It’s about US cookery doyenne Julia Child who co-authored, along with Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, the seminal book Mastering The Art Of French Cooking, and a contemporary fan who sets herself the challenge of cooking her way through every one of the book’s 500-plus recipes in one year.

The film is one long celebration of the joys of saturated fat, that dietary demon that has been proscribed by the nutrition establishment. Barely a scene goes by without a generous knob of butter sizzling in a Le Creuset skillet – one of Child’s guiding principles was that you could never use too much butter – so no surprise then that the makers of a popular brand of butter have already latched on to the movie to promote their product. The orgy of saturates doesn’t stop with butter. The film bubbles over with plump duck, larded chickens stuffed with pork sausagemeat and monumental cakes whisked up with profligate amounts of thick cream, eggs and chocolate.

What is most refreshing about the film is that it reacquaints us with a time when our attitudes to food were very much less tortured than they are now. It recalls the era that pre-dated calorie counting, when food was all about raw, visceral pleasure. A period when we could look at a platter of oozing unpasteurised milk cheese served at room temperature and think, “delicious!” – not “will it give me food poisoning?” or “I don’t eat full-fat cheese”. It reminds us that a mouthful of crispy golden chicken skin or amber pork crackling was once thought of as a delight, not the devil incarnate.

Child, of course, was a gutsy, sybaritic eater who had lived in Paris and trained at the Cordon Bleu cook school there, so she was thoroughly imbued with French culinary values. No way are you ever going to convince a French chef that low-fat spread and 0%-fat fromage frais can be substituted for butter and chocolate in a classic Gateau Opéra. Try telling any self-respecting charcutier to start making his sausages with lean, rather than fatty pork and expect a reaction somewhere between ridicule and incredulity.

Nowadays, the French are alert to modern debates around food and health, so lighter eating, with its centre of gravity moved to focus more on plant than animal foods, is increasingly in vogue there. That said, they are still devotees of giving a dish the ingredients that it needs and show no interest in reinventing recipes to take account of nutritional orthodoxy, hence their continuing adherence to traditional fat-laden, alcohol and cholesterol-rich recipes. And interestingly, international surveys routinely show that while most of Europe is getting steadily fatter, in line with the global US-led obesity epidemic, the French buck that trend by remaining surprisingly thin.

This apparent “French paradox” is not as much of a mystery as it might seem. It boils down to the fact that the French have a sensible attitude to food. They don’t turn up at the local café demanding a skinny latte and a no-fat muffin, feeling all virtuous about cutting calories. They are realists who understand balance. So if they feast on confit goose, sauté potatoes and chocolate mousse one day, they follow it with natural yogurt, salad and tisane the next.

In the UK, on the other hand, our fridges are full of skimmed milk and industrial “healthy” ready meals in boxes plastered with green lights and nutrition charts, our butter dishes have been replaced by tubs of oleaginous concoctions that purport to have something to do with olives, and we guzzle down entirely synthetic, no-cal fizzy drinks naively thinking that they might actually help us get thin. Yet still our waistbands expand inexorably.

In his insightful book, In Defence Of Food, US writer Michael Pollan wisely observes that dumping traditional food habits, and putting nutritionists in charge of our diet, “has done little for our health, except possibly to make it worse”. Three decades of public health advice telling us that the sort of recipes typified by the Julia Child school of cooking were bad for us, and urging us to cut our intake of saturated fat and cholesterol, has misfired. It simply encouraged us to replace butter, which is moderately unhealthy only if you eat too much, with low-fat spreads containing artery-clogging trans-fats which are demonstrably lethal in any quantity.

What we needed instead was to be encouraged to avoid processed food (especially those that claim to make us thin), cook food from scratch using good raw materials, then take the time to sit down to enjoy it with family and friends.

I defy anyone with a normal, uncomplicated attitude to food to watch Julie & Julia without feeling hungry. It stimulates a natural appetite that has been left hopelessly unsatisfied by a regimen of slimmers’ wraps and non-fat, non-dairy creamer. If it feeds the rising national wave of dyspepsia with bankrupt government healthy eating advice, then I’ll raise my glass to that.