To wonder why we were a thinner nation before we all knew so much about food.

[Bumblebumble123]

Isn't it funny that in years gone by, people didn't have the knowledge about food they have now. Peoples diets weren't dictated by calories or grams of fat or carbs, they were dictated by hunger. Yet now we have an obesity epidemic.

Is educating people on food counter productive? Would we all be better to scrap the info and start listening to our bodies?

I don't know the answer. I just find it odd that we know more than ever about food yet the nations waistline is getting bigger.

I think the rationing of the war and post war has led to a you must clear your plate attitude which passed down to the next generation even though food is now plenty full. I still find it hard to leave unwanted food on my plate even in my 50s

My observations (based on a 60's childhood and having parents who lived through rationing).

People didn't eat snacks. You might have a biscuit with your drink at 'elevenses' but that would be one biscuit, like a rich tea. Or an apple on the way home from school. You weren't allowed anything else, as it would 'spoil your tea'.

Crisps were an occasional thing, maybe one packet if you were lucky. A few sweets were a weekly treat and paid for out of your pocket money, they had to last until the next week.

Plates were smaller, they really were!

People didn't have as much disposable income, they would buy the minimum basic food and that was that - there would be just enough to go round. Plain cakes were made at home, and weren't laden with chocolate, cream or piles of icing like they are now. Shop-bought cakes were tiny - cupcakes were little things like a fairy cake with flat icing on the top, not piled high and bigger than the cake itself.

Nobody ate in the street, it was thought of as common and bad manners.

Fast food chains hadn't been invented, and going to a restaurant was a once or twice a year thing, and for a really special occasion. If you were out for the day, you would take a packed lunch. Maybe you'd have takeaway fish and chips on a Friday, but portions were far smaller than they are now - especially the chips.

Nobody was afraid to say "Don't be greedy, no you can't have any more, you'll get fat", or "No, you cant have that many sweets, they'll rot your teeth".

Kids played outdoors far more than they do now. I remember in the school holidays, we'd literally be out from morning to night, and only reappearing for a drink of water (sometimes with a tiny splash of squash in it) and for mealtimes, when we'd quickly eat so we could go out and play again. We'd burn off all the calories and everyone was as fit as a flea.

Very few people drank regularly at home. My parents only had alcohol at Christmas.

noeffingidea

The rationale behind rationing was food shortage. It was introduced to make sure that food was shared out equally across the whole population.

Arrangements were made for young children, expectant and nursing mothers to receive cod liver oil, orange juice and milk from welfare clinics. When oranges were available children under 6 were entitled to 1lb every week. The general health of children improved and on average they were taller and heavier than children before the war.

The social and economic changes that came with female employment are a longer term issue. Compulsory warwork for women didn't come in until December 1941. Pay for warwork was low, many if not most husbands were off fighting and dependent on army pay, which equally was not high. Some women with children didn't have husbands, some were widowed by the war and thus only had a widows' pension, some had to pay for childcare while they worked if they didn't have access to grandparents.

People add sugar to cereal that has no sugar in it. They are less likely to add sugar to ready sweetened cereal.

If the sugar content of ready sweetened cereal has increased, people may not be aware that they're consuming more sugar.

Recent research showed that that the sugar content in some children's cereal had increased by a third in just three years. Other manufacturers had cut the sugar content.

It's the snacking culture we have now. No one can go a couple of hours without eating now or so it seems!

I've put on weight since having my youngest child. Thought it was an age thing until I started doing my fitness pal and logging everything I put in my mouth. Omg!

I spend a lot of time in the kitchen making different meals, packed lunches etc. I didn't even realise how much I was snacking and picking. Also eating kids leftovers AND my normal meals. Once I was honest with myself, the weight started coming off and fast!

At the risk of repeating what most other people in the thread have said, it's completely down to availability of high fat, "empty calorie" type food, combined with a reduction in movement as we go about our daily lives. There were overweight people in times gone by - those who had enough money to buy copius amounts of meat and sugary food, and had servants to do all the running around for them. Now, fattening food tends to cost less than healthier stuff, so having less money may not necessarily mean a lower calorie intake (within reason, I realise that even in this day and age there are still people who literally cannot afford to eat). I recall an experiment that was done recently where someone was given £1 a day as their food budget. They didn't starve, but they certainly ate a load of crap whilst fresh fruit and veg were out of the question. Add to that the fact that if you want to exercise there is often a cost, both financially and time-wise, that many cannot afford, and the roles are definitely reversed.

You only have to look at your average school run to see how times have changed. I remember doing a "how do you get to school" survey at primary school in the 80s and there was one girl out of a class of 30 who got taken in by car. At dds school which has a similar size catchment, I'd say at least half are driven (not having a dig, I realise some parents don't have the choice) and those that do walk are often given snacks as soon as they leave the classroom, again unheard of when I was at school.

Not as much food readily available.
Food was more expensive in relation to wages.
Eating out was a massive treat (we never ate out)
Ditto going for coffees out
Very few families had 2 cars so people walked or cycled - when I was in primary school I can't remember anyone not walking to school, 1/2 a mile there and back in my case.

