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?

We had a takeaway once a week on a Friday. And a packet of crisps and a penguin bar in my lunch every day.

Not fat then, or now.. I did walk 1 1/2 miles to school each day - and back. Whatever the weather, as mum went to work.

I was born in the early 60s and I seem to have grown up in a different world from most of you, possibly because my family is Scottish. Every Thursday my dad would arrive home from work with fish and chips for our tea. At least once a week for tea my mum (who was working full-time as a teacher and therefore didn't have much time to cook during the week) would heat up pies she had bought from the butcher and serve them with homemade chips (cooked in lard/dripping) and baked beans or tinned pasta. On Mondays we'd have cold beef from Sunday's joint, usually with chips again. There were days when we had salad (cold meat or M&S quiche, lettuce, cucumber, tomato, salad cream, pickled beetroot) but often that came with chips as well, and failing that there were crisps.

And that was just the first course! We then always had bread, butter, jam, some sort of cake or chocolate biscuit and all washed down with tea (unsweetened, but full-fat milk).

In the course of the evening my mum and dad would usually pass round some sweets (they both have a very sweet tooth). We might be allowed half an apple each as well. I used to spend my pocket money on fruit because it was more of a treat than sweets!

We also had breakfast (boiled egg, buttered toast, coffee) and a hearty lunch. Biscuits and cake came out for visitors with the tea or coffee, if anyone dropped by mid-morning or afternoon. Plenty of convenience foods were in use (Angel Delight, Vesta meals, Spam, bought cakes and biscuits, frozen burgers).

It is a complete mystery to me how we weren't all spherical. My dad was a bit overweight, admittedly, but then he was doing a sedentary job and minimal exercise outside work. My mum was doing an active job teaching a Reception class and also fitting in all the housework. She didn't drive so walked a lot. My brother and I were at school and both slim, also walking a lot.

I think a big difference now is what people drink. More alcohol, more sweet milky coffee or other hot drinks, more sugary carbonated drinks, more artificially sweetened drinks. I know the latter are supposed to have no calories but I can't help feeling that they are not healthy.

in the 70"s I walked 3 miles to secondary school and back.. we walked everywhere.. there was no school "run"
ready meals and fast food were just starting and expensive.

I was a child in the 60s and 70s - we were thinner and more active but we certainly weren't healthier. Adult life expectancy was a lot lower. Disorders such as Type 1 diabetes and asthma were often difficult to manage, potentially life threatening (particularly in children) and regarded as a significant disability. Measles, mumps and scarlet fever were normal childhood diseases which everyone expected to get. Awareness of hygiene was a lot poorer too - no soap in school loos or antibac gels in GP surgeries and hospitals.

Children were weaned onto solid food ridiculously young and breastfeeding rates were very low. No-one (even the naicest MC parents) thought it wrong to smoke around children and babies. We had AWFUL teeth - dentists drilled and filled at every possible opportunity and we spent a lot of our pocket money on very nasty sticky ultra-cheap sweets and biscuits, available from the official school tuck-shop. We NEVER used effective sunscreen (Factor 4 anyone?) - and we sunbathed as kids using oil that actually FRIED your skin in the sun.

Survival rates for childhood cancers were abysmal compared to nowadays and children stood a far higher chance of being killed or injured in road traffic accidents - think no seatbelts or child seats, very young cyclists on the roads and very free-range children playing unsupervised ball games n the streets. And railway tracks and canal banks too as I recall....

There was no Just Eat

If you actually wanted a takeaway, not only was it a rare treat but you had to get off your arse and join the queue in the chippy

People in the seventies weren't healthier - they died at far younger ages.

Far younger? Average life expectancy in 1977 was only 7 years less than now. Hardly far younger.

I grew up in the seventies and we did snack! But the portions wrte much smaller.
We were allowed to pick out 5 penny sweets on the way home from school every day (which we walked, up a big massive hill). We also had a snack at mid day break- a penguin or Taxi or Blue Ribbon We ate very little fruit it was a luxury.
We used to have fizzy as a treat ince a year on holiday (a bottle of Coke with a paper straw)

But as others said our meal portion sizes were much smaller, we walked absolutely everywhere and played outside all day long. Happy days!

Today we need to -
Walk more
Cut down on portion sizes
Don't have snacks in the house.

Not as many people had cars for one so a lot more walking/exercise in general.
People who grew up in the 70's presumably were children of the baby boomers generation. They were still dealing with the arse-end of the war when they were growing up so I think still had that 'make do and mend', using scraps, dripping, leftovers etc.
I remember often feeling hungry as a child even though I had three meals a day but my mum was so tight we didnt have snacks very often. If we had a biscuit it would literally be just one biscuit.
So different to nowadays, I think I let my kids eat far too much and it's an offshoot of often feeling hungry/being 'denied' food when I was younger.

There's also the growth of vanity sizing. In the 80s I was tiny - 7.5 stone and a size 10. Now I'm 9 stone and apparently still a size 10 - but I'm not tiny anymore, I must be a 14 at least in 1980's sizing. That must impact how people perceive a healthy/OK sort of weight/size (I'm not saying size 10 is the aim btw) - the feeling is that if you're a lowish size then you're OK, but those sizes just aren't the same as they were.

