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?

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I think convenience foods started becoming common/popular in the 70's. I can remember having crispy pancakes. We always ate fishfingers, tinned foods such as baked beans, etc, but whatever we ate was in smaller quantities.
gooseberry 'obsession with carbs' is a silly thing to say. Most people ate mostly carbs, ie bread and potatoes, because they were affordable. That is mainly true for poorer people around the world, (often in the form of rice). Sorry, a high carb diet doesn't in itself cause obesity.

Oh yes we ate masses of carbs.

Does anyone else feel guilty if there children say they are hungry and you tell them they have to wait for dinner ? (It's never that long) I do but I have been thinking about my relationship with food and I don't want ds to go the same way.

I do wonder why I feel guilty I'm sure our parents and grandparents didn't it was how it was. We have a huge industry that produces snacks for children sold as healthy snacks but they aren't really as the snacking is not required. I read that in France ( less obesity in children) they will snack once between lunch and dinner and this is from pre school age but now from being toddlers we are constantly keeping them satisfied (and quiet) with food yes toddlers need to eat more often but do most need all the food they eat as something like a rice cake is empty calories or is this when the habit starts

I don't think it's so much what we are it is the quantity throughout the day as we had big dinners but we were not constantly filled up with sugar and fat between meals

Was it a particularly healthy era?

The working classes worked down pits and in factories and on the docks etc These were massively unhealthy and dangerous places.

People smoked like chimneys.

Basic illnesses were often left untreated.

It was perfectly normal for people to die of 'old age' in their sixties.

Very few snacks. If you were hungry before dinner, you were given a bit of raw carrot to eat. A treat like a Mars bar had to be shared with your brother - you learned how to find exactly half of something very early on (one cuts, the other chooses).

Cycling to school, skipping or playing tag at break time. Playing out after school. No icecream in the house - that came from the icecream van if it visited, so Summer only, and you only had one a day. Very few trips out, e.g to the cinema, that would naturally involve buying snack food. If you went out, you waited until you got home to eat.

Walking to the shop on a Sunday morning with Dad to buy the paper and Sunday lunch pudding (Arctic Roll or ice cream).

No central heating, so you were cold and had to get moving to warm up.

Noone would have snacked all day on dripping sandwiches! Even the convenience food you got in the 70s didn't usually taste very nice. The danger of today's crap is that it is both tasty and varied.

Having said that, my MIL's alcohol consumption and inability to cook (evacuated during WW2 and never learnt) probably had something to do with her weight gain. Both her sons drink far, far less than their parents or their grandparents.

Carl As it is now, class and money were major factors in how healthy you were. I always think that when I read threads about how "lucky" babyboomers were. Tell that to the ex miners, steelworkers and shipbuilders.

No in many ways it wasn't a healthier time but it was in regards to what the amount of food we ate and what the majority ate. You only need to look at old news clips from the 70's you do not see so many overweight young people

I was born in the early 70's and don't recognise much of what people are saying. We didn't walk to school, we were dropped there very day, we ate plenty of processed food such as fish fingers, frankfurters, Heinz tomato soup, chips. My mum was a good cook too and we ate her meals. We are out fairly regularly, McDonald's most Saturdays, Chinese a good few times a year, garfunkels and Pizza Hut. We also had coke whenever we were out and Ribena by the bucketful. I also remember my mum always buying me prawn cocktail crisps to eat as we did a food shop in M&S, I recall sitting in the trolley so I must have been very young. We were allowed sweets when we had eaten a piece of fruit after lunch and we always had either malt loaf, scotch pancakes or Battenberg cake for after school snack.

My mum and her friends were always on a diet, grapefruit and black coffee anyone?

We always had central heating and we're never cold so certainly didn't burn calories that way.

I do think portions were smaller and we did play out but we weren't fat at all. I think that people were slimmer then but I look at my kids and their friends and I don't see any of them with a weight problem at all, the few larger kids really stand out as it's still relatively unusual

It wasn't healthier actually, we just ate less.
I know a family of four who use two packets of sausages (so four each), two tins of beans and the best part of a box of 12 waffles for tea, Kids are 12 (twins). In the 70's, it would have been one pack of sausages, 1 tin of beans and one waffle each (maybe two for dad). I mentioned upthread about going to the Berni Inn - the biggest steak you could get was an 8oz rump (these days there are 14oz porterhouse steaks on the Beefeater menu).
DD had pizza for tea the other week, she had a friend round. They had half a Goodfellows pepperoni each (and salad, which they said it was "too cold for!". DD's friend said she normally has a whole one.

I still crave a Findus crispy pancake to this day, and a Bernard Matthews turkey burger/steak thing.

"You'll spoil your dinner!" was what you got told in the 70s if you were rash enough to ask for something to eat in between meals.

