Does the human body really need such healthy food?

[miniwh]

As in, 5+ a day veg/some fruits etc

For thousands of years humans weren't able to access that type of varied and balanced diet

You could say we need to move with the times but other mammals are in good health by eating what's always been available to them and nothing else

So surely our bodies are designed for fairly restricted and limited diets?

A lack of fruit doesn’t matter if you’re eating lots of veg. Vegetables are much better for you than fruit.

Also, apples could be made to last for months. They would also have berries and plums etc that they could make into jam and chutneys.

The switch happened because modern life is expensive and we can’t have one parents at home cooking from scratch.

The move to ultraprocessed and factory-prepared meals began in the 1950s, with the advent of prepurchased "TV dinners". That was a time when most households had a stay at home mother acting as housewife.

It has been a gradual creep, ever since, with fast food outlets setting up worldwide in the 1960s and onward, and then an explosion of processed crap, and then meal delivery options in the last few decades.

A lot of people now have grown up without seeing meals cooked, and have no idea how to cook from scratch even if they did have time and the utensils, etc.

It happened in the 19th century with industrialization as others have said. Many families living in urban poverty between 1830 and 1960 were living in overcrowded accommodation, with inadequate cooking facilities. It is a middle class fallacy that all families had a SAHP pre 1980. Working class women have always worked, pre WW2 most upper class women couldn't cook either because they had staff. The nation was best fed during rationing of the 1940's and 50 as there were national kitchens and children were fed a hot meal at school.

The nation was best fed during rationing of the 1940's and 50 as there were national kitchens and children were fed a hot meal at school.

I'm not in the UK. These are global western trends.

It happened in the 19th century with industrialization as others have said.

PS: I really don't think industrialisation caused people en masse to stop cooking their food themselves, which is what I was responding to.

to a certain extent mass industrialisation did stop cooking as many really poor people were in very crammed conditions with no stove or maybe a tiny one big enough for one pan or a kettle but no oven so street food and bread became staples
but this was not true by the twentieth century during WWII most women could and had to cook but there was plenty of veg just not variety and apples can be stored without preserving for several months if wrapped properly my Dad used to say we had apples till the rhubarb came then rhubarb till the apples came
diet in WWII may have been bland or boring but it was sufficient and nutritious general health was good

In The Road to Wigan Pier, which was published in the late 1930s, Orwell describes the diet of the working classes mainly consisting of sugary tea, white bread and marg, and some corned beef.

Did you not read that most of the meals I do take under 30 minutes? Stir fries are 20 minutes prep, 10 (or far less) cooking, or I could simply take something home made out of the freezer and defrost/cook it. I make 12 portions of a dish at a time and freeze 10. A lot of the time I'm simply taking stuff out of the freezer but it's food I made.

I started this while working 6 hours a day and caring for an increasingly physically disabled DH. Sadly he is developing severe cognitive difficulties and needs almost constant attention so I took early retirement - only by 6 months but his needs couldn't wait. I wouldn't change now, even though I get tired. My DH is thriving as far as he can, and I have the energy I need to cope with the almost 24/7 demands.

I agree. In the 19th century people weren’t buying ready meals and jars of pasta sauce.

So you worked short days, you don’t have dependant kids and now you’re retired. You must see that most people don’t have so much time?

We also cook everything from scratch. DH and I share the cooking 50/50, and both work jobs with long hours. However we don't have children, which makes a difference.

I think you underestimate the demands of caring for a disabled spouse. Children need less care as they grow older. With a spouse it is vice versa. I am there and currently have the t-shirt

I work ft, run 3 times a week and have 2 children. We do not eat ready made food or UPF. It's about priorities;
I generally prepare something like a chilli or bolongaise on the weekend to have in the week, another night is stir fry, a simple pasta dish (hm pesto is very quick and easy, or just some fried veg), risotto can be made in 40 minutes....We eat soup in the winter. It's just habit really. I work 7:30-4:30 5 days a week.

Exactly. Getting my DH dressed takes nearly an hour, and if he has a shower before dressing (usually needful) then add another hour to that. The therapists say I must allow him to move as best he can, and that means it takes 5 minutes to get from the bedroom to the bathroom and he needs to be watched every moment in the shower but allowed to clean himself as far as he can before I take over. Quick movements alarm and worry him so I must move slowly and carefully and always tell him exactly what I'm about to do (several times) before I do it.

Then there's the laundry needs of an incontinent man who always spills food and drinks but who wants to be allowed to try and manage.

If you don't take care of a mentally and physically incapacitated adult, please don't judge the amount of time a simple task can take.

My great grandfather, born 1897, would have turned my grandparents entire back garden into a kitchen garden if they'd let him! They still had an apple tree, plum trees, gooseberry bushes, and plenty of vegetables.

Um … haven’t RTFT but this op is wrong.

For thousands of years humans did have access to a very varied diet, as hunter gatherers. There have been suggestions here and there that the shift to agriculture reduced diet, and potentially, health with it.

Why humans shifted to agriculture is a question that’s been asked a few times too: possibly for security, to sustain a growing population. Some have posited a religion. Looking at the current economic revolutions going on, perhaps I could suggest plain ol’ politics and the desire of elites to grow richer.

