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

Plenty more ‘nobody was fat and we were all outside all day’ posts I see.

People were fat in the 80s, I promise. Even children. I’ve just googled ‘1980s class photos uk’ and I promise you there’s more than one overweight child in most of them.

Again, absolutely not denying that we’ve continued to go wrong since then; and the rates have risen and that needs addressing.

But the oversimplification and complete insistence that that 80s/90s were some utopia of kids with visible ribs eating unprocessed food, never snacking and scampering about the sunlit fields all day just really gets on my goat - I feel like I’m being gaslit as someone who was there!

I don't think there was as much snacking and kids walked to school. My parents worked but didn't drive so we had to leave the house when they did and walked to be dropped off.

I had similar growing up in the 80’s. We also had meat and two veg type dinners most nights and always had a Sunday roast. Salads in the summer at least once a week. We didn’t have sweets for snacks though every day, they were saved for pudding if we did get any.

I think food prices were relatively higher then than now for certain things, although I think we’re heading back that way now.

No I don't! I have a horror of chips, having being force fed them as a child!

I think it's the OP who is worried about chips!

Kids are fatter and less active now. It starts so young. All those organic puff snacks are still shit. It's the modern equiivalent of a bag of quavers , yet the word organic makes people think they're better. Same as the pouches that are squeezed directly into kids mouths. It's literally shoving food down their throats.

There is more choice and variety of food now, but pre packaged food aimed at babies and toddler is still shit, but worse because it makes so many claims to be lower salt, sugar, organic etc.

No, just harsh.

You'd have approved of me until very recently, because for 40 of my 60 years I starved myself to stay skinny, along with the occassional binge. 5 years ago I packed it in and am now fat - I don't give a shit, I have a healthier mindset than ever.

My relationship with food was forged in my childhood, and my son's relationship with food was forged in his. He loves food, but listens to his hunger in a way I was never able to until recently.

When there is very little money, you are told to clear your plate, whether you are hungry or not. If there is very little money, there is sometimes no food, so when there is food, you eat it, because you don't know when there will be more. If your mother's only way of showing love is to feed you, then you learn that food is love. All of this means that hunger and eating become unrelated.

There's a great podcast called 'Maintenance Phase' if you'd like to understand more.

Kids in the 80s were no way as obese as now. I don’t remember any fat kids at my school. We all are the same kind of food

Omg just had flashbacks to the tuck shop at school… every day a chocolate donut or a sausage roll for 20p! And a fizzy drink. Beggars belief now 🤣

My mum has always been good at cooking dinners with veg - casseroles, shepherd pie type stuff, but lunch and breakfast were pretty processed and sugar filled. I remember heaping spoons of sugar on my cereal and scooping it out at the end. Being horrified at my friend who was “only” allowed sweets on Fridays and thinking her parents were really mean 🤣 Bonkers.

My mum is always amazed that my kids love fresh fruit and eat their veg sticks raw, with humus etc. She says she never thought a kid would eat “that stuff” and always thought she had to hide veg in the dinners. My adult brother still doesn’t touch any form of vegetable. I was like it for a while, but travelled /ate out a lot and my eating habits got better over time.

That was definitely not my diet (as much as I'd have loved it!). Brown bread only, all meals home cooked, plenty of vegetables, sugary treats and drinks were extremely limited.

Your childhood diet sounds like cavity city.

Now I started craving coco pops. Have to pop to the shop

Microwaves were definitely around in early 80s, my mother wouldn't have one in the house as she thought they caused cancer, she died in 1985 from cancer so we promptly bought a microwave as clearly it had made zero difference to her health!

OP it's also the case too that advertising painted a lot of these new processed foods as good for you and even better than 'real' foods. Parents would not necessarily have realised they were feeding their children crap. I was in a local shop the other morning around 8.30ish, typical petrol station/shop/deli type place near a local school. There was a huge queue at the hot counter with teenagers buying breakfast rolls, sausage rolls, wedges, basically all types of fast processed deep fried foods, clearly many aren't eating a healthy breakfast before school these days either! I'm sure that counter is just as busy come lunchtime in the school as well. I'm not sure we're eating much better these days and definitely less exercise!

Or huge marrows stuffed with seasoned mince full of garlic and herbs, baked in tin foil.

This was one of my dad's favourite dinners when I was growing up. Home grown of course.

I’m not blaming my parents as virtually everyone I know lived like this then. I would have stood out a mile of I’d shown up at school with organic oatcakes, carrot and celery sticks and houmus. Just as my own DC would stand out now if they showed up with a jam sandwich, a pack of Monster Munch, a Club biscuit and an Um Bongo (wouldn’t that warrant a letter home now?)

My DC have school lunch, but at their school the organic oatcake and hummus lunch would stand out MUCH more than the jam sandwich and monster munch. The school saves letters home for the kids that turn up with leftover Dominos in their lunchbox.

Outside some 'bubbles' of affluence I'm not sure so much has changed since the 80s tbh.

I think the argument of 'you were fed, and you're still here, so be grateful' is a weak one.

I had a similar diet to you as a child and yes I'm still here but it has absolutely impacted my health. I've been overweight my whole life and have problems with appetite regulation, and it's a constant battle for me to resist UPF's and unhealthy food now.

I have a healthy diet and lifestyle now, but it's a lot more work for me than it would have been had I had that from the start.

It's not that I didn't survive, of course I did, and my parents did the best they could at the time, I don't blame them or anyone.

But it certainly has impacted my life and health, and it's not ideal.

I'm glad that we have more knowledge and awareness now.

