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AIBU?

Share your dilemmas and get honest opinions from other Mumsnetters.

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

461 replies

Destinysdaughter · 14/01/2017 22:12

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?

OP posts:
wizzywig · 16/01/2017 20:52

Plus only 3 tv channels they werent broadcasting 24hrs a day so we did things. Treats actually were a treat and expensive. I think thats why there are so many posts about grandparents giving their grandkids sweets and fizzy drinks all the time. It was too expensive to do it with their own kids, but now its so much cheaper.

notagiraffe · 16/01/2017 20:59

The amount more exercise we did in 1970s was massive. If you wanted to change channels on TV you got up and walked over to the TV. If the phone rang, you had to charge downstairs to answer it. Or in our case, if you wanted to make a phone call you had to walk two blocks away and use a public phone. No dishwasher and far fewer cars. People walked to and from the shops carrying heavy bags every day. There was no such thing as the school run or being dropped at friends' houses or at Brownies/ orchestra/swimming etc. We walked everywhere - several miles every day.

Marynary · 16/01/2017 21:04

There are such a lot of generalisations. Plenty of women could drive and many worked. I don't remember children being any more active then than they are today. Most people ate plenty of sugar too. I think difference is size is entirely due to the fact that people just eat more now, on average.

GreenGinger2 · 16/01/2017 21:08

I lived in a village Noble. We drove everywhere.

stopfuckingshoutingatme · 16/01/2017 21:12

No snacks
Less TV
Playing out
Walking and public transport

Basically what everyone said

pinkstripeycat · 16/01/2017 21:18

These days everything has sugar in it (my sister has been researching massively lately in order to cut her families sugar intake). Even ketchup and tinned tomatoes had SO much less of any sugar years ago. I'm not sure there is much you can buy these days that hasn't been tampered with. Even if you cook from scratch and I mean with flour etc, even the blasted flour is full of additives! Bread is bound with pigs hair and some cheese (for you veggies) has crushed cows bones in, cereal has arsnic in it - why?! Instead of adding sugar tax why aren't food manufactures forced to remove sugar from basic products? So we can all have ago at growing our own veg (bloody hard work to do it properly so that you can feed the family through the year) but to kill and pluck your own chickens as bought ones are pumped full of water to make them look plumper? Ummmm no thanks.

OCSockOrphanage · 16/01/2017 21:19

Born 1956, so older than most of this thread. Randomly...

My mum learned to drive in Somerset when I was about 2, on a banger in a farmyard.

We lived in a caravan in the farmyard although my dad was a junior officer (too young for a quarter in those days). My parents bought their first cottage (no heating apart from the fireplace) for £1900 in 1959 when my sister was born.

We were middle class, from working class backgrounds.

My mum learned to cook, and eventually became good at it so we ate sensibly but portion sizes were tiny compared to these days, and to this day if you eat at her table, portions are more 1970s than 2016.

When I went to school, in west Cornwall, transport was not provided unless you lived more than 2.5 miles from school; otherwise you walked.

Some of my family smoked, but my great grandfather still lived to 89, and was one of 12 children, who all made it well past 80.

There was sherry at Christmas and a bottle of Hirondelle for a dinner party of eight was the last word in sophistication.

OTOH, my mum didn't have a washing machine for years; sheets and towels were sent to the laundry weekly but nappies were fabric and washed/dried at home.

The butcher's van came twice a week and veg usually arrived via a farmer's boot and was whatever was in season. Fish was sold door to door off a string if someone had caught a load of mackerel. Flour, rice and staples were bought loose by the pound from the village shop. The arrival of the supermarket (Presto) in the 1970s was a revelation, and it was 15 miles away.

We left the house early in the morning to roam and play and were summoned to meals by DMum's air raid warden's bell; we wandered around across about eight square miles, doing whatever we wanted, without adult supervision. There was only a hour of children's TV each day. It was quite austere, but blissfully free range.

No processed foods, and much smaller portions, and a lot more activity.

HobbitTankard · 16/01/2017 21:24

Children were (in general) doing far more unstructured physical activity in the 70s. The average parent where I lived expected their kids to be out of the house in fair weather. By brother played footie rain or shine.

There were the very rare kids who were never let out and the rest of us thought it was cruelty. (Maybe they didn't want to play out, but as children we didn't think that possible!)

PigletJohn · 16/01/2017 21:35

pink

Bread is bound with pigs hair and some cheese (for you veggies) has crushed cows bones in, cereal has arsnic in it - why?!

I'd be interested to see the evidence.

YesThisIsMe · 16/01/2017 21:46

There is enough arsenic in baby rice ("cereal" in US parlance) to be worth worrying about. It comes from the soil, rather than having been put there by evil manufacturers, and there's no particular evidence that there's more of it now than there was in the 1970s.

www.fda.gov/Food/FoodborneIllnessContaminants/Metals/ucm319948.htm
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ginorwine · 16/01/2017 22:11

Expected to play out every night after school
Saturday job
One sweet from the tub each day
Garibaldi or fig bics only !

missyB1 · 16/01/2017 22:20

Mmmm.... fig roll biscuits... I'm going to have to buy some tomorrow.