It did to some extent, people started eating bought bread (with horrible additives) and pies (with contaminated meat) and cheap jam (with wood instead of raspberry seeds). People had far less time to cook.

Don’t forget Enclosure, happened before industrialisation. It drove people to vagrancy en masse. They no longer had access to grown food, and had no choice but to engage with the new market economies.

@OperaStation did you miss the part of her post where @FlipFlops4Me says that she has almost 24/7 caring demands ? Caring for an older person is harder than caring for a young child .

I think people can survive on whatever is available, yes, but if you can eat lots of vegetables it helps with so many things from just feeling better to minimising long term risks.

What I think is a disgrace is that it's deemed acceptable for some sections of society to have to live off foodbank food which is not nutritious, it's been normalised by the government and some of the public.

I'm on a really low income and I spend a lot of time and energy in making sure we get at least 5-a-day. My budget for myself and two teenagers for all food, toiletries and cleaning products included, is £50 a week.

To get our 5 a day on our budget, I have to calculate the cost per weight of everything and walk to the supermarket most nights at around 8pm (yes, even after work), and get the yellow sticker fruit and veg and also other foods at about 75% off. I either use it up or I make sure to blanch and freeze it before it goes off. It's literally the only way we can get enough veg really, which is really sad in one of the richest countries with me working and with low rent.

I batch cook 4 recipes on one of my days off. I have like a whole day of cooking on one of my days off, I play podcasts and quite enjoy it. Take lunches in a thermos food flask. Never buy drinks out.

I usually say 2 veg at lunch, 2 veg at dinner, and one piece of fruit. Sometimes we end up getting more.

I think it's easier if you like most foods, as we do. DD is veggie and me and DS are not.

Also much better if you don't have a sweet tooth. I used to have a sweet tooth but somehow my tastes just changed. I'm not really strict, I will enjoy a bit of cake here and there, but I don't buy sweet things in much, and now I find if I eat cake half a slice and I start feeling nauseous. It's hard at first but you start really tasting the healthy food and it's much better. Throwing that much sugar at your body can't be good for it at all.

Sorry that turned out to be really long!!

I think of my late dad, his sister and her late husband. They all ate vast amounts of homegrown (allotment) fruit and veg all their lives. The depression and WW2 obviously played a part in that. Kept chickens in the back garden of their (council) house so eggs available and the odd bird. My aunt is 93 and sharp as a tack mentally, some physical slowing down but still takes the bus to the shops. My late dad and uncle both lived into their mid 90's and both died within a couple of weeks of becoming ill following a long healthy life. Both mentally fit and driving up to the point the final decline started. My grandma lived to about 94, sadly my grandad was gassed in WW1 so was never the best of health after that and he died from pneumonia in his 60's.

My cousin and I both believe the secret of their longevity was the homegrown veg they've always eaten and enjoyed. Dad always cooked up 3 veg every night with his evening meal

My late Grandad (born 1914 in the Salford slums) left school at 13 to work on a greengrocers cart.. he would take home veg that had fallen 'off the back of the cart' to help feed his parents & 10 siblings.
Sadly the truancy officer caught him so it was back to school until he was 14.

Like many of his contemporaries in the slums he had a poor diet with 1, often cold, meal a day. At 18 he was homeless and joined the Communists who fed him a hot meal for breaking up meetings of Blackshirts.
Then at 19 in 1933 he joined the Army and finally got 3 decent meals a day..

Him and his siblings were well fed in adulthood but the results of childhood malnutrition meant they were always thin & bony, very arthritic. The men drank heavily including my Grandad.

However my Nan, born 1925, was always curvy.. she was from a posher part of town and her Dad ran a greengrocers! She never went hungry.

I only eat when I'm hungry or just about. Somtimes I eat well-blanced and sometimes I eat just calories and bulk. I like food generlly so no other probs. If I'm doing hard physical stuff I don't worry about the health of the food so much just the need for calories but I'm aware that a chocolate bar isn't really dinner so I eat carbs instead. It orks for me.

I do think the timetabled regime of eating doesn't work - the it's morning eat breakfast, it's lunchtime so eat lunch, etc is ridiculous particularly given our sedentary lives. If we weren't so sededentary there would be no need for 'going to the gym' for a start, after all the gym's original purpose wasn't to get fit.

It orks for me! obvs it works for me.

It did, to some extent- people often had no facilities other than a small fire. Bread would come from a bakery, but might be bulked up with sawdust, white lead and all sorts of wonderful stuff (laws to prevent dangerous adulteration of food com in in the latter half of the 19th century.). In some places, you could take pies to the bakery to be cooked, but you needed the ingredients and space to make pastry. A lot of meals would have been one pot stews with very little meat, or just bread and potatoes and maybe bacon fried up.

Water was also an issue, with not necessarily easy access to water supplies (let alone clean water.) Even a shared pump wasn't always easily accessible and could run dry in summer. Rural poverty was also bad, but they could go foraging and gleaning, so probably did have a wider diet,but in industrial slums, there were many cases of nutritional diseases, if you weren't carried off by an industrial accident or a cholera outbreak or something...