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?

A relative was a dentist in the Hebrides 30+ years ago. Apparently the standard drinks were genuinely only tea, Irn Bru, beer and whisky. Many children drank Irn Bru and many men only beer and whisky. Most people were unwittingly dehydrated all the time.

My kids have jam sandwiches on white bread 😨 in their lunchbox at least once a week, and a bag of crisps daily... they are slimmer, more active and have healthier teeth than many of their peers. They do have veg sticks (carrot, cucumber and pepper) daily and fruit too.

I think the 80s and 90s were a weird time for food - lots of processed stuff, but not the variety we have now and an over reliance on artificial sweeteners, trans fats etc. It was neither the lard and sugar but meat and two veg dinners of the 60s and 70s - which was ultimately fairly balanced and in quantities that were enough to sustain but not fatten us - nor was it the global diet many of us eat today.

I agree op, and I wouldn’t say it’s parents fault it’s was the norm at the time (also the clever marketing on marg etc being ‘lower in fat’ than butter made us all believe the health claims) we are now so much more educated on upfs etc and like you say the lunchbox letters from school! But like you I grew up (90’s) on processed cereal, chemical bread, processed meats, fizzy drinks etc. at school break we got a fizzy pop and a Freddo! And lunch was turkey twizzlers etc! By today’s standards and education it is shocking!

I don’t think op is saying it was too many calories (which your right if your more active you can eat more calories) more they are referring to the food being processed, full of additives and lacking in fresh nutrients

My dc were born in the 80’s and certainly amongst my peer group we were almost evangelical about giving our dc a healthy diet.
I made everything from scratch and we had an allotment.
My ds complained bitterly that I wouldn’t buy him freezer dinners.

Plenty of kids still eat like that and that’s exactly how their packed lunches look.

@Shudacudawuda i was early nineties and was desperate for a Dairylea lunchable and a ribena 😂 I once pretended my water was actually lemonade! But yes I agree I’m very glad of the habits my mum instilled and pretty impressed she managed to not give in to convenience food as a single parent with three children

I had identical lunches to you by the sounds of it OP. Also lots of puddings and processed food at home. And it fucks me right off when people on these threads flippantly say "well you're still here" or "it didn't do us any harm" because actually, it bloody well did. I was a fat child and have remained a fat adult with an extremely unhealthy relationship with food that I have not yet conquered. And now I'm getting older I'm suffering all the health issues and joint pain that go along with that. I don't blame my mum because she was just poorly educated on food and nutrition, but I'm not going to pretend it hasn't impacted every single day of my life in a huge way.

It has made me absolutely determined not to repeat the same mistakes with my own children and whilst we aren't obsessive, they have a very balanced diet which doesn't resemble my own as a child whatsoever.

It was definitely a different time. We used to have a pop man that came once a week with loads of bottles of fizzy pop that we’d guzzle. I absolutely loved it as a kid of course, but had at least 4 fillings before I was 10.

Oral cancers have also gone up significantly, especially in younger people, against which a diet high in the things missing from the OP’s childhood diet is protective. Cancer rates in people under 50 have increased significantly, so you can’t exactly dismiss out of hand an obviously unhealthy diet in the 1980s as a health irrelevance on a population level.

The thing about diet is that the consequences of a poor diet are often long term and also affect subsequent generations. “You are what you eat” is not entirely untrue. Eating more healthily in adulthood is obviously infinitely better than continuing to eat crap, though.

What health problems do you now have?

Or maybe it's a case of you're actually dead because of he horrifying diet you were forced to endure and are now writing from the other side?

One thing is for sure, in another 30 years, the children of today will be moaning about the horrifying diet they had because you know, every generation thinks their parents did it wrong.

The only person responsible for you being fat is you.

Harsh but true.

Hi OP, yeah your food sounds very similar to mine. The only difference was that for dinners we rarely had dessert and it was always meat and veg. Occasionally we'd have fish. If we did have dessert it was homemade and after Sunday lunch- e.g an apple crumble. In summer it was strawberries with cream.

My packed lunch was bad by today's standards - very similar to yours. Ham sandwich and a penguin with a capri sun, a pack of mini cheddars. However, thankfully for primary school I didn't do packed lunch for very long. I had a school dinner and I went to a private primary. The food was fresh cooked on site and it was epic - really nice. But school holidays and my Mum's packed lunch.....haha, it was dreadful. She didn't know.

I wasn't allowed to eat pepparami's or have those twist n something drinks. They were in pink plastic bottles and you twisted the cap off, can't remember what they were called - twist something. My Mum tried one and said - that's awful you're not drinking that. So she had the insight to follow her nose a bit with things like this.

She hated McDonald's she said it tasted like cardboard and who knows what's in it. So again we rarely had it.

But otherwise it was just lack of awareness/food education. Processed food was relatively new. Everyone was eating coco pops for breakfast.

Every breakfast was UPF, every lunch she made the same and every snack. I was just spared the worst of it by my lovely school dinners and my Mum's traditional view on dinners.

The thing to remember though was UPFs weren't as bad as they are today. I bet if you compared a loaf of Warburton from 1985 to Warburton in 2015 you'd see a marked difference. Nowadays in 2025 you might see a tad of an improvement. But that's just a guess.

But you're not alone. I certainly wasn't a 'weird kid'. Everyone's lunch box looked like mine and everyone had cornflakes, frosties or cocopops for breakfast. When I got home from school it was always a bowl of cereal as the snack.

