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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, voilą, 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.

Paradoxically French Wines

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.

"The government loves the French Paradox because it sells red wine -- Bordeaux wine in particular -- it sells French lifestyle and a number of other French products," he tells me over dinner at an outdoor Paris bistro. "It's something in the cheese! Something from the fat from ducks! It's butter! Really, we're a long way from science here."

More than anything, Fischler thinks the French Paradox is a kind of cultural Rorschach test. "Americans think it's unfair, and Francophiles think it's wonderful."

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 (who must have thought up their hypothesis over dry kidney pie, while dreaming of the kind of duck in red wine and honey sauce I had with Claude Fischler), 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 French men will start keeling over of heart attacks as it is that French women will eventually wear jean shorts and marshmallow tennis shoes on the streets of Paris.

Nutritionists on this side of the Atlantic are just as dour in their predictions. Marion Nestle, chair of New York University's department of nutrition, says that the wonderful food she found on every street corner in Paris when she lived there in 1983 has changed. "Then you could go into some local bar, and you would be given a little tart, a little salad and a little quiche that would knock your socks off," she says wistfully. But now, she says, the quality of ingredients, the concern about flavor and the freshness of the food has declined. "Last time I was in Paris, everything seemed bigger, softer and more commercially prepared. If you wanted really high quality food, you had to pay for it." When she looked at food data in France, she saw that indeed the amount of fat has risen, and the French are snacking more, eating fewer long meals and visiting McDonald's more often on the sly. She, like Law and Wald, says, "Just wait."

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