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

I had buttered weetabix too. Tried to introduce my kids to it. They found it very odd.

So what are you like as an adult?
Of course we are all products of nature and nurture.
I think your 80s diet is unremarkable for its time, though I imagine most people had a mix of all those new convenience food and home cooked more nutritious meals.
Do you eat a healthier diet now? Are you active now?

I don’t think they knew how unhealthy these convenience foods were though. For working Mums they were seen as a life line. I do remember my Mum adding veg and fruit
to meals so it wasn’t all crap!

I would add though, that we had strict rules about what we were allowed in our lunchboxes at primary school. Sweets, chocolate, fizzy drinks and crisps were all banned, with the exception of chocolate biscuits like penguins. Our headmistress said those foods caused poor behaviour. She was definitely ahead of her time.

Don’t worry our kids will have plenty to be slightly horrified by. The whole point is we do things differently each generation. It’s all based on what we had available and was the norm. I wouldn’t say we are really that much better now mind.

Personally, I think it’s a weird, defensive reaction to think that anyone commenting on what was, in retrospect, clearly a poor diet, is accusing their parents, or their parents’ generation, of being inadequate. It’s just commenting on different norms, fashions and understandings of what is healthy, what is unhealthy and what is health-neutral.

? There are a growing number of people in the UK with malnutrition. You can be morbidly obese and malnourished, as calories and nutrition are not the same thing. There may therefore not be so many people in the UK who are both malnourished and calorie deficient, but a scary proportion are malnourished.

Yeah we were brought up on heavily processed convenience food. My Mum hated cooking so…

We were as thin as rakes and very active so that wasn’t the issue. But knowing what I know now about UPF (and they didn’t know then) it’s such a worry.

It’s no coincidence cancer rates are rocketing in the under 50s I do think diet (and chemicals/microplastics etc) all contribute.

I try to be extra healthy now to compensate. I had breast cancer at 34. I am not saying my childhood diet was to blame as cancer is very complicated. But I avoid UPFs as much as I can now.

The post war generation were actually healthier. Before convenience food was invented.

I grew up on a diet like yours OP, 80s convenience food, crisps, chocolate etc. I wasn’t terribly active so I was overweight although not massively so. I have suffered with IBS since the age of 6 though, and it still kicks up after a lot of processed food.

I don’t think it was laziness so much as convenience. Both parents worked, frozen food was easy and we were ‘fussy’ children who wouldn’t eat veg (all we were ever offered was frozen farmhouse mix which I still dislike now), so mum just stopped offering it. And fruit was never on offer other than tinned.

Well I think a lot of overeating is disordered so certain kinds of disordered eating probably is one of the main health issues in the UK today.

my dm made humous, one time, followed the delia smith recipe, early 1980s

Very interesting.

Putting sugar on strawberries was usual in those days.

People definitely did eat like this in the 80s! It was the peak of ready made meals. I will say that snacking probably got much worse later on in the 90s. In the 80s, it was believed that a snack before lunch would spoil your appetite, in the 90s people started to believe you should eat more or less all the time and we're still stuck with that.

My DM used to make oven chips and burgers for my brothers every weekday. On Saturdays we had chips from the chippy and Sunday roasts on Sunday - that at least did have vegetables in it. I do remember my DF cooking us casseroles sometimes, but we didn't really appreciate his efforts.

We weren't fed like this - sounds like your parents were uneducated about nutrition and sucked in by the heavy advertising of all that crap. I do agree it's better that cereals have had to reduce sugar content now, etc.

I was fed the same and I accept it. This is just how history works. We are part of a generation at a certain time, place and context like everyone else is. I think to point out individual unfairnesses is pointless. I could argue my very poor family and their own poor upbringings who made poor food choices, gave me the best education they could give me and gave me an unstoppable work ethic which I don’t see in today’s generation. Horses for courses

I think we’ve reached peak Mumsnet - a heated debate on when hummus was invented!

Fruit has a lot more sugar in it 'naturally' now because it's been selectively breed that way, so it's probably not that different to what your mum gave you.

I do suspect most of Mumsnet has an eating disorder, due to the number of food-related threads.

I understand that cereal/sugar isn't the greatest thing to eat, but it could be so much worse, honestly. Some children don't even get regular meals. I never got fed at my father's house until he got a girlfriend (he refused to learn how to cook). I used to eat frozen peas out of the freezer because I was so hungry. Madness! Just awful, neglectful parenting. This was only about 20 years ago.

I think it's okay to accept that diets are rarely perfect and that eating processed food isn't the end of the world. All we can do is our best. I try to avoid unhealthy food, but if I eat too much of it I don't beat myself up. At least I'm eating.

Actually, for hummus as we know it- smooth with tahini, it was quite undisputably Syria.

What else would you like to bash your parents’ generation for?

Must be wonderful to be as perfect as you.

It is such a middle class pass time to obsess over kids diet/nutrition, especially by mothers who imo use it to make up for other areas of parenting they fall short on. I doubt there are any children in whole of UK who are deficient in nutrients. As long as not obese diet makes little difference to overall health.

Why do people assume the lack of weight issues was due to children playing outside in all weathers. People just ate less food.

My parents were into the whole foods thing, so I did tend to take wholemeal bread salmon paste and cucumber sandwiches to school. No crisps or chocolate when other kids has crisps every break time. I remember a kid asking if a piece of red pepper I had was poo as he didn't know what it was. I've gone the other way now really as my eldest son has a very restricted diet and it's emotionally exhausting to try to make lovely healthy food only for them to just not eat any of it. So we do tend to have a lot of easy foods for the sake of him getting some calories in him. It does worry me.

YANBU 🤣 I understand the point you are trying to make OP. But apparently in the 50’s/60’s it was even worse - my Mum says she, her siblings and their friends often ate “sugar sandwiches” (literally white bread, butter and sugar!) as adults thought sugar was good for kids 🤷‍♀️

But of course they were playing outside all the time in all weathers, without the need for supervision there would be today so there were rarely any weight issues and they needed the calories -they regularly filled up on white bread and butter after meals too and puddings were usually stodgy sponges. Different times and it probably means their teeth aren’t the best but it doesn’t seem to have caused any other health issues.

I don't think the main health issue in the UK today is eating disorders.

Sugary cereals for breakfast would have been fine if the OP had not been fed sugar at every meal.
It's not an eating disorder to not eat processed food at every meal. Unless you think the whole world has an eating disorder.