why were people so skinny in the 70s?
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Fascinating website & video
HBO's Weight of the Nation
http://theweightofthenation.hbo.com/themes/the-food-system
^^great website. It really is most likely the food difference, although activity is still a factor too. The remote control for TV, internet, etc., is not helping obesity rates.0 -
Fascinating website & video
HBO's Weight of the Nation
http://theweightofthenation.hbo.com/themes/the-food-system
^^great website. It really is most likely the food difference, although activity is still a factor too. The remote control for TV, internet, etc., is not helping obesity rates.
Yes, that's a helpful page. It's good that they mention the social shifts. I remember there being plenty of convenience foods coming out, largely because women were entering the workplace for various reasons (bad economy, divorce). Lots of cheap canned food, box meals and Velveeta in my house growing up. I find it funny and a little weird that people have this bucolic vision of people cooking from scratch and only tuning into TV for an hour a day back in the 70s. It was an era of latchkey kids and letting the TV raise your children because parents were either too busy or self-involved (the "Me" decade) or both. I knew quite a few kids whose parents had an extra TV in the bedroom. And I know I was responsible for my own meals from a very young age.
Morbid obesity wasn't as common, true, but I don't really remember the 70s as a time of skinny people. I was a chubby kid, more because I preferred reading to all other things, with TV a close second. My mother ate the same horrible food I did and lots of it, didn't exercise, and was always tiny, but she had a super-fast metabolism and was hyperthyroid for a long time. There was a poor understanding then of nutrition and how to deal with excess weight. Google "weight watchers cards"... that was a real blast from the past for me!2 -
Not sure if this has been mentioned yet, (post has gotten too large to review every comment), but there's a school of thought that the hormones in todays meats are a huge culprit in the obesity epidemic. I'm not saying I'm 100% on board with blaming this as the only reason, but when you look at how many young kids are overweight I can't help but think that there's more to it than activity level. My kids go to schools with big emphasis on physical activity (recess, after lunch outdoor play, gym class 4 times a week), and still so many of their classmates are bigger kids. And so many of the girls in my daughter's grade four class have boobs! Nobody in my grade four class (1985) had boobs except the teacher!0
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People were happy with a 2oz burger, nobody ever "went large", our legs actually worked so we walked a lot more, less processed foods and we were generally a lot more active back then. I used to walk or cycle to work (4 miles each way) every day. Didnt need to go to a gym to get exercise.1
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I am about your age and I totally agree with you.0
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Disco Fever.....and people were so high they forgot to eat LOL.0
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They were grooovin... Too high to care.0
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SkinnyBubbaGaar wrote: »Born in '62 and I'm squarely in the camp that it all boils down to portion size and activity level. Plenty of sugar treats as a kid but if you got a coke it was 8 oz and not a damn thirsty two ouncer. Also when we got the jones for a Snickers bar it meant hopping on the Schwinn Stingray and peddling the 8 miles round trip to 7/11 to get one.
Too many good times on that bike in grade school riding all over the town with my transistor radio strapped to the handlebars while Machine Gun Kelly and The Real Don Steele cranked out the Top 40 hits at full volume on 93 KHJ Radio on the AM dial.
Wouldn't trade those memories for a million bucks.
I waa born in '72 but I can relate to all of this. We didn't keep sweets and junk food in the house so if we wanted something like that we had to ride our bikes, rollerskate or walk a couple miles to the corner store and back... And what you got was a lot smaller. There were no king size candy bars and 32 oz sodas and Big Grab bags of chips. Fast food and convenience food was not as plentiful and was more expensive in proportion to the household budget so we ate home cooked meals more often.
No internet, boring TV, no video games unless you walked or biked across town to an arcade. Fitness and health waa also a big fad in the 70s and 80s, maybe just as big as now, and being active was the cool thing to do. We wore legwarmers as accessories!4 -
Because, as kids, we grew up in the 50s and 60s. Played outside all the time. Didn't get a school bus unless we lived more that 2.0 miles from school. So we walked or rode our bikes. Now days, kids who live right next to the school get a bus ride!! Ate three meals/day - never any snacking. Unless it was Friday night, then we got popcorn LOL. Popcorn cooked on the stove with a little oil, not the microwave crap with all the chemicals. Fast food places were just beginning then....weren't three on every corner like now. So most of our meals were home-cooked and much smaller portions. And if our driveways needed to be shoveled or our lawns cut or our gardens planted, we did it ourselves - it was unheard of to hire people to do those things back then... and we walked EVERYWHERE! Could go on and on.....2
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Portion sizes were still reality-based, and we were more active.1
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If you look at statistics, they weren't. Actual obesity wasn't as big of an issue in the 70s, but 48% of the US population was considered overweight or obese with 32% classed as overweight, 15% obese, and 1% morbidly obese.
Obesity really shot up in the 90s and 2000s.5 -
Thinking they ate much less processed food at the time too.
Have you seen a mid century cookbook? I didn't know you could get fresh vegetables as a child and everything had a can of soup added to it. What they we're lacking was probably processed diet food, with sugar instead of fat. I believe that was an 80s thing.
People were skinny in the 70s because they were on the grapefruit diet and took up jogging and other forms of exercise for the sake of exercise. If the folks I know are any indication, anorexia was also rampant.
Oh, and drugs.6 -
There were hardly any fast food restaurants, and going to one was a real treat. Most people ate home cooked meals. Kids were outside running around all of their waking hours.5
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cwolfman13 wrote: »If you look at statistics, they weren't. Actual obesity wasn't as big of an issue in the 70s, but 48% of the US population was considered overweight or obese with 32% classed as overweight, 15% obese, and 1% morbidly obese.
