to think our children have far superior diets than we did?

[oldendaysending]

I had reasonably well-educated parents. Both worked full time however and our diets did suffer because their childcare arrangements were not great.

Breakfast, if we had it - frosties with semi-skimmed milk. Lunch was a sandwich on white bread filled with some sort of paste. Packet of crisps, chocolate biscuit. One piece of fruit (apple.) Drinks - coke/Ribena. Weekends was always a pie and cake

Evening meal - something my mother had cooked; these were usually OK. We'd snack on crisps/yoghurt/biscuit before tea. Might have a banana before bed.

Most children I know now have wholegrain cereal for breakfast. Sandwiches or pasta salad on wholemeal brea. Raw veg, yoghurt, oatcake. Water to drink. Snacks are fruit/more raw veg. kids should be very fit and healthy!

I agree with you OP -to a certain extent. There is much more emphasis now on a good diet and people are generally aware of what is healthy and what is not. Eating well and healthily is quite easy and good food is easy to come by.

But back in the 70s (when I was a child), we were generally healthy because we didnt have vast amounts to eat, desserts were not available, we didnt eat out or have takeaways. We ate fresh food but in my own case, it was limited to meat, potatoes and veg and white bread sandwiches with fillings like egg or meat paste.

I think people (myself incluced) are fat not because they don't know what is good for them but because they (adults) lack the willpower to resist the wide amount of unhealthy foods available to them.

Ys my experience too. Though I do wonder whethrr im comparing like with like. I may be rememebring my teens and in ten years time I may have given up shovelling broccoli intoy fussy little buggers and filked the freezer witb findus crispy pancakes and micro chips too :)

I am 42 and my mum cooked everything from scratch. Unfortunately what was cooked was always meat and 2 veg, with potatoes being classed as veg, and pudding ("afters") was usually Ski yoghurt, Angel Delight ( which I didn't really like) or similar. Dinner box was white bread sandwiches, crisps and biscuit. Always had breakfast, Sugar Puffs or something like that or a boiled egg.

My dses' diets are mostly of the wholemeal variety but there's still some sugary crap in there in homage to my youth .

We had cereal for breakfast, school dinners for lunch and a cooked tea. Sometimes we had findus crap, or waffles and fish fingers, but mostly we ate potatoes (my grandad was a potato farmer) with fish/sausages/beans/egg/pie. Potatoes potatoes potatoes.

My DD1 eats shitty sugary cereal for breakfast (bad mummy) soup/noodles/a sandwich for lunch and homecooked dinners with a lot less potatoes :o

I dont think her diet is that much better tbh. It might be worse. We were restricted to water or milk in the week and no sweets except on fridays. I am not that restrictive with her.

We always had the same dinners when I was little: Monday - leftover meat from Sunday dinner, cold with chips and beans, Tuesday - homemade meat and potato pie with veg, Wednesday - pork or lamb chops with mash and veg, Thursday - stew with crusty bread to dip, Friday - fish with parsley sauce, mash and peas, Saturday - either a big fry up or a salad depending on the weather, Sunday - traditional roast... And repeat!

Lunch was sandwiches on mothers pride bread, an apple and a kitkat.

Breakfast either cornflakes, porridge or toast and marmalade.

We never had convenience foods, my mum hated them. That's one thing that's rubbed off on me, as I tend to not use them either. I've found myself cooking similar things on similar nights though, although we eat a lot of pasta and rice which my parents wouldn't ever eat.

but you are comparing what you bought at the corner shop as a teen with what you are feeding your preschoolers

my kids are teens : I have absolutely no control over what they eat during the day or when out with friends

I wouldn't have eaten any of the things you mentioned so wouldn't have been me!

I never had sugary cereal (and wont give it to DS now), didn't have semi-skimmed milk until I was an adult and I didn't like white bread or biscuits, I would only eat brown or the filling in a salad instead and fruit and cheese .

I would sometimes have some crisps in school though but that would be pretty much it.

We only have/had dessert on special occasions.

Drinks wise - I only liked water (but would occasionally like a twist and squeeze on my way to school) only fizzy juice I liked was shandy (because I thought I was being all grown up)! :o

My DS probably gets more sweets than I did due to when he's at his GPs but not that much really (they do eat dessert though so he does get it as well when he is there). He does eat crisps and savoury popcorn though and has a habit of stealing my cans of orange san pellogrino when I have one and open it but apart from that he really just eats all sorts of fish, veg and cheese and that's not completely my choice, he just doesn't like a lot of foods like ones with batter and stuff and loves his veg.

