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 always had a fully stocked fruit bowl but we still had to ask before taking an apple, there was no 'grazing and helping yourself'. We ate things like liver and bacon, casseroles and meat and 2 veg. We never had deep fried anything because my Mum had had an accident with one before I was born. Food served a purpose and not eaten for taste alone (especially relevant in my house as my Mum was a terrible cook).

No supermarkets, and shopping was done in greengrocers, butchers and fishmongers (always had fish on a Friday). Dad had an allotment so vegetables were the only thing we had in abundance. People smoked everywhere, on buses, trains, in the cinemas and in the workplace. I remember taking a flight, in my 20's when you could choose the smoking or non smoking seats.

I like it better now, cook it a bit less and discovering calves' liver was good! But my kids don't relish it so they get it occasionally but mainly they eat the gravy with mash!

I love liver, bacon and onions and the kidneys in real steak (cheap beef cuts when a child) and kidney pie.

Cate I think you have nailed it there with food being a means of just filling you up with no taste or flavours.That sums up my family meals from back then.

No snacking

We can't do anything now without stuffing our faces every high street is full of places to snack/have a meal

And we encourage children to constantly eat yes they might need something little between meals but we also give them food to keep them quiet and satisfied the obesity problem will only get worse it's ok at times to feel hungry it's good to feel hungry

I can remember when the lean cuisine ready meals arrived in the shops - my mum used to 'cook' them as a treat!

There was one of those food history programmes with Giles Coren and Sue Perkins on this I think. The Supersizers Go Seventies

Most people walked to work or school, average distance walked was 5 miles a day. Kids played out all the time. Less central heating so more calories burned that way. Even if people were inside they were less sedentary because of less screen time/tv/computer games. A lot of inside hobbies/games involved moving round a bit. More people in physical or semi-physical jobs like factory work. Fewer processed foods and takeaways, so more time spent cooking. People also shopped a few times a week or even daily at local food shops e.g. Green grocer, butcher. So more walking and more time spent in kitchen peeling potatoes etc. Less of a foodie culture. Food was food not entertainment IYSWIM. And also food was much more expensive- I think historically food on average has been around 1/3 of weekly/monthly household budget, today it's more like 10%.

I was born in 73

• fizzy drinks were parties and Bday and Christmas only- weirdly, now it seems to have gone to extremes. Parents are either "water only, ever" or putting coke in baby bottles

• no processed food. I think mum bought a jar of Ragu or Dolmio when I was about 16. That was the first time a pre-prepared food item crossed the threshold :-)

• walked to school, even in the rain, 2 miles each way.

• played out on our bikes or roller skates all summer

• had to ask for any food, and a snack was 2 biscuits like a ginger nut or a rich tea

• ate out on birthdays only (so 4 times a year basically) or if the oven broke. Wimpy was a MASSIVE treat.

• Adults didnt really snack at all. It was seen as something kids did

• food was seasonal and frankly, less nice than it is now.

To be fair, there were kids at school who had white bread jam sandwiches, a can of coke and a kit kat for lunch, so it's not like we all had hugely wholesome diets, but I think higher activity levels compensated for it.

Less crap in food, less sugar and less food additives. Cooking in dripping and jam are not unhealthy

I remember giant spaghetti! It was like turkey foil, long long.

Kids were a lot more active, both in and out of school. A lot if kids (including me) walked to school for more than a mile, carrying a heavy school bag.

In addition ready meals were not a thing. For the relatively well off we ate 3 balanced home cooked meals per day. For the poor, calories were relatively expensive; it cost a lot to become obese.

Parents also found it far easier to parent. They did not give in to pester-power. No meant no and there was big trouble if you kept nagging.

Bowl of cereal (frosties probably) and tea with sugar no less for breakfast.
Bottle of milk at school.
School dinner.
Meal at 5pm.
That was it.
Weekly treat on a Friday (glass of Cresta or Corona from the pop van and a packet of crisps).
Also, portion sizes were smaller.
Look at Supermarket pizzas today (your average Goodfellas etc). One of those did a family of four (plus a handful of oven chips maybe).
One tin of soup was opened for Saturday lunch (for mum dad and two kids), along with a slice of Mothers Pride). The same with beans, one tin between 4 on toast. My mother could get two meals out of a pound of mince.
We watched very little TV (nothing on for kids after The Magic Roundabout at 5.45pm).
The bike sheds at school were bursting at the seams.
Not being allowed out to play (rounders, 40/40, dens, hopscotch) was the worst punishment ever).
5p of penny sweets on a Saturday (would usually have a Black Jack, a fruit salad left by Monday).

I was born at the start of the 60s. Unlike most people here it seems, we did eat a fair amount of sweet stuff - my mother had a really sweet tooth and baked a lot, and every evening meal had both main and pudding course.

She also cooked all our meals from scratch - I can remember my first meal out, for my 11th birthday, so clearly. I had fish and the waiter filleted it for me! Portions were smaller too - her dinner plates were about the size of our side plates - so I've recently started using them as dinner plates instead.

We didn't snack though apart from a Mars bar sometimes shared between 4 after dinner.

Fizzy drinks, a weekly treat at most, were always shared between my brother and me. I remember at university feeling finally free to have a whole can to myself - the amazing liberty!

Always walked to school, went for long walks with the dogs at the weekend.

I became overweight at 14, but luckily John Yudkin was in his prime and the wisdom was to cut out carbs still - the low fat thing had yet to happen. So I gave up my mother's cake after school and puds after dinner, lost weight and maintained it for a long time, until my hormones hit again in my late 40s.

