The 70s and diet - what were we eating?

[Alicay]

Watched a programme about The Cure last night. There was footage of the group from '81 (I think) and they were all like pipe cleaners - that really slight, skinny look. Not an inch on them. Growing up I can remember the majority (of young people at least) having that kind of physique. Also, recently saw Gregory's Girl and was struck by the school scenes - kids all like whippets. Now im fat and in my fifties I'm trying to remember what I/people ate. think for me it was cornflakes with sugar for breakfast, orange juice then modest packed lunch (I never got crisps, but some kids got a packet of walkers) or a disgusting school dinner of meat pie and veg that I barely touched) dinner was always vegetable soup then say pasta (fancy, but Italian roots) then stewed fruit. I'd be raging hungry on that diet now. Thinking about it maybe food was just less appealing/quantities smaller? Is it all just down to the extra snacks we have now?
Any 70's/earlier people remember better than me?

Portion sizes were smaller but there was a lot of heavily processed food back then. Findus Crispy Pancakes, Angel Delight, Fray Bentos pies, tinned veg, tinned fruit in syrup, cereals loaded with sugar, bread loaded with preservatives etc were all staples of many people's diets in the 70s. My mum's saucepan filled with lard for deep fat frying was regularly in use as well.

As much as I loved The Golden Egg as a child, the only healthy choice on their menu was the tea.

Similar to those above, although I turned veggie at 11 and ate a lot of bean casseroles.

Treats were small and controlled.

A bag of bread always sat on the dinner table. Cheap white stuff. You filled up on that. I remember my parents sharing a tin of soup for lunch.

If we were hungry there was always mugs of homemade soup in the fridge. Toast. Or cereal.

Thankfully, I've never been over weight. My DD has access to lots of snacks, but she eats anything and will snack on fruit, nuts, cheese, homemade bread etc. She prefer home cooked to take out or school lunches. She just can't be arsed to learn how to cook. I need to change that.

Brought up in a 'meat and two veg' household. My parents didn't like had never tried 'foreign food' like rice and pasta. I definitely remember eating sugary cereals for breakfast eg cocoa pops, and I certainly had sweets. But, we walked a lot. We had a car but DM didn't drive and DF was at work M- F so if you wanted to go anywhere you walked, cycled or walked to public transport. We also played out a lot. So we burned calories. Take aways didn't really feature except fish and chips on a Friday, and if we went into town we rarely went into cafes and idmf we did it was a cup of instant coffee or tea, or a milk shake which was just milk and syrup, not vast amounts of cream/ice cream. And we had 3 meals a day, not constant snacks.

Yes, smaller portions and in my house, all food homemade. We did have pudding most days, but always homemade by my DM.

No convenience foods and no snacking were the key differences, looking back. As children we weren't allowed fizzy drinks, apart from at parties, so we never developed a taste for them. Also never had things like crisps in the house. We were taken to choose a small chocolate bar or sweet on Sundays, but that was it for the week.

Oh there was plenty of consuming sweets in the 70s but we'd walk to the corner to buy a packet of sherbert lemons or pear drops then wander round with our mates whilst scoffing them. So no laying around eating crap whilst on X-boxes or phones.

There wasn't any catering to dietary whims. All the family ate what mum put in front of them.

Takeaways we're limited to the chippy. I was 20 something before I had a takeaway curry.

We didn't have regular lattes or alcohol in the home except at Christmas.

Hardly any fruit juice, and what there was was served in tiny glasses as one course of either breakfast or dinner. Far fewer carbonated sweet drinks.

It's not what was eaten - the actual food was all worse quality. It's just that people ate much less. Same in the 80s. Three meals a day and that's it.

No snack at break time at school - now we're encouraged to send one in with children when the fruit stops being handed out in KS2.

Snacking only really got going in the 90s. Now people are constantly grazing and wonder why they weigh so much more. It's just sheer volume of food. And it's an american import because in Europe they don't eat like this, still.

I'm very aware that I've become very snack driven and need to knock it off. I ate breakfast at 8am and could definitely eat something now two hours later. As a child I wouldn't have been able to eat til food was next provided at midday. Just get on with it. It's hard to reset your system when you're used to food being constantly available

The crucial difference was it wasn't acceptable to be fat. There was the odd fat kid and some people got middle aged spread but being fat was looked down on and very few people were obese.

There wasn't vanity sizing or plus sized clothes.

I'm overweight now and could do with going back to the 70s for a few months!

Yesterday I was struck by a photo in the New York Times - first I couldn't believe it was taken 54 years ago, second how slim all the women were.

They'll all be in their 70s now!

Rationing from ww2 only stopped in the UK in the early 1950s... therefore young adults in the 1970s would have spent their childhood living with rations...I wonder if this affected their overall size?

I agree with the variety, but I think decent quality food at affordable prices is scarce now. There's so much processed rubbish dressed up in an attempt to fool people into thinking it's a treat - 'pulled pork' - endless varieties of burger - fries rather than proper chips or potatoes. If you want a good cut of meat at the supermarket, you pay a fortune for it - £12 for a small joint of lamb, £10 for a single fillet steak. If you want that kind of unprocessed food in a restaurant it's a struggle even to find anywhere serving it; although if you're in the market for plant-based meat substitutes your choice has never been better.

