why were people so skinny in the 70s?

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  • ahamm002
    ahamm002 Posts: 1,690 Member
    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.
  • spud_chick
    spud_chick Posts: 2,640 Member
    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!
  • LannyM74
    LannyM74 Posts: 25 Member
    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!
  • Thommothebear
    Thommothebear Posts: 25 Member
    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.
  • jennyct10
    jennyct10 Posts: 15 Member
    I am about your age and I totally agree with you.
  • MaidensAndMonsters
    MaidensAndMonsters Posts: 89
    Disco Fever.....and people were so high they forgot to eat LOL.
  • 115s
    115s Posts: 344 Member
    They were grooovin... Too high to care.
  • PrincessTinyheart
    PrincessTinyheart Posts: 679 Member
    edited February 2018
    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!
  • cbstewart88
    cbstewart88 Posts: 453 Member
    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.....
  • CoachJen71
    CoachJen71 Posts: 1,200 Member
    edited February 2018
    Portion sizes were still reality-based, and we were more active.
  • nvmomketo
    nvmomketo Posts: 12,019 Member
    edited February 2018
    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.
  • lynn_glenmont
    lynn_glenmont Posts: 10,093 Member
    AnvilHead wrote: »
    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.
  • slossia
    slossia Posts: 138 Member
    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!!
  • slossia
    slossia Posts: 138 Member
    Lol
  • jgnatca
    jgnatca Posts: 14,464 Member
    The baby boomers were in their twenties. Now they are geriatrics.
  • asuka_langley
    asuka_langley Posts: 2 Member
    I think that was just the look at the time. Rock stars made it the "cool" or sought after look. Mick Jagger was small AF. The "heroin chic" look was considered sexy.
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