To not understand why the 70s were so much healthier considering the crap we ate?

[Destinysdaughter]

I'm currently reading the thread about what was considered normal in the past, cooking with dripping, jam sandwiches etc and am curious as to why obesity was so rare in comparison to now where it's virtually an epidemic?

Dh's family were really hard up and had no car. Used to walk miles to a supermarket( thinks it was Tesco or Waitrose) and bring it all back in a pram. He was raised on frozen pizzas.

Lost A combined anecdotal experience from two people doesn't really illustrate anything! as with everything, everyone has a slightly different experience.

What is it with this site and people struggling to get their heads round different things?

We used to go to a massive Kwik Save back in the 70s. I remember you had to pay for your shopping and then take your laden trolley to a separate packing area where you unloaded it into empty boxes to take home. Not a carrier back in sight.

There were supermarkets and quite big ones too, though not hypermarkets. We shopped at Tesco when we were at university in the late sixties and there were loads around in the seventies including a very big Sainbury's. We had Sainsbury's when I was a child in the fifties too but you paid at each counter, the first small supermarket appeared in the early sixties in our village.
As far as cookbooks were concerned, I had the Penguin Cordon Bleu, Elizabeth David, Robert Carrier, Katie Stewart for basics and later Delia.

Prof I guess so. In the late eighties, when I can remember my dad having a fried egg for his Sunday dinner so that the budget could be spent on my siblings and I having a 'proper' dinner, I really didn't know any family who didn't have a car. Yet from what you say only 2 or 3/10 of the families in your road would have had a car. Sounds like neither of us were well off but maybe in my area cars were more of a necessity.

Anyway, my original point is that you and I agree that ordinary families did have central heating in the 70s. Not all of them, granted, but this idea on this thread that every one in the 70s was living with coal fires and women were all washing laundry by hand and using carpet beaters instead of hoovers is wrong.

Junk food and snacks were a lot more expensive in the 70s that they are now. Budgets limited the amount of food consumed and fewer people could afford to graze all day.

Now there is almost an expection that food and snacks are available on demand:
www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/2828397-AIBU-to-find-visiting-child-greedy-and-rude

The first UK out of town hypermarket was built just round the corner from me in.... 1964.

m.youtube.com/watch?v=F1mGrYnfz0Q

One factor suspected in weight gain is poor sleep.

My teenager will stay up in the warm house watching TV in a way that wouldn't have been possible (the TV shut down) or comfortable in my childhood home. My equivalent was listening to the radio in bed and I did drop off quite soon.

A cupcake was the flat topped iced cake in a silver container, they were often chocolate, or alternate orange and lemon!

Fairy cakes were raised sponges with icing that didn't cover the whole cake. Unlike cupcakes, you often made them at home. An exotic variant was the butterfly cake.

Today's giant-topped cupcakes didn't exist.

Like so many others, I grew up in the 70s, but withought a father.

During school time, I walked to and from, ate 3 meals a day, and when I was not doing school work was basically expected to be out of the house so I did not bother my mother.

When school was out, I woke, ate a normal breakfast (bowl of cereal), then grabbed something to eat that would fit in my pocket and disappeared until dusk. That was essentially what was expected of children in the day. If we got hungry, we would often nick a piece of fruit off a tree - but processed crap was what the spoiled kids had.

Oh - there was no shortage of alcohol in my house though. My mother made sure of that.

Jumping what a reminder! I remember having to pay a 10p "deposit" for each box so that we would bring them back and use them for the next shop.

Honestly, though - aside from the walk down memory lane, the answer is clear. We move less, eat more, and there are processed ingredients in damn near everything.

Why is this a difficult thing to grasp?

Omg those recipes! I don't think they were what we ate at home, how many foodstuffs can you present in a jelly mould . I do remember there was a culture of not being "greedy" and not "spoiling your dinner".

We had a small supermarket, Safeway's and later a hypermarket, Carrefour. We had much less variety of food available too.

lost some ordinary families may have had central heating, many didn't. Our house had gas fires downstairs and electric plug ins up stairs, and both my parents worked.
You may be surprised to learn that some British homes still don't have central heating (mine doesn't, in fact) and even in those that do, some people are unable to use it to adequately heat their home, due to their financial situation.

Okay lost - nobody had coal fires, everyone had cars and central heating.

