Food is Different in Europe Than in the United States, Part 1

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I sometimes have patients tell me about their trips to Europe and they marvel at the fact that they ate a lot of delicious food, but didn’t gain weight, or possibly even lost weight. Of course, they may have done more walking and been more physically active while on vacation, but there’s also a huge difference in the food in Europe versus the U.S., and some of those differences we can actually incorporate into our daily lives here at home.

There’s several ways that food in Europe differs from what is common in the United States. In this first part of the discussion, I’ll be focusing on the “culture” of how we approach food and the differences in priorities, both in terms of food processing and personal eating habits.

To start off, Europeans tend to focus on eating foods closer to their natural state than Americans do. This is reflected even in the “same” foods from corporate restaurant chains in Europe as compared to the states.

For example, McDonald’s French fries in Europe have four ingredients: potatoes, vegetable/seed oil, dextrose, and salt. In the U.S., they have potatoes, vegetable/seed oil (although in the U.S., it’s partially hydrogenated and often contains trans fats), dextrose, and salt. But in the U.S., they also have “natural” beef flavoring (reportedly made of amino acids, sugars, citric acid, and humectants for moisture control), sodium acid hydrophosphate (to prevent discoloration), and anti-foaming agents (to prevent boil-over when cooking large batches of fries).

Europeans tend to eat food that’s fresher – and that means there’s less need for chemical preservatives. Take bread, for instance. Europeans typically eat bread on the same day it’s made, or perhaps day-old bread. This used to be more common in the U.S., but the food production here has become more focused on shelf life (at least in part because it increases profitability), so preservatives and mold-inhibitors are pretty common in bread and baked goods here.

Different people have different tolerances for these food additives, but they are probably at least part of the issue for Americans who have unpleasant reactions to eating bread and other grain-based foods. Another issue is of course gluten intolerance, which will be discussed in Part 2 of this discussion (as a quick preview, there’s a significant differences there as well between Europe and the United States).

Surveys suggest that Europeans also have different priorities when it comes to food choices than Americans, especially among younger men. While taste is a high priority for pretty much everyone, American college-age men place a higher priority on economic value, whereas their European counterparts place a greater emphasis on nutritional value. Americans also tend to look for convenience more than Europeans when it comes to food.

This is reflected in the consumption of American-style fast food. Among college-aged Europeans, 20 to 25% reportedly NEVER eat fast food, whereas nearly 100% of Americans do eat it at least once in a while.

Europeans also restrict marketing of processed foods, both on television and online, particularly with regards to ads targeted to kids. They’ve recognized the importance of developing better eating habits early and controlling food advertising is one aspect of that.

Another area of restriction that Europeans tend to follow is that of portion size. Now, this is more common in some European nations than others in terms of overall meal size, but even when larger meals are eaten, portions of calorie-dense foods tend to be kept smaller than in the U.S..

Going back to the concept of simpler foods, Europeans tend to use actual natural flavorings versus the “natural” flavorings common in the American diet. In other words, Europeans favor fresh herbs and spices as opposed to things like the “natural beef flavoring” mentioned earlier.

In the United States, food processors can use a wide variety of chemical ingredients from the GRAS (Generally Recognized As Safe) list. This is a list of chemicals for which there’s no reported major toxicities nor adverse reactions for most people in quantities normally consumed. Of course, not everyone is “most people”, and quntities normally consumed may vary. The other issue is that the ingredients on the GRAS list have really only been studied in isolation and highly processed foods often use several of these chemicals for which the interactions are essentially unknown.

In contrast, European food producers generally have to go through a more in-depth approval process for each product and can’t fast-track products to market just because the individual ingredients seem to be safe for consumption. This is probably why they tend to keep things simpler in terms of ingredients for their processed foods.

The takeaway here is that eating foods with less processing and closer to their natural state is a European approach to eating that we Americans could probably benefit from. This is a simple idea, and one that is relatively easy to implement, even though changing eating habits can be challenging at first.

In Part 2, I’m going to go into the differences between European and American food production that are harder to make use of as an individual, but will probably at least give a better understanding of the issues involved.

Until next time…

George Best, D.C.