So it was less food, less palatable food, less choice, more structure to meals/mealtimes more movement.
what I can't get my head around about all this is the hunger thing. I mean hunger is hunger. Was it accepting and being used to hunger? Have our brains changed? Is it just expectation of feeling a certain level of fullness? Or is it the way food is engineered to make your satiety signals go haywire? I dunno.

70s kid here. Cereal for breakfast, school dinners or packed lunch, then a home cooked meal in the evening. We rarely had puddings, chocolate, snacks, fizzy drinks - they were a treat not an every day food staple. Very rarely went out for dinner, had a takeaway Chinese on our birthdays, no fast food chains. And walked or cycled everywhere. We had one overweight girl in our year at school, the rest of us had hardly any meat on us! A lot of us are still the same, ie, not overweight. I still don't have fizzy drinks tbh.

It's a really interesting question....I'd love to know. I'm sure if I had to live on a typical seventies diet, I'd be hungry.

If I went back to cornflakes with sugar and orange juice for breakfast. I'd be chewing my own fist off in a hangry rage by 10am.

I don't remember what portion sizes were like but we had enough to eat. Breakfast was cereal with sugar sprinkled on, packed lunch for school was a cheese sandwich, bag of crisps, piece of fruit, and dinner was stew or mince and potatoes. We didn't often have dessert and if we did it would be rice pudding or Angel Delight because we didn't like milk to drink and my mum worried about us not getting enough calcium in our diets. We got sweets and fizzy drinks when we visited my gran at the weekend and not any other time

The key difference I see is snacking. We don't allow ourselves to feel hungry any more. Even if we choose a healthier snack (and that's not always easy with all the tempting junk food on offer), we're often eating a lot of calories in between meals. And the sheer volume of junk food that gets pushed at children. I've been trying to find a balance after ds told me he's the only one who doesn't get a sweet or biscuits every day in his lunchbox, so now I give him a weekly allocation of small bags of Haribos or cookies etc that he can choose when to eat. I'd be ok with that. But then he attends a birthday party, and wins a big bag of Haribos as a prize and gets a party bag full of sweets and cake, or plays in a rugby match where the hosting team provide a help yourself range of cereal bars and cakes, and before I know it he's had 3x the amount of sweets I feel comfortable with.

I eat sweets and crisps too. I'm often too busy to eat breakfast or stop work for lunch then hunger hits and I eat 2 bags of crisps and a bar of chocolate. This is relatively new for me and I need to stop. I'm thin but not healthy right now.

I remember being allowed a spoon of sugar at my grandparents as a treat before bed, and a cube of sugar if watching my mum have a cup of tea in BHS or the co-op. That would be bordering on child abuse I think now! Still thin and no dental issues arose from that either.
I have read about less nutrients being available now from the earth so I think the food quality of meat/veg/milk etc, even if buying really well, is less than the 60s, and that’s without the pesticides and ways to super grow veg/fruit. I think this does impact our body shape/health and it is difficult to avoid as even the best farmed and best bought goods are affected. There’s a lot of comments on snacking, which definitely was not a thing back then and I think maybe the inherently better quality food/fat, even in cheap produce, perhaps kept us fuller for longer as well as being allowed to be hungry back then and rules around ‘common’.
Overall it will be a mix of factors but sadly I do think a lot of our bad habits as a nation are driven by corporate need to make cash which is just awful, but not unique to food or the U.K. sadly.

I mean I was still thin as a kid - not now unfortunately 🙈

Breakfast was boiled egg or porridge with a slice of toast
2 sandwiches for lunch. We were given milk in primary school
Dinner mostly meat & 2 veg
sometimes toast for siupper
Very few treats, only at weekends.

Salads in summer which I loved as I’d put the contents on a piece of bread, slap another slice on top & back out to play.

Portions were much smaller. I have dinner plates from the 70s & they’re half the size of one sold now.

Drinks were water from the tap, tea or coffee. Nobody drank alcohol at home except for a bottle of Blue or Black at Christmas

So true . We only had treats at Christmas and my Mum decorated a table to put the treats on !
Today those treats are in the kitchen cupboard all year round 🤦‍♀️

The sheer availability of food 24/7 is a problem - food outlets are everywhere e.g. stations, hospitals, high street, etc. Just had a walk around my local park where there was a major fireworks event last night and there were dozens of food trucks and bars - in the past you would have just watched the fireworks and gone home.

I will just add that all that little portion sizing made for tiny tummies. When i was at uni and living in a student flat, i do remember a typical lunch for me was HALF a tin of ravioli.

One day a flat made suggested i try ravioli on toast (one slice toast!) and i did. It is really good on toast but ½ tin ravioli on one slice toast absolutely floored me. I could barely finish it.

Now i would easily have two slices, full tin ravi plus cake!

Don't forget all the smokers!