There weren't so many (or any in some areas) huge supermarkets and 'retail parks'. Going to Sainsburys in the 70s meant a bus into town and going round a shop the size of a 'Tescos Metro', and you had to be able to carry everything home on the bus (or to the multi-storey car park at least if you had the luxury of a car). There was no filling your trolley to the brim and transferring it straight to the car.

Food was very bland. My mum used to make 'casseroles' out of stewing steak; mince served dry etc. - there weren't the plethora of creamy sauces you can buy nowadays. Pretty much everything was cooked from scratch.

We did have wine regularly - but it was my dad's home made stuff!

Stil, you'll probably be about 5 years younger than me (born late 60's). I think your childhood would have been different. McDonald's were just stating to make an inroads into my neck of the woods by the time I was in my late teens for example. I think mid 80's onwards there was a real shift towards more junk food and people were becoming more affluent. We all walked to school because it was very rare for a household to have 2 cars - the school run just didn't exist.

EmilyAlice - Certainly social class is a determinant in life expectation - as of course is gender.

But there's a question to be asked here. How far is that because historically manual worker and men have smoked more? If smoking disappeared will life expectation become more nearly equal among classes and between genders?

Not a question everyone wants answered, because it might establish that the biggest improvement to our health would be a matter, ultimately, of personal, not collective, responsibility.

I think it was due to the food more than the exercise. I grew up in the 70s and was very thin, eating 3 good meals a day but minimal snacking. I would maybe have 1 biscuit after school! My dc's now take 3 at a time.

But I put on a stone in my first year at university even though I was still doing loads of walking and cycling everywhere. My meals were unsatisfying so I would snack all day between meals. (And also due to the alcohol probably!)

Casz - I also remember cutting up mars bars! They were considered too big for one person to eat a whole one and we sometimes cut one into 4!

The smoking question is an interesting one. I would say, yes it would make a huge difference to mortality rates except that I live in France where smoking appears to be more common, yet people live longer.
Maybe the fatal combination is smoking, poor diet and unhealthy living conditions?

I agree that we used to say, "you'll spoil your dinner" and also "don't be greedy". Oh and "your eyes were bigger than your stomach".

DD and her friends are slim, like we were as kids. Main difference nowadays is that the adults are larger, myself included. I snack more than my parents despite being more active than them at the same age. My parents didn't smoke, but hardly drank and never had these vats of coffee some people chug down every day. I think snacking really is the key- growing up there might have been the odd packet of crisps around, or a packet of biscuits, but I rarely remember my parents eating either.

Portion sizes were definitely smaller, we used to have one tin of meatballs or spam between 5 dc. There were always two courses, usually a big rice pudding or custard and one tin if fruit between 5. There was no snacking between meals and no fizzy juice. Never ate out. Any biscuits were usually plain tea biscuits.

There was no fussy eating in our house as you were told if you didn't eat what was put I'm front of you, you'd go hungry. We were told to be grateful for the food on the table.

I had never encountered a fussy eater until I came across DD's friends, 2000, onwards.

My home diet in the 70s was all home cooked meals until age 7ish I think

1. A giant Tesco was built nearby
2. My best friends parents kept a big american style fridge full of fizzy drinks (which changed my Mum's attitude to treats)

Even then, the junk I ate was not comparable in calories to now
Eg Findus crispy pancake for tea then, now processed chicken kiev
Angel delight for pudding vs Ben and Jerry's now
3 packs of multipack crisps vs tube of pringles
2 bourbon biscuits vs a starbucks muffin

So in my view, it is consumerism and the manufacturers pushing price and availability. And so those people genetically predisposed to gain weight do so much more easily. And compound the problem by yo yo dieting (as opposed to constant dieting which is probably a good tactical approach in our current environment).

I was born in the early 70's and don't recognise Stil's description. It comes down to family income I think, we were the same as many have already described, no biscuits, pop, chocolate etc in the house. No take aways, very little eating out, taking sandwiches on days out etc etc mainly because it was all we could afford.

It was in the 80's it changed. I suspect partly cultural and partly our family circumstances improved. The mid 80's was when we started getting frozen food, take away pizza appeared, McDonalds finally opened in our town etc

Stil I too was born in the early 70's but my experience was quite different

M&S didn't sell that many ready made meals and it was very expensive but we did on occasion have chicken kiev and McDonalds wasn't in most areas until the 80's again that was a treat. Going out for a proper meal (Bernie Inn) was really special we would have to wear our nicer clothes

In the midish 80's we started to have Chinese and Indian (though I had curries at home real and English concoctions that always had fruit in ) that was special too

We always walked to school didn't have a car neighbours did their daughter was in the same year and only when it was raining very heavily did we get dropped off it just wasn't considered otherwise