I do think drinking alcohol at home has become the norm now especially wine for women. My mum had a shandy at Christmas or a snow ball.

I remember getting smacked for coming home early from playing out as it was raining. Mum was spring cleaning and I was given a plastic hood, anyone remember them tying under your chin?! and told to get on with it.

Oh we ate out once a year on mums birthday and noonr enjoyed it as mum and dad were so nervous. Bless them they thought the rather run of the mill restaurant was super posh. It wasn’t

And I agree, kino, plates were smaller. We inherited some plates from DH's grandparents and they were small!

Growing up in the 70s, we had an endless supply of veg as my grandparents had the most amazing garden and grew all their own fruit and veg ( war generation)
There were always pots of homemade veg soup, lots of pulses and lentils and of course homemade jams and marmalade.
But my mother was the worst cook ever - think Wendy Craig's character in Butterflies.
Every night was some kind of variation of mince and potatoes so quite frankly none of us could stand to eat much of it. Honestly, it was bad.
With the advent of Chinese and Indian take away food, not to mention more convenience food, our taste buds were finally awakened to a whole new way of eating and cooking which was actually v exciting at the time.
None of us were fat though. Very active lives and eating was in moderation.
Also I think we expended quite a lot of nervous energy wondering what my poor mother was going to serve next!
For the sake of balance, my dad could rustle up a fabulous full English breakfast on a Sunday. And he was actually much more adventurous in trying out new foods and recipes.

Growing up in the sixties and early seventies, as previous posters have pointed out: We didn't snack between meals apart from maybe a digestive biscuit with a cup of tea. We had 3 meals a day, cereal or toast for breakfast, maybe a bacon sandwich on a Saturday morning, sandwiches and a biscuit and an apple/banana for lunch at school. and a cooked tea at about 6pm which could be anything from mince and tatties with plenty of veg (Mum used to manage a nice dinner for 4 with half a pound of mince - DH and I have more than that between 2 of us.) to bacon and egg pie (note, not quiche!) with chips and salad, sometimes beans on toast with an egg on. We had proper puddings, never ate out apart from fish and chips on our summer holiday, Mum never drank alcohol except for a sherry and a snowball at Christmas (we used to get the rest of the bottle of lemonade - the only time we had 'pop', except again maybe on our summer holidays). There were no takeaway mocha lattes or hot chocolate with extra cream, no pizza/Big Macs etc. I find a lot of the preprepared stuff in the shops a bit sickly looking - some of the birthday cakes - 3 layers of cake, lots of heavy buttercream icing, then half a pound of actual chocolates on top - everything is 'luxury', 'treat' etc. I think our relationship with food has become warped. Apols for lack of paras.

I lost weight without 'trying' (as in I started naturally doing the things I used to make an effort to do) over last autumn and Christmas.

I walked to work daily (3 mile round trip up and down a hill), I had a sausage roll and an apple for breakfast, and because I was so busy (newly promoted), I only had time for my lunch and dinner as they came, no snacking.

I gained weight originally and struggled to lose it because when you have to add activities to your lifestyle to maintain/lose weight, you're onto a losing battle already. I firmly believe that it's habits - in both eating and exercise - that fundamentally need to change.

Human bodies aren't designed to process and lose the weight sedentary lifestyles give us. Weight loss in nature is usually a massive problem that the body fights, which is why so few diets succeed.

How thin are we meant to be though? Lots of posters have said they were hungry as children, is that how it should be? I’ve read that it’s healthier to be closer to a BMI of 25 than the lower end.

Indeed, nowater, I was definitely hungry as a child.
You could be right about BMI - i've read recently that post-menopause, thin women are more prone to osteoporosis.

As a 14 year old I was expected to spend my morning and lunch breaks in the playground - we had long pieces of elastic and used to do complicated "french skipping". We had a PE lesson of some sort every day - gymnastics, netball or tennis and country dancing for forty minutes and once a week we had a whole afternoon of PE - either lacrosse or cross country in winter and tennis in the summer.

My 14 year old is studying 16 different subjects (she is preGCSE years) - she has a dance lesson once a week which is all about studying different dance forms and choreographing so uses much less energy than 40 minutes of country dancing would. She has an afternoon's PE every other week as they need a 2 week timetable to accommodate all the different subjects they study - next term that PE lesson will be either rounders where she will spend most of her time standing around waiting to bat or catch a ball or athletics where she will spend much of her time waiting her turn at the jumps or javelin etc with a small sprint if she's lucky. Her morning breaks are spent in her classroom chatting and at lunch times they are encouraged to attend "clinics" or clubs around their academic subjects.

I ate far more as a child than she does - she is slim but I was so scrawny I was prescribed glucose powder to "build me up".

Lots of posters have said they were hungry as children, is that how it should be?

