To be slightly horrified now by what I ate as a kid in the 80s?

[NotWantingToBeRude]

Breakfast was a bowl of either Coco Pops, Frosties or Sugar Puffs. (At least they didn't sell Froot Loops over here I suppose).

Packed lunch in my My Little Pony or Care Bears lunchbox was a sandwich (usually some form of processed meat, occasionally even jam), a pack of crisps, a chocolate bar and a juice box (Ribena or Um Bongo). Never any fruit.

Snack on arriving home from school would be not crisps and chocolate, possibly a Pepperami. Sometimes we’d stop off for pic ‘n’ mix.

Dinner included a full dessert every single night, usually with custard or cream.

Is it just me or would this not be considered so acceptable now?

Well I think a lot of overeating is disordered so certain kinds of disordered eating probably is one of the main health issues in the UK today.

I grew up on a diet like yours OP, 80s convenience food, crisps, chocolate etc. I wasn’t terribly active so I was overweight although not massively so. I have suffered with IBS since the age of 6 though, and it still kicks up after a lot of processed food.

I don’t think it was laziness so much as convenience. Both parents worked, frozen food was easy and we were ‘fussy’ children who wouldn’t eat veg (all we were ever offered was frozen farmhouse mix which I still dislike now), so mum just stopped offering it. And fruit was never on offer other than tinned.

Yeah we were brought up on heavily processed convenience food. My Mum hated cooking so…

We were as thin as rakes and very active so that wasn’t the issue. But knowing what I know now about UPF (and they didn’t know then) it’s such a worry.

It’s no coincidence cancer rates are rocketing in the under 50s I do think diet (and chemicals/microplastics etc) all contribute.

I try to be extra healthy now to compensate. I had breast cancer at 34. I am not saying my childhood diet was to blame as cancer is very complicated. But I avoid UPFs as much as I can now.

The post war generation were actually healthier. Before convenience food was invented.

? There are a growing number of people in the UK with malnutrition. You can be morbidly obese and malnourished, as calories and nutrition are not the same thing. There may therefore not be so many people in the UK who are both malnourished and calorie deficient, but a scary proportion are malnourished.

Personally, I think it’s a weird, defensive reaction to think that anyone commenting on what was, in retrospect, clearly a poor diet, is accusing their parents, or their parents’ generation, of being inadequate. It’s just commenting on different norms, fashions and understandings of what is healthy, what is unhealthy and what is health-neutral.

Don’t worry our kids will have plenty to be slightly horrified by. The whole point is we do things differently each generation. It’s all based on what we had available and was the norm. I wouldn’t say we are really that much better now mind.

I would add though, that we had strict rules about what we were allowed in our lunchboxes at primary school. Sweets, chocolate, fizzy drinks and crisps were all banned, with the exception of chocolate biscuits like penguins. Our headmistress said those foods caused poor behaviour. She was definitely ahead of her time.

I don’t think they knew how unhealthy these convenience foods were though. For working Mums they were seen as a life line. I do remember my Mum adding veg and fruit
to meals so it wasn’t all crap!

So what are you like as an adult?
Of course we are all products of nature and nurture.
I think your 80s diet is unremarkable for its time, though I imagine most people had a mix of all those new convenience food and home cooked more nutritious meals.
Do you eat a healthier diet now? Are you active now?

I had buttered weetabix too. Tried to introduce my kids to it. They found it very odd.

My mum was an immigrant and sensitive to her kid not standing out in the school grounds so we had sandwiches with some form of lunch meat or cheese or spread in the lunch box. But at home everything was home made, no packaged breakfast cereals, snack foods etc, puddings were rare and generally some form of cooked fruit only. She did start making batches of homemade toasted muesli for breakfast at some point which was relatively sweet due to the fruit and possibly honey or syrup. I don't have much of a sweet tooth now but no idea if that's related to my childhood diet.

I think it was balanced out though. I was born in 1981 so a proper 80s child. My parents cooked a lot from scratch- stuff like stews and roasts, even spaghetti bolognese sometimes! Yes there were findus crispy pancakes etc at times.
But then there would be dessert every night which was sometimes home made like rice pudding or sponge and custard but often angel delight etc.
We weren’t allowed too many sweets and breakfast was usually sensible cereal and we did eat fruit - but yes we did have crisps most days and always juice to drink never plain water.
None of us children were overweight though, neither were my parents, I think there were only maybe 2 overweight children in the whole school.
I think on the whole children these days eat more processed crap, and more salt, and less home cooked food.

