To wonder if people were actually healthier when everyone smoked

[Fragmentedbrain]

(I have never smoked and used to hate going to bars etc that stank of smoke so this is a very against my own interests question but)

Smoking makes people thinner (it just does)

Cigarettes can be good for people with anxiety

Smoking is a social activity and social connection is good for health

Should we try and get a tiny bit more going?

(Not me I still don't want my hair to smell)

I think it’s hunger that’s gone crazy since 70s. It’s wild animal hunger that’s impossible to ignore.

Processed food has increased and changed massively over the last few decades. Processed foods were simpler in the 70s (flour, sugar, yeast, meat, veg etc), minimally processed with less additives and little choice in supermarkets. Todays processed foods are ULTRA processed, with increased additives, complex processing for longer shelf life, convenient access, wider choice. In the 70s home cooking was the usual way of eating, while in 2023 a BBC study found that 57% of the UKs diet was ultra processed.

I wonder if it’s this that’s sparked the insatiable hunger, which a losing battle as we’re ultimately programmed to obey it, hence rise of obesity?

Agree on most points, but re the processed food it depends how far back in time you go. Like a pp, I was a child in the 70s and I was only just thinking the other day how much 'plastic' white bread we consumed and how many meals featured crispy pancakes, fish fingers, Angel Delight and the like. And then as pp said, instant mash was heavily peddled in the 70s, box curries were introduced, etc...

To go back to when food was really wholesome and cooked from scratch you'd need to go back to about the 1950s imho, as convenience foods were being introduced as early as the 1960s. In fact, if you go back to the mid-20th century wholesome cooking back then was pretty much totally enabled by women's unpaid labour. And although I know a lot of MNers would disagree with this statement, I think the pressures on women nowadays to be amazing mothers and work full-time and still manage to knock up a delicious home-cooked meal from scratch every evening (because, let's face it, women still get shamed if they don't do so while men still get off relatively scot free) are downright anti-feminist.

I realise I've wandered away a little from answering your post here, but all I'm saying is that processed food is an occasional necessity for many and I don't think it's the end of the world provided it's balanced out with more wholesome stuff. Agree with you that there's too little exercise and human interaction nowadays though, and too much time spent on screens.

Oh of course, tinned food is still processed after all. I should have specified UPFs, my bad!

Edit: your reply and especially the point about women's labour is bang on btw (posted too soon)

If 57% of our diet is Ultra processed, who is that on?

To me, as the dangers are well known now, we have made a choice to eat this rubbish and it isn't all about poverty, Waitross have shelves of ready made meals and some of the "bigger" people i know are very well off, for many, it is basically down to laziness.

It doesn't take very long to make a decent meal.

No I'm not a troll. This is an example of life of life in the seventies. Not every family smoked like chimneys. Not all men smoked and it want as popular as you seem to think. Where u even born then?

I could be wrong about this, but I seem to remember having read/heard that UPFs tend to intensify cravings for more of the same?

You re not wrong at all.....

Processed foods, especially ultra-processed ones, can be addictive due to their high content of refined carbohydrates, fats, and salt, which activate the brain's reward centers in a way similar to addictive substances like nicotine or alcohol. The speed at which these foods deliver these ingredients to the gut, and the additives used to enhance flavor, also contribute to their addictive potential

We've replaced fags with "food" and something i'm only too well aware off, don't have shop biscuits in the house, as i eat them all, home made ones, fine with.

I think there were overweight people but not so many of the seriously flabby obese as now.

Sizes above about a 22 were much rarer

Most of these people from other countries have hacking coughs & keep coughing up phlegm & spitting it all over the pavements 🤢

Yes I was alive in the 70s!

I will admit though, I somehow thought you were the OP and trolling more of your "Smoking is good and we should all start so we can save the nations health" retoric, hence the comment about the potential trip-trapping. My bad. Although It's still blatantly obvious that just one family isn't enough anecdotal evidence to make a judgement on whether a statistic is fake.

Those sizes were rare but it didn’t mean that there were no people who needed them. I expect people had to make their own clothes in the absence of them being available in the shops. I agree that shops didn’t usually go above a size 18-20 in those days. I think Evans, in those days unflatteringly called Evans Outsize, was the only high street chain store that had really large sizes and the clothes were frumpy and made of crimplene.

I think we would be healthier as a people if processed foods were banned and smoking commonplace again with many of the restrictions lifted, smoking rooms at work reintroduced as well as smoking in pubs etc.

Do you really? I think that's nuts, personally.

Getting rid of UPFs is a good thing, they really do need to have duty applied, like alcohol etc.

As for encouraging smoking, nothing stopping you from upping your intake.....

Nothing stopping you thinking that. Doesn't make it correct though.

Haven’t rtwt, but please note - smoking can cause obesity due to low oxygen levels in the blood.

It's so expensive though. It cigarettes were much cheaper maybe people would buy them instead of junk food.

I think you're just trying to be funny now...