As an American in Paris, here’s something I never stop noticing: French people are thin.

What I notice most are waist sizes: men seem to wear trousers sized for teens, and women seem especially thin-waisted. I’m not alone in this observation. Others have noticed, and made best-sellers from their investigations.

The French instititute for preventive health and education (French acronym: INPES) has just come out with a survey –the third in a series– with data on eating and exercise. It’s a serious work, with a lot of data.

Where relative thinness is concerned, three points struck me:

  1. French people don’t snack. Only 5% of French people (age 15-75) eat repeatedly outside three daily meals. (There’s a definition issue here: having one snack doesn’t count, but eating twice outside meal times counts, for the French, as “snacking”.) The result is generation and age-sensitive: close to 10% of those age 12-25 snack, compared to 2.8% of those age 55-75.
  2. French people eat at home. Images of cafés and restaurants aside, most French people eat at home most of the time. Specifically, 65% of French people, age 15 to 75, eat lunch at home. (More than 92% eat breakfast at home and 87% eat dinner at home.) When you consider only people who work, a majority –55.9%– eat lunch at home. Most French people mostly eat home-cooked meals, at home, with their family.
  3. French people don’t drink often. The stereotype of French people downing glasses of wine also doesn’t exactly reflect how people live. Only 37.4% of French people (age 15-75) had one or more drinks (with alcohol) the day before they were interviewed. This percentage has fallen consistently over the past decade –44.7% had had at least one drink the day before being surveyed in 1996– and has fallen most for people over 35. This point struck me less for what it says about alcohol and drinking than for its insights into hidden calories.