Some people did have all of these things, some had some of them and some had none of them.

I know that might be complicated but it's true

but this idea on this thread that every one in the 70s was living with coal fires and women were all washing laundry by hand and using carpet beaters instead of hoovers is wrong

We had a coal fire with no central heating until the early nineties, never mind the 70's. We also did the laundry by hand as the washing machine died and we could never afford a new one and the launderette closed down.
We did have an ancient hoover though!

We had a washing machine eventually - we had an outside toilet for the first few years though.

When a Carrefour opened in my area (I think it was about 1981) it was considered a huge novelty.

I was. born in late 70s. we had one car in the family, all meals were homecooked. yes, often with drippings etc, but very little meat otherwise (and tons of veggies to bulk it up). Bread was brown.we walked to school, to the shops, and played outside after school. we ate out about once a quarter, no takeaways or ready meals. Cake every day, but basic recipes (no icing etc) and a tiny slice as our mud afternoon snack. Pop about once a day, but again the bottles were tiny. Full fat milk was our mid morning snack (just the milk, nothing else!).
so, while not healthy in terms of fat, sugar and salt, also not obesity inducing thanks to small portions and loads of exercise.

Contrary to others we had as many snacks as we wanted, but they were carrots, tomatoes when in season. apples and pears. i remember being very jeloys of a girl who had bell peppers in their greenhouse.

I have been talking to my mum quite a lot about this subject because neither of us can quite figure out why we weigh a good stone and a half more than we should do, despite exercising and counting calories.

Back in the 70s, we ate pretty much the same way we do now. We've always been a "from scratch" family and ate quite exotic (for the time) food because we were from refugee family.

There are a couple of things we think might be responsible. The first is the low fat, high carb, low red meat ideal that came in the 80s; this meant that a lot of food stuffs were reformulated to have a higher sugar content and we stopped using saturated fats to cook with, going with veg oils instead. The second is the explosion of new dairy products (prior to the 70s, in the days before ski, yoghurt was quite a specialist item).

But moreover, we think there could be changes in the food stuffs themselves as they have been bred or processed to be sweeter. A lot of fruit seems sweeter than it did back in the 70s, so does modern fruit contain more fructose than 70s fruit?

Again, chicken and bacon seems sweeter. And ham, even if you buy it cut from the bone, seems a lot sweeter than it ever did, as though they are doing something to the meat.

I do wonder whether part of this obesity explosion is the sugar or sweetness increasing processes that are layered through the entire food industry in a way the didn't exist in the 70s at all, and it's just creating havoc with people's bodies.

We had a car but it never started on its own. We had to push it to get it going, then chase after it so we could jump in without it stopping. We thought we were well posh when we moved to a house at the top of a hill so didn't have to run after it anymore.

People were thinner on average but I don't think there lifestyles were healthier apart from that. Although they eat less food and consumed less alcohol there were many more smokers and nearly everyone was a passive smoker. Anyway, there are a lot of generalisations on this thread. I'm certainly a lot slimmer than my mother and grandmother were at my age and I doubt that is unusual.

We had no car, no heating apart from a coal fire in one room, a twin tub washing machine.
We were less neurotic about children. We went to the beach and park all day without adult supervision from around 5 years old. We cycled or walked everywhere. There were no computer games and black and white tv.
However to say we were healthier isn't necessarily true. Life expectancy is higher now. You are less likely to die from a stroke, cancer or heart attack now. Children are less likely to die from leukaemia or other cancers, they are unlikely to contract measles, are protected from cervical cancer. Less children die from abuse. Less people die from terrorism related injuries. You are less likely to suffer serious consequences of sepsis and meningitis. You are very unlikely to die during elective surgery.

Another who remembers the school tuck shop - and the sweet shop on the way home from school - and the very cheap packets of biscuits - so I don't think it's the case that nobody had snacks. I sometimes wonder if better central heating is a factor - that must lower energy output.

Also, isn't it the case that adults have actually changed shape since the 1950s, not just become a heavier version of the earlier shape - although it's hard to tell as some of the 'hour glass' in women was the result of artificial aids! I did read somewhere a theory about changes in hormone levels for various complicated and not fully understood reasons, which then affect people's overall shape as well as their weight. Not sure if this would apply worldwide though.