When it comes to preventing chronic disease, diet is often seen as a place to start. In the United States, that’s long meant urging people to cook more — to eat more whole foods and less ultraprocessed fare. But many American families, with working parents and little time, can struggle to make fresh meals. Julia Belluz, a contributing writer for Times Opinion, argues in an essay that France, where she now lives, has found a middle path. She speaks with leading nutrition experts about how the country has gone out of its way to make fresh and healthy prepared foods more widely available. There’s even been a boom in frozen food shops there. When she moved to Paris, Belluz says she expected to see the city’s famous open-air markets, but other high-quality yet easy options, like frozen bouillabaisse and canned ratatouille, “weren’t what I imagined to be staples of Parisian culinary life.” “Yet they’ve become mainstays,” she writes. As a result of this and other efforts the country made to improve its food system, France has substantially lower rates of obesity than the United States does, Belluz writes. The French “are objects of their environment, just as Americans are of theirs.” The United States, she argues, still has a long way to go to make its food better — and should be far more ambitious, taxing ultraprocessed foods and subsidizing healthier options. “Maybe then we could all eat more like the Parisians: cooking when we can and want to, savoring our food and, when we’re pressed for time, grabbing a frozen vegetable stew or a rotisserie chicken on the way home from work,” she writes. Here’s what we’re focusing on today:
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