OBC Food Rules-Day 41: Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks.

People who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than those of us eating a modern western of processed foods.  Any traditional diet will do:  If if it were not a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn't still be around.  True, food cultures are embedded in societies and economics and ecologies, and some of them travel better than others, Inuit not so well as Italian.  In borrowing from a food culture, pat attention to how a culture eats as well as to what it eats.  In the case of the French paradox, for example, it may not be the dietary nutrients that keep the French healthy (lots of saturated fat and white flour?!) as much as their food habits: small portions eaten at leisurely communal meals; no second helpings or snacking.  Pay attention, too, to the combinations of foods in traditional cultures: In Latin America, corn is traditionally cooked with lime and eaten with beans; what would otherwise be a nutritionally deficient staple becomes the basis of a healthy, balanced diet.  (The beans supply the amino acids lacking in the corn, and the lime makes niacin available.)  Cultures that took corn from Latin America without the beans or the lime would up with serious nutritonal deficiencies such as pellegra.  Traditional diets are more than the sum of the food parts.