It is a collection of foods that reads like a French housewife's shopping list. Chocolate - yes, the French love affair with chocolate continues. Almonds - yes, the French adore all sorts of nuts. Garlic - naturally: anyone who has travelled on the Paris Metro will attest to France's enduring love of garlic. Wine - of course . . . Fish is enduringly popular and everyone has access to good, fresh fish. And while it's almost impossible to find a breadfruit in France, most people willingly accept this constraint in return for excellent, flavour-full, locally-grown produce that crowds the shelves of even the large supermarket chains.
If nothing else, the research shed new light on what we know as "the French paradox" - the fact that French rates of cardiovascular disease are among the lowest in the world despite a diet high in fat.
It is simply the French way of life to have such riches at their fingertips. And local markets, traders, the government and even supermarkets combine to make sure it stays that way.
Meanwhile, good eating practices such as long lunch-hours and proper evening meals, strictly-controlled school meals and little "snacking" also contribute to the good national diet.
Leila Delporte is a typical example. Aged 70, Mme Delporte lives in the tiny French village of St Beauzile, in the south west of France. Although St Beauzile has only about 12 homes, no shops and is far too small for a village market, she has a full range of magnificent foods on her doorstep. Like every French rural garden and most town gardens, Mme Delporte's has a vegetable patch which she supplements from the market-stalls in a larger village nearby.
Every Thursday, Mme Delporte buys fresh fish in St Beauzile's tiny "place", when the travelling fishmonger, M. Labege, arrives, on the dot of 9.45am. M Labege's fish is not cheap but it is excellent - it comes from the port of Sete on the Mediterranean, some 200km away. Later in the week the dairyman, with his mouthwatering selection of hand-picked cheeses, and the meat-man will be pulling up in their turn, and their products will be equally fine.
Between the garden and hopping up and down to the place for her supplies, Mme Delporte is a fit woman, and nationally, at least part of France's good health is attributable to the fact that this is still an intensely rural country with a correspondingly active population.
However, as rural areas empty into the cities, France is, now, increasingly facing the same health pressures as its more northern neighbours.
Obesity is increasing, particularly among children, and the change is marked. While fat children are almost unknown in country schools, children in French cities face the same restrictions on play as Irish children, and the same temptations to a sedentary lifestyle - and it shows.
The government is fighting back. A recent missive from the department of education firmly suggested that children over the age of seven don't need an afternoon snack in school, for instance.
A recent bestseller, French Women Don't Get Fat by Mireille Guiliano, president and CEO of champagne house Cliquot, describes how French women don't diet and yet don't get fat.
Of course, some French women do diet and some do get fat, but dieting is not a national obsession (one US commentator wondered what French women talked about, then).
There is no direct French translation for the phrase, "oh no, I couldn't, it's too fattening", but there is a phrase for "a little goes a long way".
Health and fitness are viewed as a lifetime investment, the idea being that you are handed a perfectly good body at birth, and should keep it that way - "préserve la Capitale Santé", trumpets government health information.
Which is not to say that the French don't have some truly terrible health habits. French women may not diet obsessively, but they often smoke heavily and use laxatives casually.
Nonetheless, most French people find that sitting down to a proper meal twice a day gives eating habits good enough to control weight and hands those good habits on to their children, so that they grow into adults with good habits.
Which brings us back to the polymeal and its enticing ingredients.
While we find chocolate almost subversive, the French regard it unequivocally as a health food, prescribed, for example, to pregnant women with restless leg syndrome.
And yes, various studies in recent years have suggested that dark chocolate can help reduce high blood pressure, one of the causes of cardiovascular disease. It is a major source of dietary copper, manganese and magnesium, as well as zinc, and contains antioxidants and bioflavonoids. And the French treat it with the reverence it deserves. Most cities have chocolate emporiums, their master chocolatier usually claiming to be easily the finest in France. This is serious food, a passion, rather than flavoured vegetable fat.
The French love-affair with nuts may be based on the French passion for wild food. Chestnuts, creamy fresh walnuts and hazelnuts are all freely and easily available to any walker with a basket, in season, as are such delicacies as mache (wild lamb's lettuce), pisenlit (dandelions), resplechons (wild, rather bitter asparagus), mushrooms, quince, blackberries, and feral fruits such as cherries and plums.
Whatever the reason for their place in the French diet, almonds (rich in protein, essential fats and some B vitamins, as well as a good source of zinc, magnesium, potassium and iron, and not fattening) are a perfect example of French food snobbery.
The French believe that the best almonds come from Provence and although this is possibly not true, no French person will be interested in hearing you deny it. French people are intensely proud of their food, their attitude to food and their national diet.
Not only does the canny Frenchman have a strong idea of the importance of spending his cash near home, but also he simply finds quite ludicrous the idea of flying in a celery from the Middle East.
Food is a local matter, and supremacy is hotly contested: there is considerable rivalry between regions, for example, in the growing of garlic, another Polymeal ingredient.
Garlic earns its place in the Polymeal because, like the rest of the onion family, it contains sulphur compounds that are widely believed to protect against cancer and cardiovascular disease, lowering cholesterol and blood pressure, and boosting the immune system.
The study suggests one glass of wine per day - and although more may be merrier, there is no suggestion that it's healthier.
The theory behind the efficacy of red wine (and, notably, red grape juice) is that resveratrol, a substance in grape skins, has anti-clotting properties and this protects against heart disease and atherosclerosis, a degenerative disease of the arteries.
Other compounds in wine, such as flavonoids and antioxidants, are thought to protect against infection, cancer and dementia.
Moderation is ever suggested - moderate drinkers may live longer and are less likely to die from heart disease than teetotallers, but those with a tendancy to drink too much place huge strains on heart, liver and digestive tract.
The French still tend to prepare food from scratch, shopping daily for fresh vegetables where possible.
Nutritionist Dr Francoise L'Hermite says the French secret to staying slim is to make sure you sit down with friends or family for a meal, eat three times a day at regular intervals, don't snack, don't eat in front of the television, and finally - eat slowly and savour both the food and the company.
"For France, a meal is a very particular moment, in which you share pleasure, the food as well as the conversation," she says.
"From an Anglo-Saxon point of view, food is just fuel to give energy to your muscles. If you have no pleasure in it, you are breaking all the rules of eating."