There’s a thing Americans say, usually right after a week in Italy, and it goes something like this: European food is just *cleaner*. No corn syrup. No dye number whatever. That’s why nobody over there is fat.
I was thinking about this while looking at my breakfast. Puff pastry. Melted cheese. Roasted vegetables sitting on top like a fig leaf. And a cappuccino you could bathe a small cat in. Two of them on the table, because of course there were two.
Health food. Absolutely.
The dye thing
The regulatory gap is real, I’ll give it that. Europe bans stuff America shrugs at, and America approves stuff that would set off alarms in Brussels. But the two systems aren’t arguing about nutrition. They’re arguing about how much proof you need before you say no. Europe wants to see the evidence it’s safe. America wants to see the evidence it isn’t. Different philosophy, same croissant.
And here’s the uncomfortable part. If you took a dye out of a soda and left everything else, you’d have a slightly less colorful soda. That’s it. The calories don’t care what shade they are.
People love the additive story because it makes the problem external. Someone did this to you. There’s a villain, and he works in food science, and if we just banned him you’d fit into the jeans again. Very satisfying. Mostly wrong.
What’s actually different
Portions, first. A European “large” is an American “regular” wearing a hat.
Then the snacking. Or the not-snacking. There’s a rhythm to eating here that Americans notice and can’t quite name: people eat at meals, and between meals they mostly don’t. Nobody’s got a bag of something in the car.
Drinks matter more than anybody wants to admit. Water with lunch. Wine with dinner. Coffee that comes in a cup instead of a bucket. Liquid calories are the quietest way to eat 600 things you never remember eating.
And then the walking. This is the big one and it never gets credit. An American in Rome does fifteen thousand steps a day without ever once deciding to exercise. Train, cobblestones, the apartment on the fourth floor with no elevator, the restaurant that’s “close” and turns out to be twenty minutes away. Then they come home five pounds lighter and tell everyone it was the olive oil.
It was not the olive oil.
Europe isn’t a diet
The other problem is that “European food” isn’t a thing. It’s about forty things and some of them are magnificent for you and some of them are a fried breakfast that could stop a clock.
Mediterranean eating has real research behind it. Fine. Nobody’s ever run a longevity study on Danish pastry, British sausage, or a paper cone of Belgian fries, and I suspect there’s a reason.
The obesity numbers back this up in the least flattering way possible. The UK is not doing well. Hungary, Malta, Greece are not doing well. And the gap between Europe and America has been closing for twenty years, which is the direction nobody wants to look at, because it means Southern Europe is drifting away from its own diet rather than the rest of the world drifting toward it.
So yes, keep the myth if you enjoy it. It’s a nice myth. Just know that the thing saving your waistline in Paris is your feet.
Anyway. The pastry was excellent.