why were people so skinny in the 70s?

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  • wizzybeth
    wizzybeth Posts: 3,578 Member
    edited February 2018
    DX2JX2 wrote: »
    Packerjohn wrote: »

    But I would guess you would find a very small % of this combination ordered without the fries. This includes a 32 oz drink. I know at least in my area you could not get a 32 oz soda at McDonald's and there were no free refills either, anywhere in the 1970's.

    32 ounce drinks didn't become a thing until 7-11 introduced the Big Gulp. Even then, it took years for the Big Gulp to be considered normal and adopted by other FF chains. It was a novelty for a long time after it was launched.

    McDonald's fries were always offered in multiple sizes but the portions were much smaller. I want to say that the current medium is the former large and the former small is now only available in the kids meal!

    Ditto drinks. If I recall, a small drink used to be about 8 ounces, a regular drink was 12 ounces and a large was 16. Now I think it's 16, 24, and 32 or something ridiculous like that.

    With regard to the fries - no the kids meal fries is like a half size fries, they are REALLY tiny. Maybe teh Mighty Kids meal fries are standard small fries. The current small fries is the same as I remember serving in the 80s. I agree though the medium fries used to be large and the large fries are way bigger.

    With drinks, I remember when buying soda it was either a 12oz can or a 16oz (glass) bottle when you bought at a store or from a vending machine. The smaller 8oz glass bottles (or were they 6?) had been phased out in my area at least. No restaurants EVER gave free refills except for water. I do agree drink sizes at restaurants were smaller than they are today.

    But I do remember my mom and dad getting a pizza and a "big" bottle of Coke from the local tavern to bring home for Friday nights- and the (again, glass, lol) bottle of Coke was a FRACTION of the now standard 2ltr bottle you get - it could have been a 32 oz bottle? Meant for all three of us to have with our meal...
  • French_Peasant
    French_Peasant Posts: 1,639 Member
    I regularly drink 32oz of water or diet pop at every meal, I don't think it's that hard. I think food is way more readily available now. Back in the day, my mom said she had to save up money just to buy a snack and rarely snacked outside meals. Now if you go into any school/office/etc there is free food galore. I wasn't working back then, but was office treats so readily available all the time? Every office I go into has a plethora of cookies, chocolate, high calorie laden treats available almost daily for free.

    At the office where I work, my older coworkers regale me with tales from the 70s and 80s, the old-timey days when people were still chain-smoking at their desks, and on their 15-minute breaks would whip out the euchre deck and another cigarette.

    I cannot imagine the amount of smoke that would have been involved. It was apparently pretty nasty.

    Anyway, I just asked one and she said the amount of food around was about the same. But it wouldn't have been like one of those tech companies trying to appeal to millenials and putting out entire buffets as a basic work right, LOL.
  • mph323
    mph323 Posts: 3,565 Member
    I regularly drink 32oz of water or diet pop at every meal, I don't think it's that hard. I think food is way more readily available now. Back in the day, my mom said she had to save up money just to buy a snack and rarely snacked outside meals. Now if you go into any school/office/etc there is free food galore. I wasn't working back then, but was office treats so readily available all the time? Every office I go into has a plethora of cookies, chocolate, high calorie laden treats available almost daily for free.

    At the office where I work, my older coworkers regale me with tales from the 70s and 80s, the old-timey days when people were still chain-smoking at their desks, and on their 15-minute breaks would whip out the euchre deck and another cigarette.

    I cannot imagine the amount of smoke that would have been involved. It was apparently pretty nasty.

    Anyway, I just asked one and she said the amount of food around was about the same. But it wouldn't have been like one of those tech companies trying to appeal to millenials and putting out entire buffets as a basic work right, LOL.

    Seriously - I shared a cubicle for about 6 months with a guy who chain-smoked and drank his lunch, and nobody considered that an issue at the time.
  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
    wizzybeth wrote: »
    With regard to the fries - no the kids meal fries is like a half size fries, they are REALLY tiny. Maybe teh Mighty Kids meal fries are standard small fries. The current small fries is the same as I remember serving in the 80s. I agree though the medium fries used to be large and the large fries are way bigger.

