SOMEWHERE IN MY basement warren of cardboard boxes – wherein are molderingly stored various stillborn manuscripts, college papers, and other trivia of interest, clipped, gathered, and largely though not entirely forgotten over the years – is a cardboard box containing "The French Paradox." Most of us, I suspect, associate this term with a 60 Minutes television report, but the germ of that piece was a story by Edward Dolnick published in Health magazine in 1990.

It turns out the French have healthier hearts than we do, despite their extensive smoking and drinking and their heavy consumption of brioche, goose fat, and other fatty wonders. How can this be? Is there some protective quality in red wine, or chocolate, or in the cheese France produces in staggering variety? Is it that they have lots more sex than we do, or that they aren't nearly as fat as we are (the French frown on snack culture)? Is it just one of the great injustices of the cosmos, the Lord moving in some mysterious way He has not bothered to discuss with our esteemed, and frankly Francophobic, leader?

The food media perseverate about stories like this – at the moment the fixation is on the evils of carbohydrates – because the American population at large always has one eye peeled for painless healthfulness (lose weight by eating ice cream and bacon double cheeseburgers!) and the other for the next beloved tidbit turned lethal, whether from bizarre pathogens (mad cow) or environmental ruin (dioxin in farmed salmon). Is it any wonder we've all gone a bit walleyed?

The real French paradox isn't a paradox at all but gusto in moderation, while the American paradox – an infantile sweet tooth and a countervailing terror of everything – goes unremarked. When soda pop, which is to American culture what petroleum is to global industry, turns out to contain toxic levels of something or other – as sooner or later it must – a great shivering of disbelief and dread will ripple across the land.

Meantime, why worry? Worry is life's greatest toxin and spoiler, and its flames are too easily fanned by our busy media, which in recent years have learned to give food the celebrity treatment, by raising up and chopping down and, possibly, resurrecting. Eggs, to take but one example, have been through the full cycle of hullabaloo and are now more or less back where they started – good for you, in moderation.

Most food is good for you, in moderation, and provided it isn't processed. "Processed food" is ... no, not a paradox, an oxymoron, a self-canceling phrase. (The classic example, given new and unhappy life of late, is "military intelligence.") Avoid – both! – and to your health.