We did have a lot of processed foods but I don't remember that much sugar. People weren't necessary worried about general health effects but they were certainly worried about teeth. I had loads of fruit though.

I was a child of the 80s. My mum cooked almost everything from scratch often with seasonal fruit/veg from our own garden. Sweet cereals were not allowed. We had weetabix or rice crispies for breakfast but mainly toast with marmite, peanut butter, honey or homemade jam. What makes me laugh looking back is that my sister and I used to pile tablespoons of sugar on top of our “plain” cereal. It probably would have been healthier for mum to have just bought Cocopops 😂

80s baby too.

I had sandwiches, an apple and a biscuit.
Sandwiches often with processed meat, jam or something equally as rubbish. Often had a piece of cake too.
I developed an eaten disorder aged 7 and binged on chocolate at my grandmother's where I went 2 nights a week after school. My grandmother also didn't have a clue about portion sizes and would let me eat whole pizzas and quiches, huge slices of cake etc. I was as heavy as I am now aged 10, my diet was appalling! It does make me wonder what it did to my health.
I was an anorexic teen too.
I'm healthy ish now. Exercise and not overweight, but formative years have a lot to answer for.

I was a child at the same time as you in the 80s OP.
I loved my Care Bears lunch box.
It contained wholemeal bread sandwiches filled with cucumber, lettuce, mustard & cress and cheddar. Fresh fruit. Sunflower seeds.
After school I would be given a slice of home made apple cake made with wholemeal flour, and big thick apple chunks and sultanas and cinnamon. Mmmm, makes my mouth water thinking of it.
Dinner would be casserole made with lots of different vegetables and chicken from the local butchers. Or huge marrows stuffed with seasoned mince full of garlic and herbs, baked in tin foil.
We didn't have pudding every night, but when we did it was baked cooking apples stuffed with sultanas and drizzled with honey, served with home made custard.
My mum was a single parent and really truly struggled financially.
But she says healthy, wholesome food was cheap back then.

south africa

@MrsMappFlint why do you have such a big chip on your shoulder?

On the subject of sugar, people forget that for a long time it was advertised on the basis of giving you or your family the necessary energy to get through the day. There were adverts in women’s magazines. Silver Spoon etc still do advertise, but the advertising tends to be along the lines of how useful it is in cooking.

When I first started work in the late nineties (in an unrelated organisation) my boss had begun her own career working for the British Sugar Board, marketing sugar everywhere and trying to convince people that it wasn’t bad for children’s teeth!

Also back then health messages were presented differently. They sometimes came out in the news (I remember big news stories about cholesterol) but it was all seen as a bit remote and something that scientists had come up with as a ‘scare story’. To be actively concerned about the health of your diet was seen as something on the fringes, a ‘crank’, an idealist, visiting a ‘health food shop’ and perhaps a bit of a hippy or a ‘health nut’. There just wasn’t the same sense that healthy eating applied to everyone and that some food products could actually do you harm in the long term.

Hi OP, yeah your food sounds very similar to mine. The only difference was that for dinners we rarely had dessert and it was always meat and veg. Occasionally we'd have fish. If we did have dessert it was homemade and after Sunday lunch- e.g an apple crumble. In summer it was strawberries with cream.

My packed lunch was bad by today's standards - very similar to yours. Ham sandwich and a penguin with a capri sun, a pack of mini cheddars. However, thankfully for primary school I didn't do packed lunch for very long. I had a school dinner and I went to a private primary. The food was fresh cooked on site and it was epic - really nice. But school holidays and my Mum's packed lunch.....haha, it was dreadful. She didn't know.

I wasn't allowed to eat pepparami's or have those twist n something drinks. They were in pink plastic bottles and you twisted the cap off, can't remember what they were called - twist something. My Mum tried one and said - that's awful you're not drinking that. So she had the insight to follow her nose a bit with things like this.

She hated McDonald's she said it tasted like cardboard and who knows what's in it. So again we rarely had it.

But otherwise it was just lack of awareness/food education. Processed food was relatively new. Everyone was eating coco pops for breakfast.

Every breakfast was UPF, every lunch she made the same and every snack. I was just spared the worst of it by my lovely school dinners and my Mum's traditional view on dinners.

The thing to remember though was UPFs weren't as bad as they are today. I bet if you compared a loaf of Warburton from 1985 to Warburton in 2015 you'd see a marked difference. Nowadays in 2025 you might see a tad of an improvement. But that's just a guess.

But you're not alone. I certainly wasn't a 'weird kid'. Everyone's lunch box looked like mine and everyone had cornflakes, frosties or cocopops for breakfast. When I got home from school it was always a bowl of cereal as the snack.

I got pick'n'mix on a Friday.

Oh and I never drank water it was vimto/Ribena or apple juice. I don't think i had a glass of water until I was about 15yrs old and 'Just 17' mag started on about all the supermodels drinking it!

The only person responsible for you being fat is you.

Harsh but true.

What health problems do you now have?

Or maybe it's a case of you're actually dead because of he horrifying diet you were forced to endure and are now writing from the other side?

One thing is for sure, in another 30 years, the children of today will be moaning about the horrifying diet they had because you know, every generation thinks their parents did it wrong.

Oral cancers have also gone up significantly, especially in younger people, against which a diet high in the things missing from the OP’s childhood diet is protective. Cancer rates in people under 50 have increased significantly, so you can’t exactly dismiss out of hand an obviously unhealthy diet in the 1980s as a health irrelevance on a population level.

The thing about diet is that the consequences of a poor diet are often long term and also affect subsequent generations. “You are what you eat” is not entirely untrue. Eating more healthily in adulthood is obviously infinitely better than continuing to eat crap, though.