    Yeah, this is consistent with my memory. It was small and large, and then small, large, and supersize, and I think the old large is now "medium." Apparently there are studies that say (for drinks, fries, whatever) that a lot of people always get "medium" no matter the size.
    With drinks, I remember when buying soda it was either a 12oz can or a 16oz (glass) bottle when you bought at a store or from a vending machine.

    I remember the little bottles and the half cans being common, when I was little (so the late 70s).

    Mostly I recall, if I had a birthday party or something where we could have soda, that we'd get the big bottle and have glasses (or paper cups) of an individual size. That's actually what my mom did when she started having diet soda at home sometimes (she'd have a glass after dinner, poured from the big bottle) and what she did long after that. She thought it was far cheaper than buying cans (which it probably was, I haven't priced them out).
  • wizzybeth
    wizzybeth Posts: 3,578 Member
    Oh yeah the big bottle is way cheaper than buying cans!
  • ljmorgi
    ljmorgi Posts: 264 Member
    I regularly drink 32oz of water or diet pop at every meal, I don't think it's that hard. I think food is way more readily available now. Back in the day, my mom said she had to save up money just to buy a snack and rarely snacked outside meals. Now if you go into any school/office/etc there is free food galore. I wasn't working back then, but was office treats so readily available all the time? Every office I go into has a plethora of cookies, chocolate, high calorie laden treats available almost daily for free.

    At the office where I work, my older coworkers regale me with tales from the 70s and 80s, the old-timey days when people were still chain-smoking at their desks, and on their 15-minute breaks would whip out the euchre deck and another cigarette.

    I cannot imagine the amount of smoke that would have been involved. It was apparently pretty nasty.

    Anyway, I just asked one and she said the amount of food around was about the same. But it wouldn't have been like one of those tech companies trying to appeal to millenials and putting out entire buffets as a basic work right, LOL.

    I worked with people from a local hospital that moved after umpty-ump years in its old location; when they started taking furniture out of the board rooms they discovered that the walls were originally white, not beige.
  • seltzermint555
    seltzermint555 Posts: 10,740 Member
    edited February 2018
    Sorry to jump ahead, but I'm amused by all the "home cooking" that went on in the 70's.

    We had frikken TV dinners 2-3 nights a week. Those damn tinfoil covered things where you had to pull it put halfway and peel the tinfoil off the desert or some fool thing.

    3 tv channels and no xBox made a bigger difference to me than the level of MSG in my food vs kids today.

    I've gotta agree. I grew up in the 80s, not 70s, but we ate out at Pizza Hut, McDonald's, etc. I was overweight yes, but most of my friends whose families were middle class to wealthy, they went out all the time too! Steakhouses and fast food were pretty much all they ate! A lot of moms didn't cook and if they did, it was "cooking" TV dinners and Little Debbie snack cakes. But most of my peers were skinny til college. Everyone played sports, outdoors, swimming all summer from dawn til dusk, maybe some of them played a couple hours of Nintendo games but that's it.
  • spinnerdell
    spinnerdell Posts: 233 Member
    I lived in a small lumber-mill town in Oregon in the late 70's and remember the restaurant portions being huge. Not that I minded- I could plow through gigantic meals and stay thin, thanks to my job at the mill.
  • jrochest
    jrochest Posts: 119 Member
    cwolfman13 wrote: »
    they rode bikes,skateboards, danced and walked to the park to play. they ate basic meals without them adding 100 ingredients AND we were broke/poor so couldn't spend much money on groceries. Now days...it seems as though we have to have a recipe a mile long and with bread on the side. dessert every night. the list is endless.

    The only things my mom really made from scratch was chili, spaghetti sauce, and tuna and noodles...though those had I don't know how many cans of cream of mushroom soup and she made a potato chip crust. My dad would grill burgers on weekends.