One of the reasons I think a VLCD can be so useful if you have a fair bit of weight to lose is that it helps reset the snacking and the large portion size habits. If you can manage of 500 calories a day without being ridiculously hungry, then you know you don't need to fall face down in a metric tonne of lasagne every night.

My children were born in the early seventies. We grew a lot of vegetables in the garden, we shopped at supermarkets, small shops and our local health food shop. We didn't snack or let the kids have sweets (they complained at the time but don't let their own children have many). We were not very well off so we did a lot of pasta and lentil dishes. We had wine sometimes, OH baked the bread and I made biscuits and cakes for treats. We had puddings on Sunday, but not much otherwise. We both cooked. We only ate out if our parents treated us and the only takeaway was fish and chips as a rare treat. We both worked full-time so did a lot of batch cooking of pasta sauces, curries and casseroles. We walked a lot and worked in the garden. We were all pretty skinny.
I think the biggest changes I have observed are snacking, portion sizes, and processed food.
We now drink more wine and eat far fewer carbs. We both still love growng food, cooking and eating. I am still a size 10 but I wouldn't fit my size 10 clothes from the seventies.

I didn't gain weight until I married & left home. Our mum cooked from scratch. If you were given a mars bar as a treat, you felt like you'd won the lottery. Nowadays chocolate & sweets are just crap.

Agree with most of what's been posted. Having said that, I hated the 70's.

Another example, Christmas selection boxes was the most amount of chocolate a 70's child would see in a year (in one go). There was an unspoken rule you only ate one item a day. The packet of Spangles was still there on New Years Day. My parents never drank at home, there might have been a bottle of Cinzano at Christmas. We ate out (at the Berni Inn) perhaps three times a year (some families these days go out to a Harvester/Nandos every few weeks, according to Fakebook).

And another thing that hasn't been mentioned - the amount of drinking most people do now. My parents have a healthy attitude to alcohol, but a glass of wine with dinner was never a thing in the sixties and seventies, and most weekends they wouldn't have a drink either - just at a dinner party or on holiday in France (when as a young teenager I was allowed a little wine, watered down).

More exercise. No "snacks" Things like fizzy drinks as a rare treat.

We had to ask if we wanted food in between meals. We played out all the time. There were no computer games. We ate meat sparingly because it was expensive. Pudding was for Sundays and special occasions.

I think we treat ourselves too often now.

Yoshka, we used to cut our mars bars into slices so it would last longer!

Treats were definitely treats. Our pocket money off grandma was 50p and a chocolate bar. It was the highlight of our week to see what the choice bar would be. Mars bar?(disappointing) Marathon? Or the ultra-rare walnut whip?

Every day, school dinners would have a proper pudding mind - chocolate pudding with chocolate sauce, jam roll poly and custard.... And every day, without fail, my auntie, who looked after us till mum got home from work gave us bread and jam. I have never eaten it since.

But no junk food as such. No ready meals, pre packaged anything. Everything was seasonal and cooked from scratch. We didn't sit on our arses watching tv/playing compute games cos it just wasn't possible.

It is very noticeable now that people do not, and cannot go for any length of time without eating or drinking something. And this urge to eat or drink is immediately satiated. I think back in the 70's people would go maybe 4 hours between food, so the digestive system also got a rest several times a day. Now, people consume food or drink the moment they feel hungry or thirsty. I think now people rarely go for even 1 hour without eating or drinking, so the digestive system is never rested, hence the rise in type 2 diabetes as well as obesity - the insulin production is 24/7. That's why IF seems to be so successful - it's giving the digestive system it's much-needed break again.

I miss pink panther chocolate though. Amazing stuff.

Walking much more, especially to school.

The points about takeaways and fizzy drinks made by others.

I still used to ask my mum if I could have a glass of milk into my 20's. It was a precious fridge item back then and god forbid any of us would go and help ourselves and there be none for the evening or if the milkman was late the next day and there was none for morning tea.

I was born in 72.
I agree that there was no processed food, some of the meals I remember were nice but I remember sitting at the dinner table staring at boiled potatoes for ages because I wasn't allowed to leave until I cleared my plate, even the dog wasn't tempted. Meals I recall were mince and potatoes, corned beef and potatoes, gammon steaks and potatoes (a lot of potatoes) chicken casserole and rice, fish and chips, fry ups- with fried bread.
We had fizzy drinks because the alpine man came round every week and we got 4 litre bottles.
Majority of kids I know had sweets every day, 10p for the tuck shop, polos were 4p a packet so you could buy two packets of polos and 4 mojos. 10p would also buy a quarter of sweets (100g). We'd hunt for ginger bottles on the way home for the return money.
I had syrup sandwiches for lunch and a club biscuit. Or meat paste sandwiches- bleugh.
Breakfast was cereal with sugar on top and full fat milk (my sister and I would fight over who go the cream)
We never ate out.
We were out from morning til dusk in the summer.
We walked to school and we played out at break unless the weather was really bad (my DD seems to have to stay in a break time a lot, the snow this week was fairly light but they weren't allowed out).
Kids Tv was rubbish and finished at 5.10 so out playing.
I don't think my diet was especially healthy in the 70's but I ate smaller portions and I was active all the time.
Kids these days (and adults, myself included) are much more sedentary and there is access to high calorie food instantly everywhere and we eat because we are bored rather than hungry. I often say no when my daughter asks for a snack because it's obvious she isn't hungry she's just bored.

That said, I remember when I was at high school and we were able to gin out for our lunch having a roll and fritter, a chocolate eclair and a donut every time (3x a week) washed down with Diet Pepsi so my choices weren't so good. This was the 80's though! I still walked everywhere and my weight was about 8 stone.