TheNaze73 · 16/01/2017 22:26

No "snacks" Hate that word!
We walked to school
We played outside a lot
Portion sizes were a lot smaller
The only snowflakes, came from the sky

The list is endless....

Clearaschristal · 16/01/2017 23:23

Everything above is true!! But, also if you were young, you probably went out at least three nights a week to dance the night away! Two of those nights till about 3 in the morning and one night during the week till about 11. Then, you had to walk to the station and from the station, or walk home. No wine, either, just perhaps a whiskey and soda if you was lucky and made it last all night. Working in the bank job during the day and the Bar job on the other nights to make our money up. No wonder we were slim!!

IamSwitzerland · 17/01/2017 00:03

Rose tinted glasses is the truth.

As a kid in the 70s and 80s we were just skint and hungry. There was always money for fags though, even if the leccie meter had run out of coins.

I do mean skint, I remember getting money from grandparents for a mars bar which would be cut up and shared around the kids, it was a huge treat.

I am glad my dcs don't know hungry.

I think dcs are over scheduled and over parented now in some ways and think it a bit sad that they don't often know the freedom of running wild til teatime these days.

HelenaDove · 17/01/2017 00:09

And they are given too much homework. I was born in 73 and i never had any homework until high school. Now they are given hours of it in primary and have to spend time after school completing it cutting down the hours that could be spent playing outside.

IamSwitzerland · 17/01/2017 00:15

If dc do sports or outdoor stuff now it is all very organised and adult led - far less scampering and mucking about then peggin it home in case you were late for tea.

I think there was value to larking about building gang huts in the bushes and racing each other to the top of the hill etc. I seem to recall a huge amount of imagination went into these games which can't possibly happen when it is all planned out - there were at least a couple of summers aged 7 or 8yo when all bikes were ponies for example. Does that ever happen to dcs now?

KindDogsTail · 17/01/2017 00:27

There has been another recent thread about questioning the Eat Well Plate that has a some of the answers, related to an idea that came in about carbohydrates being good, and fat bad.

People had three real meals, there were no cafes with giant lattes and cakes, large pizzas and pasta plates as the norm, bags of sweets and crisps for "sharing", meal deals, large bottles of fizzy drinks, excessive wine drinking, cartons of fruit juice, sugar in all food, the idea that a diet massively high in carbohydrates was good but fat was bad, twelve inch plates, sitting all day with a computer, being driven to school, no playing outside, constant stress at work and at home, anti depressants.

There must be other reasons too, such as, perhaps, things going wrong in the microbes of the gut from pollutants.

KindDogsTail · 17/01/2017 00:31

Notagiraffe You are right about all those small things, like going to the other end of the house to answer the telephone etc, all adding up to a lot more exercise. I had forgotten all that!

ActuallyThatsSUPREMECommander · 17/01/2017 00:54

Someone upthread was expressing doubts about whether the increase in obesity combined with the large decrease in calories purchased could really be explained by the decrease in energy expenditure but actually I think it's perfectly plausible that we're spending on average 100 fewer minutes a day on our feet and moderately active - even if it's only getting up to change channels or having to lug the washing from one side of the twin tub to the other. It all adds up.

www.ifs.org.uk/bns/bn142.pdf

PigletJohn · 17/01/2017 01:49

is the calorie count based on tonnes of food imported and produced in UK, divided by number of people?

Or is it derived in some other way?

gleam · 17/01/2017 02:50

I had jam sandwiches every day as an after school snack. I was really thin though. Exercise through play at school, walking to school and running round the neighbourhood with my local gang of kids.

ActuallyThatsSUPREMECommander · 17/01/2017 07:03

The one in my link is based on food sold, but there are other studies from apparently reputable sources using surveys etc and they all seem to say the same thing e.g. iea.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/Briefing_The%20Fat%20Lie.pdf (bolshy anti-nanny state journo but lots of links)
personalpages.manchester.ac.uk/staff/rachel.griffith/WorkInProgress/GriffithLluberasLuhrmann2016.pdf

Caveat: this is not my particular field and all such research is vulnerable to the effects of food industry funding - they love nothing more than the suggestion that "it's nothing to do with us, you're all just lazy". But I haven't found anything systematic demonstrating a long term rise in calories consumed. Feel free to link if you do.

shins · 17/01/2017 07:18

All of the above - also, there was a bit of a stigma about being very overweight and the perception of overweight has changed. Middle-aged spread was expected but most people were quite slim. It was common for children to be scolded for being greedy, whereas there's a more indulgent attitude now. I knew elderly ladies who would tell someone they had "fallen into flesh", that was quite an image! Confused

noeffingidea · 17/01/2017 07:47

There was such a thing as 'middleage spread' which was expected. There was also a thing called 'puppy fat' which was also expected but was usually lost quite quickly, if you wanted to wear fashionable clothes that is. Clothes aimed at teenagers and young adults only really came in 3 sizes - 10, 12, 14, and they were much smaller than those sizes today. Weight loss was usually acheived by crash dieting rather than nutrition and fitness programmes as seen today.

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