Obesity really shot up in the 90s and 2000s.
4-year old necro thread, but anyway:
It seems to me that most people who think we (as a society) were 'so skinny' in the '70s must not have actually been alive in the '70s. I was a teenager in that era and I remember plenty of fat/obese people. They weren't the rarity that some people seem to think they were.walktalkdog wrote: »There were hardly any fast food restaurants, and going to one was a real treat. Most people ate home cooked meals. Kids were outside running around all of their waking hours.
That may have been the case in some places, but I grew up in a large city and we had plenty of fast food restaurants everywhere in the '70s. McDonalds, Jack in the Box, Carl's Jr., Taco Bell, KFC, etc., etc. were just as common as they are today. The neighborhood moms took turns picking us up from school in the evening after football practice, and a stop at Mickey D's or Jack's with 3-4 hungry football players in the car was almost mandatory.
There were plenty of restaurants that offered huge servings/portions, too. I clearly remember a steakhouse that offered a dinner consisting of a 2-pound hunk of prime rib, a huge baked potato with everything on it and a basket of bread - they gave you a certificate if you could eat the whole thing. Same with Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor - they had huge ice cream concoctions (the "Pig Trough" and "The Zoo"), and gave you awards for finishing one by yourself. And then there was the breakfast place that did a fully loaded 12-egg omelette....I could go on and on. The "good old days" aren't really like a lot of people seem to remember them.12 -
cwolfman13 wrote: »If you look at statistics, they weren't. Actual obesity wasn't as big of an issue in the 70s, but 48% of the US population was considered overweight or obese with 32% classed as overweight, 15% obese, and 1% morbidly obese.
Obesity really shot up in the 90s and 2000s.
4-year old necro thread, but anyway:
It seems to me that most people who think we (as a society) were 'so skinny' in the '70s must not have actually been alive in the '70s. I was a teenager in that era and I remember plenty of fat/obese people. They weren't the rarity that some people seem to think they were.
I was a fat kid in the 70's and what was fat then isn't even worth batting an eye by today's standards, though.
It still tickles me to remember that humiliating weigh in (it was so humiliating that it's burned into my brain) in 1975 and know that I weigh less now than I did then, though!
Saying that, I do remember fat people, I just don't remember as many. Saying that, I do live in one of the thinner states in the country, so that could be playing into my perceptions here. There aren't that many obese people around where I live even now, though I do see more when we vacation (we've been vacationing in the same town I've vacationed in my whole life).
Interesting necro thread. I do know we walked around and biked around a lot more than kids today do.
As for the assertion for there not being any fast food restaurants? Maybe that depends where you were living. We had plenty of them.6 -
TL;DR but always an interesting topic.
Smoking was big back then. From what I understand, it can help suppress appetite.
In my house, activity levels were about the same as what my kids have now. I had less purchasing power than kids have now. If I wanted a treat, paying for it was a bigger deal than it is for many kids now. Plus treats seem to be more readily available today.
I think there may be something to being born to fat parents may lead to a higher chance of a child being fat. Epigenetics? Who knows.0 -
cwolfman13 wrote: »If you look at statistics, they weren't. Actual obesity wasn't as big of an issue in the 70s, but 48% of the US population was considered overweight or obese with 32% classed as overweight, 15% obese, and 1% morbidly obese.
Obesity really shot up in the 90s and 2000s.
4-year old necro thread, but anyway:
It seems to me that most people who think we (as a society) were 'so skinny' in the '70s must not have actually been alive in the '70s. I was a teenager in that era and I remember plenty of fat/obese people. They weren't the rarity that some people seem to think they were.
^^ Second this. Nor, at least in the suburban or urban U.S., was it difficult to find fast food, convenience food, or processed food, as many on this thread (who probably weren't alive at the time) seem to think. My own large family, with parents who lived through the Depression, did not go out for meals very often, and my mother cooked from scratch a lot, but that was about living within our means, not about weight control.
I think kids spent a lot more time running around outside than they do now (I hardly ever see kids in my neighborhood outside). I don't think adults living in suburbia got more exercise or steps in than people do today, on average, although I guess my mother had to run up and down the stairs to the laundry room a lot, having to do the washing for a family of eight
I do think portions in fast food places were smaller -- or even if a larger portion was available, it wasn't marketed or perceived or priced in a way that made it seem normal to get the larger or largest size. On our rare trips to McDonald's, most of us got one hamburger or cheeseburger (single patty), an order of fries that was the size of the small fries today, and a soda that I'm pretty sure was only 12 oz. Teenage boys might get a double cheeseburger, with the same small portion of fries -- but they were probably burning hundreds of extra calories a day at football or track practice, on top of the demands of growing bodies.0 -
I was born in the 50s and was in my 20s in the 70s I don’t even recall the word “calories “ I had a 28 inch waist and we would call anyone with even a 40 inch waist fat!! Out every night looking for girls and girls looking for guys! Dancing till 2 am ! Getting up at 7am working all day and repeat!! I think their were NBC A BC CBS and PBS! No internet, no computers just sex drugs and rock and roll!!2
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I was born in the 50s and was in my 20s in the 70s I don’t even recall the word “calories “ I had a 28 inch waist and we would call anyone with even a 40 inch waist fat!! Out every night looking for girls and girls looking for guys! Dancing till 2 am ! Getting up at 7am working all day and repeat!! I think their were NBC A BC CBS and PBS! No internet, no computers just sex drugs and rock and roll!!
Believe me, all those girls who were out dancing with you had heard the word calories -- and they had heard of the grapefruit diet, the cabbage soup diet, the cottage cheese "diet plate," and by the end of the decade they had heard of aerobics.8 -
Lol0
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