To be slightly horrified now by what I ate as a kid in the 80s?

In the 80s/90s humous and carrot sticks or homemade pack lunches wouldn't have been ridiculed those were every day foods. I say that as a woman who came from a run down council estate with a mother on benefits. Also studies show a wide range of different things. It's not what you eat as a kid that maps you out it's lifetime diet, exercise etc.

Op do you know that your death date is planned out on conception? So how far back are you taking diet?

actually when younger i used to eat Alpen
i find it so sweet now

i dont think i had breakfast as a teenager
lunch was a brown roll, cheese or salami
and a club biscuit

but there wasnt crisps or anything when i came home, perhaps a sandwich or toast, no puddings

SilverButton

To be fair she said if she’d had carrot sticks and rice cakes she’d have been looked at but back then there wasn’t the ridiculousness that there is now on food (even though because of the soil etc most foods are grown in nowadays it doesn’t even matter)- there was a proper dinner daily as less packaged food and a few bananas apples and pears. Just not humous carrot sticks and the like! I get her point, I just think she’s forgetting that milk was a normal thing and the share bags of crap that have now didn’t exist- the posts there’ll be in few years time- kids being given a giant bag of sweets and crisps!

Sorry op still confused by your post and what you want from it especially since the update saying that you don't blame your parents.

You might need to educate me here but in the 80s/90s fast food was new rare and expensive and small portions at that. Microwaves weren't in every house and were back to the future things.

So your parents were rich and fed you these foods daily is that what your saying?

To be honest everyone I knew in the 80s/90s didn't even have a Microwaves let alone fast foods because of the unnatural items In them plus the expenses.

Have you read the OP's posts?! She's already said she ate hardly any fruit and wasn't active at all!

Oh no you had Coco pops? However are you still alive! 🤣🤣🤣🤣 Your insane!

I bet you drank loads of milk, ate loads of fruit, cheese and yoghurts and had proper dinners though, and I bet you were out in fresh air most of the day. I’d be extremely shocked if today’s lifestyle was healthier than a child of the 80s!!

Similar here with the exception of pudding every night as we had that at lunchtime at school...was a skinny kid/adult until I hit early 20s and then I started working in construction, bacon butties every day, pies and sausage rolls, donuts and cakes...not as many healthy options as there are today and I inevitably gained weight.

I don't blame my parents for that though

Would it have been less horrifying in a different lunchbox?

I love sugar puffs and coco pops still to this day.

In fact this diet sounds exactly like what I ate in the 80s and my children also had lunches like this.

I was born in the 1970s and my diet was nothing like yours OP! We did have processed foods but never had sugary cereal, chocolate or crisps, let alone every day! My DC eat more treat food that I did (although less processed food).

Yes to the OP. That was pretty much our diet too. Anything that wasn't processed food was deep fat fried (sometimes both!). We are working class. Most people ate the same.

In fact it isn't far off the diet that my family still eat now. My mum genuinely believes that a shop-bought frozen lasgne counts as healthy food.

No poverty at all in my extended family. They are efucated intelligent people with sufficient time and money. They just don't really care about food.

I am not horrified by the 80s diet because everyone ate the same. There wasn't the same awareness as now. I am constantly horrified now by what they eat. I even buy and cook my own food when I go back. Otherwise i put on about a 2 kilos a week.

Poverty is often given as the reason for poor diets but it nearly always isnt the case in my experience.

Nope, not what I had (much to my irritation and disgust)...

Sandwich - Mighty White bread with Dairylea or Peanut butter or Marmite, occasionally cheese and tomato.
Apple/tangerine/pear
Yoghurt
Carrot sticks or pepper sticks.
Flask with Vimto (hurrah, the original sugar filled kind not the awful sugar free shit).

Sometimes Mother would get fancy and do a little salad or a fruit salad, rarely though. Sometimes it'd be a banana.

Breakfast was rice krispies, cornflakes, muesli or toast (peanut butter or marmite).
Dinner would be cheese omlette and salad or shepherds pie and veg or corned beef hash. Occasionally if she really couldn't be arsed it'd be eggy bread.

Dessert would be fruit or a yoghurt.

Snacks - sugary stuff only happened on long car trips or up a mountain/down a cave, but if we asked at home, then the option would be fruit or some yoghurt (live plain yoghurt, not flavoured/sweetened stuff with bits in).

I did stand out a mile at school, mm!

Nobody notice how many of the 80s generation ended up obese and/or with serious health problems? We are what we eat. And I'm the mother of a picky eighties child who also ate rubbish

Born in 1970 and I didn’t eat any of that stuff then or now. My mum was a war baby and was the most fantastic cook and baker

Oh, and we were poor too. My.mum never fed me that crap. An apple or a cheese and tomato sandwich is cheaper than all that processed rubbish.

Pretty awful diet. I grew up in the 80s too..No one I know ate like this. Borderline neglect.
Even poor people can provide fruit and veg.

I agree OP. I was fed junk. I wouldn’t mind but it wasn’t a lack of awareness, it was laziness. My mum ‘didn’t like cooking’ so opted out of it (!), despite having a childhood of healthy home cooked meals herself. My dad wasn’t around. I have no doubt it will have impacted my health in the long term. I put it to the back of my mind and try not to think about it.

My diet was the same as yours OP in late 80s /early 90s. Think with my parents it was a mix of lack of knowledge plus being very time-poor.

thing is I’m now a healthy 40 year old, eating properly and doing well in life, so it does make me wonder why we worry so much about healthy food for kids? I was active as a kid but not overly so. My kids are active too but I don’t let them have sugary cereals or put chocolate bars in their lunch box (not allowed anyway at SC school).

it does make me panic less when dc refuse to eat anything other than pasta or toast - at least they’re not eating pick n mix, crisps and cake every afternoon, like I was!

I grew up poor in Singapore in the 1980s - 5 siblings, single working mother - and every meal was homecooked. Lots of carb from rice and bread but also loads of veg, fish and meat was more occasional. Seafood like crab and prawns for special occassions. Cereal would have been a luxury - my mum cooked dosas with fresh coriander chutneys for breakfast! Dessert was a foreign concept and we had plenty of fresh fruit. We only had soda for special occasions a few times a year. I would say that I had a great childhood diet compared to the kids now. Our school canteens sold freshly cooked rice and noodle dishes - it is still the same. We also learned to cook for ourselves and fried rice was the first survival dish most of us learned.
When I first visited the UK in 1989, I was pretty disturbed that toddlers were being fed fish fingers as a meal. Where I come from, toddlers were cooked a rice porridge with veg and meat.