单选题
For much of the past decade, American and British scientists have been annoyed by the phenomenon known as the French Paradox. Nutritionally speaking, the French have been getting away with murder: they eat all the butter, cream, foie gras, pastry and cheese that their hearts desire, and yet their rates of obesity and heart disease are much lower than ours. The French eat three times as much saturated animal fat as Americans do, and only a third as many die of heart attacks. It's maddening. Baffled, scientists struggled to come up with a few hypotheses: maybe it was something in the red wine, they said. But while winemakers worldwide celebrated that news, more sober research has suggested that any alcohol — whether Lafite Rothschild, a banana daiquiri or a cold Bud — pretty much has the same nice, relaxing effect. So while a little wine is apt to do you good, the French aren't so special in having a drink now and then(though the fact that they drink wine moderately and slowly with meals, instead of downing shots at the bar, could make a difference). After the wine argument, scientists ventured that it must be the olive oil that keeps the French healthy. But this doesn't explain the butter or brie. Then, voila, French scientist Serge Renaud(made famous on "60 Minutes" as an expert on the French Paradox)said it's the foie gras that melts away cholesterol. This, too, is dicey: while people in Toulouse — the fattened force-fed duck-liver-eating area of France-do indeed have one of the lowest rates of heart disease in the developed world, they actually only eat the delicacy about six times a year. And they're a lot more likely to die of stroke than we are anyway. Other researchers, perhaps sponsored by the garlic and onion industry, suggested that the French Paradox effect is due to garlic and onions. Claude Fischler, a nutritional sociologist at INSERM, the French equivalent of America's National Institutes of Health, says all these single hypotheses are more wishful thinking than science. Last May, researchers writing in the British Medical Journal came up with the least cheerful hypothesis of all. They argued that it's just a matter of time before the French — who are in fact eating more hamburgers and French fries these days — catch up with Americans, and begin suffering the same high rates of cardiovascular disease. These researchers, Malcolm Law and Nicholas Wald, call this the " time lag explanation" for the French Paradox. As far as they are concerned, the McDonaldization(this is a French catch — all term for the importation of fast food and other American cultural horrors)of France will continue at a frantic pace, and it is as inevitable that Frenchmen will start keeling over of heart attacks as it is that Frenchwomen will eventually wear jean shorts and marshmallow tennis shoes on the streets of Paris.