The French Paradox refers to the curious observation that French people are slim and healthy, suffering from a low risk of coronary artery disease despite a diet extremely high in saturated fat regularly washed down with glasses of wine.
While the long held belief that saturated fat expands your waistline and causes heart disease has long since been disproven with cardiologists now going on record saying how ridiculous such an assertion actually is based on current research, there is clearly something else at play here keeping the French so healthy.
Is it just me or do the French just get it about what it takes to be healthy much better than Americans?
Case in point, while many Americans seem to prefer the latest and greatest silver bullet supplements that empty the wallet with promises of reduced fat, no wrinkles and perfect health yet never come close to measuring up, the French stick with the tried and true that actually works: nutrient dense food.
Check out this video below of a raw milk vending machine in France.
If raw milk was really as dangerous as the CDC and conventional medical authorities in the USA claim, wouldn’t these machines that are popping up all over Europe be causing some serious food borne illness outbreaks by now?
Perhaps the time has come to set aside the shrill warnings about the clear and present “danger” of grassfed raw milk and try some for yourself!
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Raw milk… has made people in France sick.
Yes, and romaine lettuce has sickened dozens here in the US of late. Your point is what? Ban lettuce and raw cheese? Given that pretty much every food has made at least a few people sick along the way, don’t you think it would be better to ensure a clean food supply rather than banning a perfectly healthy food that millions of people enjoy every single day without a problem?
Of course, if the palate is not bored with the fare, much less food is necessary to satisfy. Sugar and salt really begin to annoy me, as I am tired of those flavors, so I am beginning much more these days, to cook from scratch. Amazing flavors that one cannot find in a can.
When I was in France no one drank milk. It was only used in cooking. Dipping cookies in it or putting it in coffee had people staring at me like a crazy person, so I don’t know. The logic seems like it makes sense, but there really isn’t any shortage of data from around the world regarding micro organisms in milk making people sick.
I believe that humans past puberty are not meant to drink milk. Milk transformed by beneficial bacteria–cheese, yoghurt, and the like– is another story, and raw milk is perfect for cheese making. But drinking raw milk is a bad idea–why do you think Louis Pasteur developed pasteurization? If you think this is government propaganda, would you accept Mother Jones’s opinion? http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2012/09/is-raw-milk-safe-e-coli
By the bye, spent mash (wort) from distilleries and breweries is still used as animal fodder, mostly for pigs; it is highly nutritious and not rotten or putrid. But it is grain, so cows should not eat it.
The french know whats up. When I was traveling over there raw milk was plentiful and so were raw milk products like cheese and butter. Yes the portions are small at meal time but they skimp out on the fat content either. One other thing that struck me was that the children there in the schools are given a vast array of differing foods that offer variety to the taste buds… anchovies, olives, smoked ham, etc which is a big difference to what our children are served in school (ie. chocolate sugary milk, plain old sandwiches, etc)
I have strong feelings that humans should not drink milk from any animal past the age which one finishes breastfeeding (and while breastfeeding, human breastmilk only,) but I do appreciate the fact the French have two things correct: everything in moderation, and daily exercise/activity. People think of the three, four, even five hour dinners the French partake in but they don’t realize that each course is, in fact, pretty small- snack size, even. They take the time to eat instead of shoving food into their mouths while driving, and in doing that, they let their bodies recognize that it is full whether their plate is empty or not. That’s the French Paradox: everything in moderation. Unfortunately, most of us have this “empty-plate” mentality that we need to beat.
Mae- The only reason people were getting sick was because the milk itself was bad. Not because it was unsterilized. It was not uncommon, before pasteurization became popular, for cows to be fed the left over mash from alcohol distilleries as a way to save money. Of course cows being forced to sustain themselves on rotten, putrid substances would make poor quality milk. They often produced gray milk, so that is when the industry got creative and started adding chalk to it to whiten it up. The milk was nothing more than swill. Along came pasteurization, and the germs could be killed, so technically it was “safe” to drink, but it still had little or no nutritional value. Today CAFO dairy cows are fed GMO corn and soy and often chicken poop. You would be a fool to drink anything from these cows -pasteurized or not.
The raw milk we followers of this blog drink is from cows raised on open fields, with green grass, plenty of room to roam and lots of sunshine. The dairy I buy my raw milk from (Organic Pastures) has mobile machines that milk the cows out in the pasture instead of a mass milking area filled with God-knows-what. Then between milkings, the machine is steam cleaned instead of doused with chemicals to be sterilized. I can’t imagine a safer, more God intended way to drink this nutritious beverage.
You really should do some research on the subject. You don’t have to drink it if you don’t want to, but spouting off about the unproven dangers does nothing more than make you sound like a governmnet drone.