    Only one can of soup in tuna casserole! A can of tuna, a packet of egg noodles, a can of mushroom soup and some frozen peas :)

  • Packerjohn wrote: »
    Packerjohn wrote: »
    I said our increase in sugar consumption. My point was not that a single chemical caused the nations obesity problem, That was the single thing you two looked for to try to make the debate about. I was saying the American lifestyle changed. That is all I was saying in my original post. We became more sedimentary with our jobs, they found cheaper ways to make different forms of sugar that sometimes you have to be a chemist to find on a label. I am saying we need to go back to how society lived in the 60 and 70's in regards to eating. Compare a big Mac today with a big mac from when we were kids? The calorie contents are massively higher than when we were children. That is what I was trying to say in the beginning. All the list of chemicals that someone mentioned was a quote I put in my post answering someone else about all the chemicals.

    You wrote: "The increase in chemicals and the massive amounts of sugar being consumed by the American public was on a steep climb up." If you want to remove the first part of the sentence and focus on the sugar, that's fine. But people can only respond to what you wrote, not what you *meant* (at least until you clarify).

    Do you have a source for the Big Mac today being bigger than it was when we were children? I ask because McDonald's themselves says it is the same size (with the exception of the new, specially labeled limited offer of the "Grand Mac") and if they're not being truthful, I'd like to know the source for that claim.

    No, I do not have a source for the calories of a big mac when we were kids. You know why, cause they did not keep track of that information or it is a proprietary secret, which they will not share. Do you think that a big mac and a coke was 1150 calories 30 years ago? If it was that means we are consuming way more then we did 30 years ago, but I find it hard to believe that cokes product has changed, I do not know the exact number of times, would it not reason that McDonald's has changed their recipes and hamburgers and ingredients as well and lied to the American public about it? I'm just saying.

    A Big Mac and coke aren't even 1150 calories today.

    But I would guess you would find a very small % of this combination ordered without the fries. This includes a 32 oz drink. I know at least in my area you could not get a 32 oz soda at McDonald's and there were no free refills either, anywhere in the 1970's.

    2uw0anmki0x8.png

    That's almost a liter bottle. I can't even finish that much soda in a whole day, nevermind a single meal. A 1.5l bottle lasts 2-3 days for me.

    You can see why there is a problem then. Many people are getting this with every meal away from home.

    I was out at lunch yesterday with co-workers. There were 9 of us, 4 normal weight and 5 significantly overweight/obese.. To a person the normal weight people ordered water, plain iced tea or diet soda. All the rest ordered regular soda. The glasses were at least 24 oz and the waitress brought refills. Woman that sits across from me at work drank the regular soda and when we got back to work went to the machine and got a 20oz regular Coke. These are all well paid individuals with college degrees, not someone who is needing calories from any source to survive.

    This is why any professional who works with weight loss patients/clients will try to get them off regular soda first thing. Big bang for the buck in elimination/reduction of empty calories.

    I'm fat and I don't drink any coke. Only a diet coke occasionally, like a few times a year. I pretty much only drink water. I'm a big eater I guess.
  • ccsernica
    ccsernica Posts: 1,040 Member
    I lived in a small lumber-mill town in Oregon in the late 70's and remember the restaurant portions being huge. Not that I minded- I could plow through gigantic meals and stay thin, thanks to my job at the mill.

    Well, there you go. I mentioned my 4-H leader and her farm in an earlier reply. As it happens, she and her sons were all HUGE. They were literally the fattest people I knew. I remember going into the bathroom off her kitchen and wondering how her sons even used the thing -- the toilet seat looked so small next to their butts.

    I have come to strongly suspect that the problem was she had learned to cook, and how to feed farm workers, from her own mother, who would have been feeding pre-mechanization (or, at least, early mechanization) farm workers who burned a hell of a lot more calories per day than you do on a modern dairy farm. Not that farming of any kind isn't hard work -- it is -- but simply milking a herd of cows by hand is much more laborious than the automated milking machines they used. Not to mention all the other farming tasks eased by mechanization.

