THE 1970’s DIET - sun ch5 9pm

[Blondeshavemorefun]

A social experiment with Josie Gibson

who eats and drinks and exercises in the way they did in 1970’s

what can we learn from their diet

I reckon it would be healthier. We weren’t allowed snacks when we were children - except couple of plain biscuits with some squash. Food didn’t have as many additives & people ate more seasonal food. Less air miles.

I was kid/young teen in the 70s.

We ate a lot of meat/potato/veg type meals.

Kedgeree, smoked haddock, fish pie.

Snacks tended to be fruit or something baked by mum.

If it was close to meal time-no snack!

There was no sweet/treat cupboard that's for sure.

Sweets I think tended to be more of a weekend thing.

Lots of playing outside!

I was a kid in the 1970s but from what I remember the adult diet was mostly chips and fags.

It was all home cooked meals in our house. Daily plain, meat and two veg, fish on Friday (usually smoked haddock or kippers), sausage bacon and eggs on a Saturday. Cakes and puddings all home made too.

Def healthier and not so much processed crap and snacks

The puddings weren't healthy: Angel Delight, Arctic Roll, Wall's ice cream, Dream Topping, etc were full of crap - the only thing missing was the now ubiquitous palm oil or fat.

Also sweetened yoghurts were vile then.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Same here. I remember a lot of fried foods, chips and sausages alongside meat and 2 veg/potatos. Not sure it was healthier than now. Also everyone smoking indoors everywhere you went enough to make your eyes water and clothes stink.

Also snacks/crisps etc were much tastier so probably full of crap and additives that are now banned.

I was born in the early 70s. My mum's cooking in those days was very bland indeed - grey mince bouncing around the plate with no sauce or herbs or anything; lumpy mashed potatoes, casserole with nothing more than an Oxo cube to flavour it, and the inevitable soggy vegetables. Small portions for her, my sister and me, and a much bigger one for my dad although he had an office job - he was pretty skinny in those days though so I guess he was burning it off.

We didn't have a freezer in those days so everything was either fresh or from a tin.

Puddings, in the week it would be things like rice pudding but at the weekend my mum would bake, and her baking was amazing - I know everyone says this of their mum, but she made the best apple pie in the world, and beautiful cakes and scones.

Drinks were tea, coffee or fruit squash. On special occasions we'd get fizzy drinks delivered by the milkman.

We didn't really have snacks but if we went for a day trip we'd have crisps alongside the home made fish paste sandwiches and chocolate biscuits such as Club or Penguins.

Takeaways once in a blue moon - fish and chips - not much else available where we lived.

Our diet in the early 80s was much the same, but in the mid 80s my mum went back to working full-time. We'd acquired a freezer by then so we saw more convenience food coming into our meals - Findus crispy pancakes, turkey burgers and the like.

Was it healthier than the the typical modern diet? Probably. Was it very appetising - other than my mum's baking, not at all.

Forgot to mention, we didn't have a car in the 1970s so we certainly got plenty of exercise!

Findus crispy pancakes I remember them. Vesta beef curry in a packet.
Flavoured custard I used to love those, creamola foam.

Zero UPF
Three meals a day and snacking was forbidden
Pop man delivered and fizzy drinks were only drunk as a very special treat at birthday parties and christmas

Pop man delivered and fizzy drinks were only drunk as a very special treat at birthday parties and christmas

We must have been posh. We had it every Sunday dinner. Poured from a big jug with a frozen jubbly dropped in it.

I wonder if they will be eating the “main meal” in the middle of the day rather than the evening?
I’m sure this was much more common in the 70’s and I have a theory that it means eating less calories over the course of the day.

I was born in the 70s, we had no money, dad grew veg & we lived off chips as potatoes were cheap. If it was payday then it was sausage n chips or egg n chips , bread and butter sandwiches!.
And walked or biked everywhere as nobody could afford cars.

Today, today I got on a bike, fell off into a pile of nettles as its really important when riding a bike to know how to stop & i hadnt ridden a 2 wheeler in 30 years so I was rusty. If i ate chips every day id likely end up like my dad, dead in his 60s from a heart attack. However if you look on TV most folk had 28 inch waists.

It’s a repeat - think it was on at the start of the year. But reasonably interesting watch if you haven’t seen it.

I grew up in the 90s and even then I don’t remember the level of snacking that we have now. There were treats - like a piece of homemade cake with lunch, and there was always desert after dinner, but it was often tinned fruit - although sometimes we’d be lucky and it was ice cream with chocolate sauce that dried solid. And Sunday lunch followed by shop-bought lemon meringue pie or chocolate gateau 😋

but we didn’t have any of those (very occasionally Angel Delight) because we were skint and mom was an excellent baker. (Still is in fact at 89!)

I honestly think the biggest change between then and now Is the variety (much better now!) and the constant snacking we have now which we didn’t have then. People seem to have lost the ability to be peckish.

I came here to say findus crispy pancakes. The height of food fashion in the 70’s, finished off with butterscotch angel delight.
I’m not sure the food was much healthier but I do think we didn’t snack as much.
As kids we definitely played outside more - like all day until the sun went down in the summer. Mainly riding our bikes somewhere or building dens in the local woods, so a lot more exercise.

This really depends on whether they are looking at a middle class 1970s diet or a working class diet - very different things I think.

My 1970s diet was full of crap, endless boiled sweets, sugar on sugary cereal, boiled to oblivion veg, no fresh fruit, packet mix puddings and lots and lots of fizzy pop or squash - oh and a soda stream.

My friend on the other hand had a health food mother so her diet was no sugar, all wholemeal, TVP, nut roast diet. The only sniff of fizzy pop she got was at my house (where she secretly imbibed)

Do you remember that BBC series I think it was, Back in Time for Tea? I loved that - I wonder if it is on youtube or something.

No idea what this site is but it seems to be here: https://era.org.uk/streaming-service-resource/episode-1-back-in-time-for-tea/

I was eight in 1970. Regular meals (all home cooked) included fray bentos pie with roasties and veg, stuffed hearts blurg, gammon with pineapple, steak n kidney pudding, various types of meat with veg, home made curry later in the seventies. Never any pasta or rice unless with chicken curry. Dessert was most nights and was things like angel delight, tinned mandarins with carnation, that packet lemon meringue pie, and the best steamed apple pudding. I feel I consumed a lot of potatoes and suet. Snacks weren't much if thing but I remember having pomegranites every now and again with a pin to spear them and orange segments with, weirdly, a dish of sugar to dip them in. On Saturday there may have been a Marathon or Mars bar cut into slices to share between all five of us . I also remember taking an apple, some brown bread and a piece of cheddar to school for lunch regularly. We did have sweets a couple of times a week.

There was an episode of that Sue Perkins and Giles Coren series, The Supersizers, where they go back in time and eat the food of particular era, which focused on the 1970s. It most certainly was not healthy.

I was a child of the 60s and you have pretty much exactly described our diet

I wish I had appreciated the baking more though instead of wishing we could have fondant fancies or other 'shop cakes'