Funny that people mention alcohol, average consumption is going down! And people then were healthier in terms of obesity, but not in other ways. For example, more people smoked. Which may partially explain why they were thinner. Also worth mentioning that we didn't really achieve an end to widespread hunger until WW2 at the earliest. In the 1930s and earlier, there were still plenty of kids growing up without a proper diet. A lot of the adults in the 70s would have grown up poorly nourished, in a way that wasn't true in later decades. That has an impact. It's only quite recently that all the working age population grew up at a time when nearly everyone had enough to eat.

Less heating. My mum was young then and they were quite poor, though not at the extreme. They didn't have any heating upstairs. You use more calories when you need to keep yourself warm then when you don't.

I'm also going to be controversial and say food was just not as nice then. You can get a lot more tempting ingredients now. I wasn't alive in the 70s, but I do remember 80s food, and I hear that was a bit better. It was also less likely to make you want to eat a lot of it than what's available now.

Processed crap was in its infancy, so people hadn't had many vesta curries/findus crispy pancakes yet.

Few snacks here, but jam sandwiches (on sliced white with marg, not butter) were a regular in my packed 70's lunch, because they were cheap to make and my mum didn't have much money. Most of my friends had a packet of crisps in their packed lunch every day, as well as something like a penguin. I was always so jealous, as I'd have a bloody apple, or - whoop-de-woop - a yoghurt. But even all the crisp-eaters weren't unhealthy, either.

I agree it was a lot more exercise, fewer cars, fewer snacks and no extras like starbucks (which are about a billion calories a pop).

When we went to visit my cousins on holiday, who were farmworkers, they had SO MANY meals a day, like a hobbit, but their work included a lot of physical exercise, so presumably they needed them.

I was always driven everywhere in the 70s including school. We had tuck shops at school and went to the sweet shop loads. We did play out for hours so that must have been the difference

Oh yes as a pp says, there was no school run as such. Children made their own way to school from a young age. I remember my mother crossing me over the road then I made my own way to primary school. My mother never drove until later in life and even though my father had a car, he never gave me a lift anywhere, day or night. None of the parents did. If you wanted to see a friend, you walked. Children were far more independent then.

Portion sizes. 90s ready meals were a third to half the size of the ones sold now. I think 70s portions were smaller still.

We had smaller dinner plates.
Kids were out playing not twiddling thumbs in bedroom or being driven round to activities.
No fast food, takeaways etc

To some extent we're simply healthier because medicine is better. There were outbreaks of polio in Britain in the 1970s - not to mention measles and mumps. Heart disease and cancer treatment is far far better. And yes, thousands fewer of us are being killed by cars or poisoned by asbestos or lead based petrol, or passive smoking in every single workplace - that's the legacy of the Nanny State for you.

I remember day trips to places like Scarborough or Skegness and my mum would make packed lunches with tinned salmon sandwiches, squash and coffee in a flask. We would never eat out. For years, I felt guilty for having lunch in a cafe!

However, years of working in London eventually killed that

Less heating. My mum was young then and they were quite poor, though not at the extreme. They didn't have any heating upstairs. You use more calories when you need to keep yourself warm then when you don't.

Oooh, this is a good point, Silent. No central heating, and only patchy heating in the rest of the house. Got dressed in the morning either VERY QUICKLY or under the covers!

food was nice then
my mum made stews with dumplings, home made pies and stuff like that. it was good( and just so I don't get shite posted, how she managed it i don't know as she had the big C)

I was born in 1960, . I remember eating mainly bread and potatoes with miniscule amounts of meat (which often came out of a tin). Food tended to be a bit boring and we ate to stop feeling hungry rather than for pleasure.
We never had fizzy drinks and sweets were quite rare in our house, however my Mum did bake cakes and pies from scratch.
And as others have said, we walked a lot, did quite a lot of PE and played things like skipping, french cricket, hopscotch, etc in the playground and streets.
Smoking was definitely the bad part of the 70's . Probably the majority of adults smoked, many teenagers and sadly quite a few children did too. My sister started when she was 8 (obviously only the odd one at first). One wonders what long term damage early smoking does.

The only snack we had in the house was fruit. The only time we had pudding was after Sunday lunch. We ate proper meals, at a table for all three meals. No tray food. No takeaways, no freezers. We didn't eat 'on the street' or on 'the go'. There was no necessity to keep eating when you went out, eg food at the cinema, or stopping for a latte and an over priced muffin.

The bus stop was a good mile and a half walk; school was a 5 mile journey, but we'd often walk it regardless. PE was every day. We didn't spend our lives in our bedrooms talking to imaginary people; we got out and played.

I used dripping for the Yorkshire pudding tins last time I made them & I put lard in my pastry. Mmmm, animal fats...

In the 70s we ate smaller portions, moved around more & the compulsory eating of snacks had not yet been invented.

Feck all worth watching on TV and no decent video games yet, so kids actually moved occasionally

People definitely ate less and moved more.

Even with jam, dripping, home made chips, lard etc being the norm

3 solid meals a day with lots of carbs, seemed to be enough for many people.