    On HFCS, I'm convinced that it's a heavy contributor to the obesity epidemic, not because it's a particularly poisonous sugar, but because it's in EVERYTHING, even foods you don't expect to be sweetened. Perhaps a legacy of the "low fat" trend of the 1980s, when food manufacturers turned to sweeteners to make lower-fat foods more palatable.

    And yes, the absolutely massive sizes of soft drinks, while not responsible for it all by themselves, certainly don't help. Although they were rare, I remember a 6.5 oz deposit bottle of Coke being a perfectly satisfying amount to drink. A single 30+ oz cup is absolutely ridiculous.
  • lemurcat12
    lemurcat12 Posts: 30,886 Member
    If HFCS played a role at all, it's because it's easy to use (for food manufacturers, apparently, it has advantages to sugar because it's liquid) and super cheap and thus has helped with the proliferation of ever more, cheaper, and better tasting junk food available. I don't think because it adds any significant calories to foods that people wouldn't expect to be sweetened. (Its biggest role calorie-wise is probably soda, and that wouldn't be any different if soda were made with sugar instead.)
  • jrochest
    jrochest Posts: 119 Member
    I lived in a small lumber-mill town in Oregon in the late 70's and remember the restaurant portions being huge. Not that I minded- I could plow through gigantic meals and stay thin, thanks to my job at the mill.

    Yep, in small American mill towns, the portions were HUGE, I'm sure. But now they're huge everywhere, and not everyone is humping logs on a chain :)
  • Packerjohn
    Packerjohn Posts: 4,855 Member
    Packerjohn wrote: »
    Packerjohn wrote: »
    I said our increase in sugar consumption. My point was not that a single chemical caused the nations obesity problem, That was the single thing you two looked for to try to make the debate about. I was saying the American lifestyle changed. That is all I was saying in my original post. We became more sedimentary with our jobs, they found cheaper ways to make different forms of sugar that sometimes you have to be a chemist to find on a label. I am saying we need to go back to how society lived in the 60 and 70's in regards to eating. Compare a big Mac today with a big mac from when we were kids? The calorie contents are massively higher than when we were children. That is what I was trying to say in the beginning. All the list of chemicals that someone mentioned was a quote I put in my post answering someone else about all the chemicals.

    You wrote: "The increase in chemicals and the massive amounts of sugar being consumed by the American public was on a steep climb up." If you want to remove the first part of the sentence and focus on the sugar, that's fine. But people can only respond to what you wrote, not what you *meant* (at least until you clarify).

    Do you have a source for the Big Mac today being bigger than it was when we were children? I ask because McDonald's themselves says it is the same size (with the exception of the new, specially labeled limited offer of the "Grand Mac") and if they're not being truthful, I'd like to know the source for that claim.

    No, I do not have a source for the calories of a big mac when we were kids. You know why, cause they did not keep track of that information or it is a proprietary secret, which they will not share. Do you think that a big mac and a coke was 1150 calories 30 years ago? If it was that means we are consuming way more then we did 30 years ago, but I find it hard to believe that cokes product has changed, I do not know the exact number of times, would it not reason that McDonald's has changed their recipes and hamburgers and ingredients as well and lied to the American public about it? I'm just saying.

    A Big Mac and coke aren't even 1150 calories today.

    But I would guess you would find a very small % of this combination ordered without the fries. This includes a 32 oz drink. I know at least in my area you could not get a 32 oz soda at McDonald's and there were no free refills either, anywhere in the 1970's.

    2uw0anmki0x8.png

    That's almost a liter bottle. I can't even finish that much soda in a whole day, nevermind a single meal. A 1.5l bottle lasts 2-3 days for me.

    You can see why there is a problem then. Many people are getting this with every meal away from home.