I feel really lucky tbh and guess I will probably end up with a junk food monster this time round!

We had a huge organic garden, so I grew up with loads of fruit and veg from there along with milk from our neighbour's goat and my mum's homemade wholemeal bricks bread. I would have killed for a fish finger.

My DC have a fairly healthy diet, but I have less time than my mum did as she didn't work so I do take more shortcuts.

So for me the reverse is true.

I agree. I wasn't brought up on crap, but cereal that was considered a decent breakfast for me is a treat for my dc.

Sandwiches were never brown or wholemeal bread, and jam was a regular filling.

Party drinks or drinks when out at restaurants were always coke or lemonade as far back as I can remember, whereas my 10 yo has only had them a few times.

And sweets were a regular occurrence at the weekend, along with whatever pudding was going. We'd get selection boxes at Christmas and they would last two days, my children still have stuff left in February.

Talkinpeace, no I am not! I'm talking about what my parents GAVE to me, when I also was a pre-schooler! We did have fruit (one apple!) and veg to be fair but a lot was processed, white bread, biscuits, type of stuff.

Lunch on Saturdays was always pie or pasty with a cake. Sunday it was a big fry-up.

I agree OP, my children certainly eat a hell of a lot more fresh and nutritious food than I did when I was their age.

Do not forget that food is proportionally much, much cheaper than it was when we were kids.

I lived on pasta. Fruit was too expensive for my Mum to buy in London - I ate fruit when in the country with friends. My daily portion of meat and veg was in my school dinner.

I'm 51. My mum didn't but fruit and we only had fresh veg with the weekend roast. My diet was carb heavy and very processed. I was, however, much fitter than the average kid nowadays. I walked everywhere and spent holidays 'out and about'.

It depends - kids now in general eat much more processed food - so I think in general probably not.

I grew up in 1970s/1980s middle class parents. My mother would only buy high fibre cereal - eg weetabix / shredded wheat / shreddies (frosties was v occasional treat), and only buy brown bread for lunch - filled with salmon / tuna / egg / cheese or similar - never allowed jam or paste.

All evening meals homemade - meat or fish / eggs etc.

Very similar to what my kids eat now - don't really see a difference other than that we took a packet of crisps to school every day but my DC's school does not allow this.

My kids have an infinitely superior diet to me and have a varied, balanced diet with what we would consider to be good quality food.

However my kids eat better than almost everyone we know, regardless of income. Most kids, from my experience, eat crap; hence the high obesity rates.

We might know a lot more about nutrition than we did 40 years ago but we generally eat more rubbish too.

I agree, OP, but I think there was much more portion control then. I don't know of any child who had free access to a snack bar or fruit bowl - permission was required for any food - and that seems pretty common now. Kids might be eating better food (in general) but they are eating more of it, hence the increase in childhood obesity.

In the sixties we would eat things like roast chicken dinner or steak pie and potatoes (Sundays!), Stew and potatoes, mince and potatoes, always fish on Fridays (Catholics!), bacon, potatoes and cabbage fried in the bacon fat, ham salads on Saturdays - with chips and we had corned beef, potatoes and beans. We would have sausages, beans and mash or perhaps scotch pie and chips. We did eat vegetables - or at least it was put on the plate for us to eat, not always successfully. Thankfully my mother and father thought offal of any kind was disgusting so that wasn't fed to us, unlike some of my unluckier friends!

Every dinner had potatoes in some form. We never ate pasta or rice of any kind. That would have been far too exotic for us

We ate only white bread. We always had real butter, never margarine. We only got fizzy juice like coke on special occasions like Christmas or holidays. I remember as we got older my mother bought diluting orange juice now and then.

We rarely had puddings, sometimes on a Sunday. Occasionally we would have home made soup and a pudding rather than a main meal. Cheap and easy.

We had toast for breakfast. For lunch we went home from school and had whatever was concocted for us, depending on which day of the week it was. Our favourite was when on a Thursday my mother made a few chips and boiled eggs and put some of each on a slice of bread for us. She treated it like a special treat and we loved it. In actual fact it was because my father didn't get paid until Fridays and there was only eggs and potatoes left to eat.

My mother was not a paragon of virtue as far as our eating habits was concerned, it's just that they had very little money to buy any of the crap that we can afford today. In fact I grew up thinking that my mother didn't like meat, but I now realise that she took potatoes, gravy and veg without meat because there wasn't enough to go round.