See I don't think there's anything wrong with children being hungry from time to time. Not, obviously, to the point of feeling unwell or unable to concentrate because of it, but if dd comes to me half an hour before dinner is ready and says she's hungry, then surely that's a good thing! Hopefully means I'll have a fair chance of getting some decent food into her, rather than her filling up on snacks. I also believe that much of the time (nowadays) when children say they're hungry, what they actually mean is they are craving the sensation of eating their favourite snack. They have no idea what actual hunger feels like as they've never been able to feel it. And if they don't know the sense of mild hunger, can they tell what "full up" feels like and know when their body is telling them to stop eating?

The bmi thing is interesting. I've never heard that about 25 being better than lower in the "healthy" range. Personally I feel at my best when I'm about 22 and look distinctly chubby at 25, but I suspect this is as individual as we are.

Two things: lifestyles are generally more sedentary, most jobs now do not involve hard physical graft in the same way they used to (eg working down mines or in mills or in the fields) and the second thing is that much of the diet advice we were given was just plain wrong eg "butter is bad for you, so is bacon, carbs are good, est lots of rice and potatoes". My dear parents still insist that too much meat (even lean meat) will make us fat! Ditto with eggs.

The invention of low fat foods has not helped at all- sweeteners added. Experiements done on mice some years back showed the mice fed on sweetened foods as opposed to actual sugared foods developed much bigger appetites and gorged until they became obese. The US is one of the fattest countries in the world, maybe THE fattest and I do not feel it is a coincidence that most everything they eat is spiked with corn syrup or fructose syrup.

Obesity has clearly not increased due to education. If that was the case the obesity would be increasing the most rapidly amongst educated professionals when it is actually the other way around. I work with very educated people and there is virtually no obesity. My friends (all educated) are all slim too. If anything they exercise much more than middle aged people did in the 80s because they are much more conscious of the importance.

The increase in education is a consequence of increase in obesity, not the other way around.

I also believe that knowing about calories and healthy food is like sticking a plaster on a cancerous tumour in mnay cases- it is a band aid. The real reason many people are obese is because junk food and processed food affect certain areas in the brain dealing with dopamine and serotnoin, so sugar acts as an antidepressant. So when people are feeling low or even mildly clinically depressed (nearly all of us will have some form of depression at some point in our lives,. some (including myself) will be unfortunate enough to actually need medication or therapy long term) they/we reach for the food to deal with the empty scared sad feelings we have. Knowing how to handle our emotions better is the key for many of us. When I am well I eat more healthily, when I am anxious or low or "empty" I binge or eat massive carb portions and it is the same for many of us.

How thin are we meant to be though? Lots of posters have said they were hungry as children, is that how it should be? I’ve read that it’s healthier to be closer to a BMI of 25 than the lower end.

There is research that indicates people with an overweight BMI live lo get than those with a normal or obese BMI.

It does seem to me that these days especially for young women if you are not skinny you are obese. There seems to be no aceptable middle ground.

I had a crap diet growing up, biscuits for breakfast, ready meals for tea, crisps, sweets and pop on tap... was mega skinny as a child as we played out ALL the time, this was in the 90s so not that long ago. When i started to read more as puberty approached i started to get chubby... i remember a relative commenting. So i started to diet as a teen... i remember my lowest weight, 8 stone 12....now i have to really watch what i eat to remain around 9 stone 10 (i do slimming world). Ds2 is 9 weeks old and ive got about half a stone to lose to be back to me adult "best". Im lucky in that ive naturally got a small waist and flat stomach so "look" slimmer than what i am but i get very annoyed when people comment that i should "eat more" or get a pudding. I also dont drive and get out with the kids every day, pushing the double pram. My husband has a sit down job and will come in and ask if ive bought him "snacky" things... erm no i haven't, if you really must have a bag of crisps you can walk to the shop and get some! My only reak vice is wine, if ive got wine in then I'll have a glass on an evening. I dont remember my mum drinking at home as a child but at some point she must have done as now she cracks open the lambrini on a Friday night and might have a beer or gin midweek

I do think people eat out a LOT more, when i was a kid we rarely ate out, sometimes we'd go to a carvery or we'd get fish and chips at the coast. My 2 year old loves a babycino in costa and is as good as gold when we eat out because he does it so often 🙈. Its something we need to stop but when the local italian does 3 courses for 3.95 its so easy to just go there...

My DH works with a lot of elderly. He says that he comes across some overweight people in their 60s, a few in their 70s and usually none in their 80s upwards. Either these are formerly overweight people who have just become thin in old age or thin people live longer.

Historically food has always been equated with wealth - look at any old portraits, the women are buxom and the men are strurdy.

The nation thinned out with war rationing and manual labour. It fattened up again with the advent of fast food and additives plus sedentary jobs .

People consume too much for their needs.

Also societys idea of beauty changes - currently the more androgenous female - a la Victoria Beckham size zero is the industry ideal. Where as in the 1950's you had a rather chubby Diana Dors.

The States seem to fete large rumps but thats probably due to their rap influence and the physical/cultural norm for black women to have large buttocks.