    I was out at lunch yesterday with co-workers. There were 9 of us, 4 normal weight and 5 significantly overweight/obese.. To a person the normal weight people ordered water, plain iced tea or diet soda. All the rest ordered regular soda. The glasses were at least 24 oz and the waitress brought refills. Woman that sits across from me at work drank the regular soda and when we got back to work went to the machine and got a 20oz regular Coke. These are all well paid individuals with college degrees, not someone who is needing calories from any source to survive.

    This is why any professional who works with weight loss patients/clients will try to get them off regular soda first thing. Big bang for the buck in elimination/reduction of empty calories.

    I'm fat and I don't drink any coke. Only a diet coke occasionally, like a few times a year. I pretty much only drink water. I'm a big eater I guess.

    That is why my original post said many people are getting large Cokes with meals frequently.
  • TonyB0588
    TonyB0588 Posts: 9,520 Member
    That's almost a liter bottle. I can't even finish that much soda in a whole day, nevermind a single meal. A 1.5l bottle lasts 2-3 days for me.

    Yeah, was never a problem for me. A liter of pop with lunch was normal up to a couple years ago. Now it's that much water.

    Normal portion size is an 8oz glass at table (maybe a 12oz if you like), so why do people drink more than that when buying meals out??
  • TonyB0588
    TonyB0588 Posts: 9,520 Member
    they rode bikes,skateboards, danced and walked to the park to play. they ate basic meals without them adding 100 ingredients AND we were broke/poor so couldn't spend much money on groceries. Now days...it seems as though we have to have a recipe a mile long and with bread on the side. dessert every night. the list is endless.

    Yup!! I often talk about this change too, whenever I can get someone to listen. :)

    Why does food always have to be a "recipe" now??
  • vegmebuff
    vegmebuff Posts: 31,389 Member
    ...Drugs.

    yup...
  • canadjineh
    canadjineh Posts: 5,396 Member
    In school from 1970-82. I took my lunch to school which was usually supper leftovers (European background so real food from scratch), walked to school & back every day (until Senior High which was quite a few km away- took the bus then). Played outside (racing, tag, pretend 'rodeo' with our standard poodle, cycled everywhere (sometimes away for several hours on weekends/holidays), built snow forts, lots of x-country & downhill skiing. Only pop was 3 or 4 times/month when we went for treat lunch (usually clam chowder at a local lunch counter.) Never been a fan of cake/cookies - preferred savoury stuff for snacks like cheese, pickles, pepperoni.
  • Carlos_421
    Carlos_421 Posts: 5,132 Member
    TonyB0588 wrote: »
    That's almost a liter bottle. I can't even finish that much soda in a whole day, nevermind a single meal. A 1.5l bottle lasts 2-3 days for me.

    Yeah, was never a problem for me. A liter of pop with lunch was normal up to a couple years ago. Now it's that much water.

    Normal portion size is an 8oz glass at table (maybe a 12oz if you like), so why do people drink more than that when buying meals out??

    Your normal portion is not my normal portion.
    I can easily drink 40 oz of whatever beverage I’m having with supper, be that water, Coke Zero, regular coke, root beer or milk (though that much milk does weigh heavy on the stomach).
    I’m that guy who the waiter can never keep up with when it comes to refills. I drink no less when I eat at home. It’s very rare that I get through a meal without a refill or two.
  • romeandrylan
    romeandrylan Posts: 101 Member
    technology has made the human race lazy
  • zumbalinda22
    zumbalinda22 Posts: 182 Member
    When I was a child, fast food was a "treat," not a daily occurrence. We lived on Long Island, NY, and every summer we'd drive up to Oswego, NY to visit/stay with friends. What kept my younger sister and I from going insane on this 8+ hour car ride? The promise of a hamburger, fries, and chocolate shake at Carrol's, a hamburger joint that doesn't exist anymore. We got to stop there on the way up and the way back home. That was it FOR THE YEAR!! Believe me, no fast food meal has ever tasted as good as that since it was so greatly anticipated! No instant gratification in those days. We went out for a "fancy" dinner on our birthdays (was thrilled to get my "Shirley Temple"with the maraschino cherry!) What I wouldn't give to revisit those days.......
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