I think in many ways it might have been easier to feed children healthier back in the sixties if you had enough money to do so, as often mothers didn't work and had more time to cook from scratch. Today it's difficult for parents to both work fulltime, pick children up from childcare, go home and then cook a meal. Sure you could say they could batch cook at weekends, but often they have to do many other household chores as well as spend some time with their children.

I think, to be honest, that people in general are trying their best in difficult circumstances.

I am a believer in good food and nutrition. I cook all the time and enjoy cooking. My children, however, do not share my beliefs. They do not eat anything that is green. Nothing, except the occasional pea (for DS).

If I present them with salad, the reaction is almost as though I had whipped them soundly and sent them to bed without supper. Fish has the same reaction. I do resort to stealth vegetables frequently, but even then, they will pick out a bit of celery or onion in a bolognaise and look disgusted.

Take DD (15). Her typical daily diet is as follows:

Breakfast: I tiptoe into her room, bring her a cup of freshly ground coffee and orange juice and suggest some scrambled egg on toast. She grunts a refusal. She drinks the coffee and leaves the juice.

Midmorning break: I used to send her in with some fruit, but it rapidly became clear that this was an act of parental cruelty. She eats two biscuits. Usually jammy dodgers.

Lunch: I have gathered from the cashless system that her normal lunch consists of a plate of chips. Sometimes with cheese.

Tea: She eats a scotch egg. She buys them by the dozen. This is not good food. Sometimes she will eat something called a poptart. She buys those by the dozen as well. The poptarts are even worse than the scotch eggs.

Dinner: She has a delicious home cooked meal every single night. Today it was mushroom risotto with chicken. She picked out all the mushrooms and most of the onion and ate a tiny portion of rice and a small piece of chicken.

I have expressed my concerns to DD (at an increasing volume, over the years). She has taken it all on the chin and suggested that I get her some multivitamins to supplement the deficiencies in her diet.

The main thing that is different is the abundance of fruit. My DCs eat melon, grapes, blueberries, raspberries, kiwi fruit and strawberries like they are going out of fashion. Melon and strawberries were an occasional treat in the summer when I was a kid. Also the idea you could eat veg raw - veg had to be cooked to within an inch of its life once but my kids crunch and snap their way through carrot, celery sticks, pepper.

My Dcs diet is far more varied than mine was, but probably contains more sugar and chemicals. We only had water or milk to drink, and things like ice cream were only for birthdays. No snacking in between meals on sweets - you got a white bread jam sandwich if you were lucky.
My Dcs won't eat wholemeal bread or pasta so don't know if their diet is better or not to be honest.

Bless you Wuldric; I'll be there with my DD1 who cries if she sees broccoli and says I am trying to make her eat a hedge!

I suppose when we were growing up, the out of season variety of fruit and veg wasn't so abundant.

But my mother wouldn't have allowed the sugar laden diet the OP described herself as having. By 4 I had elected to not have breakfast and just had coffee anyway. We came home for lunch and it was a hot meal, and a hot meal again of an evening. We did not have biscuits, cake, crisp, fizzy drink and so forth either. Fruit was the staple snack - apples, pears, oranges, bananas. Pudding on Sundays only. Yogurts weren't discovered until I was well into my teens.

Gluttony not encouraged.

I fairly well still live by that although we do go through a lot of yogurt, jelly and lunchbox crisps. And thousands of boxes of cereal a week, I do at least 16 4 pinters of milk a week.

I disagree. I detest todays foods which are low fat, low everything else, full of artificial sweeteners and chemicals, and generally messed about with, which is what you get today. It's unnatural and unhealthy and so much is marketed towards children as healthy.
My mum cooked lots of stuff from scratch, we didn't eat anywhere near as much processed shite.
Kids don't need low fat, messed around with food. They need fresh wholesome natural food in sensible amounts.

Agree OP.

Tinned potatoes
Breakfast slices aka fake bacon
Bad white bread and marg
"Orange juice" made out of powder

Too much panic about diet these days. My 70s childhood was not a healthy place to be.

I think its a bit of a mix.

I had some awful school dinners for example. Deep-fried spam fritters and chips followed by tapioca (1970s) urgh. My son has restaurant standard healthy menus at school.

My mum worked and wasn't interested in cooking, so meals that I remember were basic things like chops and peas and mash, and the childminder's horrible offerings! I also ate lots of sweets when I could and angel delight when I could get hold of it (butterscotch flavour!).

However, there were few biscuits in the house, we rarely bought crisps, coca cola was for a special restaurant occasion, and pizza hadn't been invented!

Overall, I think my son eats better than I did.