I got pick'n'mix on a Friday.

Oh and I never drank water it was vimto/Ribena or apple juice. I don't think i had a glass of water until I was about 15yrs old and 'Just 17' mag started on about all the supermodels drinking it!

On the subject of sugar, people forget that for a long time it was advertised on the basis of giving you or your family the necessary energy to get through the day. There were adverts in women’s magazines. Silver Spoon etc still do advertise, but the advertising tends to be along the lines of how useful it is in cooking.

When I first started work in the late nineties (in an unrelated organisation) my boss had begun her own career working for the British Sugar Board, marketing sugar everywhere and trying to convince people that it wasn’t bad for children’s teeth!

Also back then health messages were presented differently. They sometimes came out in the news (I remember big news stories about cholesterol) but it was all seen as a bit remote and something that scientists had come up with as a ‘scare story’. To be actively concerned about the health of your diet was seen as something on the fringes, a ‘crank’, an idealist, visiting a ‘health food shop’ and perhaps a bit of a hippy or a ‘health nut’. There just wasn’t the same sense that healthy eating applied to everyone and that some food products could actually do you harm in the long term.

@MrsMappFlint why do you have such a big chip on your shoulder?

south africa

I was a child at the same time as you in the 80s OP.
I loved my Care Bears lunch box.
It contained wholemeal bread sandwiches filled with cucumber, lettuce, mustard & cress and cheddar. Fresh fruit. Sunflower seeds.
After school I would be given a slice of home made apple cake made with wholemeal flour, and big thick apple chunks and sultanas and cinnamon. Mmmm, makes my mouth water thinking of it.
Dinner would be casserole made with lots of different vegetables and chicken from the local butchers. Or huge marrows stuffed with seasoned mince full of garlic and herbs, baked in tin foil.
We didn't have pudding every night, but when we did it was baked cooking apples stuffed with sultanas and drizzled with honey, served with home made custard.
My mum was a single parent and really truly struggled financially.
But she says healthy, wholesome food was cheap back then.

80s baby too.

I had sandwiches, an apple and a biscuit.
Sandwiches often with processed meat, jam or something equally as rubbish. Often had a piece of cake too.
I developed an eaten disorder aged 7 and binged on chocolate at my grandmother's where I went 2 nights a week after school. My grandmother also didn't have a clue about portion sizes and would let me eat whole pizzas and quiches, huge slices of cake etc. I was as heavy as I am now aged 10, my diet was appalling! It does make me wonder what it did to my health.
I was an anorexic teen too.
I'm healthy ish now. Exercise and not overweight, but formative years have a lot to answer for.

I was a child of the 80s. My mum cooked almost everything from scratch often with seasonal fruit/veg from our own garden. Sweet cereals were not allowed. We had weetabix or rice crispies for breakfast but mainly toast with marmite, peanut butter, honey or homemade jam. What makes me laugh looking back is that my sister and I used to pile tablespoons of sugar on top of our “plain” cereal. It probably would have been healthier for mum to have just bought Cocopops 😂

We did have a lot of processed foods but I don't remember that much sugar. People weren't necessary worried about general health effects but they were certainly worried about teeth. I had loads of fruit though.

I think the argument of 'you were fed, and you're still here, so be grateful' is a weak one.

I had a similar diet to you as a child and yes I'm still here but it has absolutely impacted my health. I've been overweight my whole life and have problems with appetite regulation, and it's a constant battle for me to resist UPF's and unhealthy food now.

I have a healthy diet and lifestyle now, but it's a lot more work for me than it would have been had I had that from the start.

It's not that I didn't survive, of course I did, and my parents did the best they could at the time, I don't blame them or anyone.

But it certainly has impacted my life and health, and it's not ideal.

I'm glad that we have more knowledge and awareness now.

I’m not blaming my parents as virtually everyone I know lived like this then. I would have stood out a mile of I’d shown up at school with organic oatcakes, carrot and celery sticks and houmus. Just as my own DC would stand out now if they showed up with a jam sandwich, a pack of Monster Munch, a Club biscuit and an Um Bongo (wouldn’t that warrant a letter home now?)

My DC have school lunch, but at their school the organic oatcake and hummus lunch would stand out MUCH more than the jam sandwich and monster munch. The school saves letters home for the kids that turn up with leftover Dominos in their lunchbox.

Outside some 'bubbles' of affluence I'm not sure so much has changed since the 80s tbh.

Or huge marrows stuffed with seasoned mince full of garlic and herbs, baked in tin foil.

This was one of my dad's favourite dinners when I was growing up. Home grown of course.

Microwaves were definitely around in early 80s, my mother wouldn't have one in the house as she thought they caused cancer, she died in 1985 from cancer so we promptly bought a microwave as clearly it had made zero difference to her health!

OP it's also the case too that advertising painted a lot of these new processed foods as good for you and even better than 'real' foods. Parents would not necessarily have realised they were feeding their children crap. I was in a local shop the other morning around 8.30ish, typical petrol station/shop/deli type place near a local school. There was a huge queue at the hot counter with teenagers buying breakfast rolls, sausage rolls, wedges, basically all types of fast processed deep fried foods, clearly many aren't eating a healthy breakfast before school these days either! I'm sure that counter is just as busy come lunchtime in the school as well. I'm not sure we're eating much better these days and definitely less exercise!