Fat and Lazy: It's Not Just for Americans Any More!

As everyone knows America is not a healthy country.  For example, French fries and ketchup are considered vegetables, and 68% of the population is overweight, with a scale tipping 34% of the overall population obese.  Yet because of America's infatuation with sports, athleticism, and that California "good-look" epitomized on television and the movies, exercise venues and sports clubs are an ubiquitous part of the cultural landscape.

In France, the idea of a thin European smoking cigarettes and sipping coffee or wine still impregnates the imagination.  In 2004, a book was written by Mireille Guiliano titled, French Women Don't Get Fat.  However, the idea of a svelte and upwardly mobile Frenchwomen appears to be more fiction than fact, if one considers what the LA Times had to say back in 2007:

Already, 42% of the French population is either overweight or obese, according to the National Institute for Health and Medical Research, known by its French initials, Inserm. The rate among children and adolescents has quadrupled in the last 25 years and has been growing almost as fast as in the United States.

"If you look at the statistical curve, we're now where the U.S. was in the 1970s," said Olivier Andrault, a food expert with the French Union of Consumers. "It means if we do nothing, in a few years the French will be as fat as Americans."

Like every other Western society, France is seeing an unprecedented acceleration in its health care costs.  The increased girth of the population has put pressure not just on waistbands, but also on the finances of the country.  An obvious solution to the health of its citizenry is for the French to migrate towards the workout routines or fitness lifestyle as seen in America.  However, for both cultural and economic reasons, this solution do not appear likely.

"It appears to me that more people are sitting in cafes smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee than working out ... the French don't see fitness as a lifestyle," says American-born fitness consultant Fred Hoffman, who has lived in Paris for 21 years.

Only 5.4 percent of French people belonged to a health club in 2008, according to the International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Association, compared with 9.5 percent for Italy, 11.9 percent for the United Kingdom and 16.6 percent for Spain.

For a society that invented the French kiss and a noon time excursions between the sheets, it strikes me as odd that the French don't like to sweat.  I've had others too, exclaim that they didn't like sweating.  Obviously no likes perspiring in public and looking like a big fatty, but the excuse seems terribly lame given the upside.

A Reuters article describes the economic and additional societal reasons why fitness clubs don't appear to taking hold.  Vive la Fatties!