Is there such a thing as empty calories when you are outside all day running and playing. Children are much more sedentary nowadays but used to be able to play out and given the chance children prefer playing to watching to or playing on phones

My son eats Weetabix with butter and Vegemite. I'm not game to try it.

i now have guilt that my own dc had more convenience foods than i did, chicken nuggets for instance! oven chips

What I do remember is that there was just far less food in the house. We didn’t get a freezer until I was 13, just a little one in the fridge to put ice cream in.
Only had proper meat for a Sunday roast. The rest of the week it was corned beef hash, egg and chips, liver and mash, on repeat.
We had a singular packet of chocolate biscuits on a Thursday to last a week. A few plain biscuits in the house. If you wanted a snack you had a jam sandwich.
No food got wasted. No restaurant eating unless it was a very special occasion. Christmas was a treat as there were more sweets and treats.
One family in my road had a full deep freezer in their garage packed with goodies and all four kids were obese, which was really unusual. They also didn’t leave the house. Although everyone wanted to go to theirs as their parents were very generous with choc ices!

a good rule of thumb: if you look at a food product’s ingredients and there are

1 loads of them
2 loads whose names you don’t recognise

it’s almost certainly bad for you. I’m a hypocrite because I eat a lot of crap, but we’re only now starting to realise what consequences this is all having.

I was in my 20s in the 1980s and DS and I were caught up in the vegetarian wholefood movement led by cook Sarah Brown.
We must have been the healthiest people on the planet.
I'm still vegetarian but not so keen on buckwheat and lentils with bits of straw in.

I’m an 80s child and we had loads of veg when I was a kid! And we definitely had fruit. Some processed foods, of course, findus crispy pancakes anyone? We typically had meat and 2 veg type meals. Egg and chips on a Saturday. I remember grisly sausages that I hated. There are more obese children nowadays so couldn’t have been too bad.

I was born in 1973. We had similar, although dinner at night was very much meat and two veg. Things like pork or lamb chops with potatoes and peas. I couldn’t eat that now. My dad had a friend who worked on the boats so there was a lot of fresh fish - smoked haddock poached in milk with mashed potatoes, an egg, and peas was a favourite of mine.

What we didn’t have were loads of snacks, loads of water, and many takeaways. My parents used to get a Chinese takeaway one Saturday night each month and my brother and I got chips from there, but served with something like fish fingers and beans my mum made.

My daughter eats Coco pops for breakfast, in her packed lunch she has plain crackers, a packet of pom bears, a yogurt, strawberries and a mini packet of party rings. The evening meals she will eat are curry, roast dinner, chicken burgers, chicken nuggets and chips, sausage and mash. She won't eat any other fruit but she likes cooked veg so I put lots of it on every meal. I don't really know what I could do to make it any better other than starving her or force feeding so I don't feel guilty about her diet.

I grew up in the 70s and 80s and I recognise bits of what you’ve posted OP but in the while our diet really wasn’t like that.

my dad cooked for us when we got home as my mum was still at work and that would generally be things like beans on toast or sausage and mash. My mum cooked from scratch at weekends & we didn’t have that many convenience foods. Plus we had school dinners rather than packed lunches

we were always out playing - big garden even though a council house or out on our bikes.

we just didn’t have access to the massive range of foods we have now. This was a time when an Avacado was considered exotic and resturants still had melon as a starter

My mum was a bit “knit your own muesli”, and an early adopter of a wholefoods diet, so OP I would have been so jealous of your lunch. I had tuna fish on brown bread sandwiches and an apple for packed lunch, and my mum’s one concession to sugar was the occasional Jordan’s muesli bar. I side-eyed the kids with the jam sandwiches on white bread and the Um Bongo with rank envy.

There didn’t seem to be any moderation in the 80s. Either you had the sugar and carb fest, or you got the full lentil/carob/sugar free muesli shebang. It would have been nice to have a sensible medium!

Yep appalling diet by today's standards. Not good even back then to be fair.

1970's child and we were the same. Cereal for breakfast sugar puffs included but also rice crispies, cornflakes and shreddies. It's the lunchbox that gets me though - a sandwich of usually processed meat or spread, a packet of crisps and a chocolate bar - food which would be banned nowadays. That said I did see others eating salads and boiled eggs so some parents had awareness around healthy eating. Or maybe it was cost we didn't have much money growing up. Dinner was home cooked meat and potato and vegetables so quite healthy and frequently a pudding such as rice pudding or something with custard. We rarely snacked, if so it was something like bread and jam or toast. I remember the odd apple or orange but not much fruit and the odd bits of salad. We didn't have sugary drinks much either. Overall I don't think we did too bad. We walked everywhere or got the bus so I was a pretty healthy weight.