France's Social Programs are Behind Their Better Health
The creation of public programs to improve the health of women and babies began in nineteenth-century Europe, where governments found themselves in need of robust young men to fight their wars and expand their empires. Following a crushing defeat in the 1871 Franco-Prussian War, for example, France set up a series of programs intended to care for pregnant women, promote breastfeeding, and improve infant welfare. (David Barker has suggested, half seriously, that this early attention to maternal health lies behind the famous “French paradox”: the low levels of cardiovascular disease found among the French, despite a diet rich in foie gras and triple créme cheese. It’s not French people’s nightly glass of red wine that protects them from heart attacks, Barker argues, but the programs and clinics provided to pregnant women more than a hundred years ago.)
Notes:
By improving the environment in which French fetuses develop, the French have improved their overall health.
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Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth Shape the Rest of Our Lives