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?

And yes when I said healthier on reflection I did mean thinner! ( tho they are related . )

We were cold a lot of the time when I was growing up and we were relatively well off. I didn't live in a centrally-heated house until I left home in the early 80s!

We ate pretty crap food a lot of the time, even though it was mostly cooked from scratch. Mince, chops and cheap sausages. Lots of tinned food, white bread and potatoes, a limited selection of (overcooked) veg and fresh fruit was a luxury. Lots of home-made carb and pastry-heavy pies, puddings and sponges. Lots of sugar in everything.

People smoked instead of snacking.

Different oral obsession.

Sorry to hear about your mum, Zacky.

My mum was also a very good cook when she had the time. Other staples in our house: mince and tatties, beef stew with dumplings (and boiled potatoes too), lovely thick soups (lentil, broth flavoured with boiled beef, cock a leekie), roast beef and Yorkshire pudding for Sunday lunch. And yes, as everyone else has said, although I remember always having lots to eat, the plates and bowls were indeed a lot smaller so the helpings must have been too.

Yes, funnily enough there was a thread the other day about all the shit people eat in cinemas.

I remembered in the 70s, there would be a quick break in the film and the staff would come round selling little pots of ice cream.

That seemed to be enough for most, rather than today's mini buffet that seems almost compulsory to munch through - washed down with a large bucket of Coke

Want to make beef stew with dumplings now. Yum!

All the stuff everyone has already mentioned,
Also, More people had vegetable gardens and grew their own fruit and veg.
There weren't many supermarkets. We had a butcher, baker, greengrocer. So you bought staple foods and cooked basic meals.
Pizza Was considered very exotic where I was brought up.

Also, a lot of seventies food was pretty revolting ... Stuffed hearts anyone or spam fritters. Possibly why I became vegetarian ☺ I did get sweets fairly often but we didn't lay about watching TV a and of course there was no internet or computer games.

Having to get up to change the channel to one of the other two.
Long hot summers spent outside or at the swimming pool.
Playing out .
Drinks measures were smaller.

I don't think there was so much emphasis on food and on dieting in the 70s as there is nowadays.It was much more straightforward. I think today there are so many diets about and so much conflicting information that people are genuinely confused about how to eat properly and stay slim and as a result a lot of people are eating wrongly and are overweight. I also think lifestyles are so different today than as there were in the 70s. I think people on the whole are under a a lot more stress these days and therefore eat more.

silentbatperson good post, agree with most of what you say.

How old are you Waterlillie? Because IIRC there was a lot of focus on diets for women in the seventies and early eighties. An endless stream of random and loopy diet fads on every magazine cover.

No central heating - house a lot colder.
No car - walked nearly everywhere.
Women didn't drink alcohol as they do now and only a minority drank much alcohol at home.
Housework more physical / more DIY / more gardening / allotments.
Ate earlier in the evening.
No culture of going out for coffee / eating lunch out.
Fewer mothers worked full time so were less likely to cave in to children re: diet, mothers did not ask their children what they wanted to eat etc.

We weren't healthier but we ate less and took more exercise. I definitely ate lots of sweets and had lots of fillings in my teeth! And the Corona man came round every Saturday and delivered the fizzzy pop.
We didn't have a fridge until I was about 10, before that fresh foods were kept on the cold slab in the pantry.

More activity in general - hand washing and squeezing and rinsing, carting a trolleyload of washing to the laundrette once a week, having to get off your arse to change TV channel (and thus watching stuff you've never have tuned into because oyu couldn't be bothered to turn it off). Vigorous polishing of shoes on Sundays, scrubbing pots and pans, carrying bags and cases because tough granny trollies hadn't been invented yet, nor the wheelie suitcase. Even the long journeys in my aunt's car to visit family was exercise as without seat belts it was a couple hours of fighting six others for space in the back of the estate!

And research shows people just don't eat as much when every meal is similar. I know I started getting heavier when I could afford a varied diet with new 'exotic; ingreadints (1996/7) and the delivery takeaway reached London.

That's why it can be frustrating sometimes, watching people on diets making themselves miserable by obsessing over carbs, sugar, calories, this, that and the other.

It must be exhausting having to second guess everything you put in your mouth, not to mention all the self denial just making you crave certain foods all the more.

Looking back to my childhood, hardly anyone was fat and most people I knew ate whatever they wanted.

They just ate a lot less of it than people tend to nowadays and of course, they moved around a lot more. Two car families were really very rare.

Even housework and shopping was way more physical than it is now.

Isn't it the people who were kids in the 70s (people who are now in their 40s) the ones who were the start of the growth of obesity? They may have been thin when they were kids and walking everywhere, but those poor dietary habits stayed when the walking stopped...

Rita I am 40. I know there were a lot of diet fads around in the 80s, but I don't think it was the case in the 70s. Also the diets those days were simple - it was about low calories. Nowadays they are much more complex and conflicting e.g. Akins; 5:2; high protein;, low carbs; high fat content etc

If I was hungry between meals my mum would send me into the garden to pull a carrot or pick some peas. Once in a while, I was allowed a dried apricot - they were the sort you had to suck for ages, not the gloopy things you get these days. No pop or fizz.

Crisps were something you might get in a pub once in a blue moon, but I remember feeling shocked sometime in the 80s when I saw people buy bags of them in the supermarket to just have at home!

There were no supermarkets. You didn't browse the aisles and put random stuff in your trolley. I remember going to the local grocer's with a note as a child with the exact money.

People didn't drink at home and no one had wine. On the other hand, people socialised in pubs much more especially men.

The diet industry was huge in the UK by the mid-70s. Anyone else remember Limmits Slimming Biscuits, Ayds appetite-suppressant candy, Nimble bread, and Tab low-cal fizzy drinks? Slimming magazines were everywhere, and women's magazines focussed on weight loss just as much as they do nowadays.

BoomBoomsCousin omg I wish I was in my 40s can I pretend

Yes but the message was the same - low calories. Today it is so confusing. We have hear one message telling us to eat everything low fat, then another telling us to eat everthing full fat; we are told by one source carbs are bad, then by another source carbs are good. I think people are confused and don't know how to eat to stay slim.