why were people so skinny in the 70s?
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Similar recollections of my (thin) great grandmother and great aunt in rural Ontario and feasts and baked goods (in the 80's). I figured that most of it was due to the special occasion of relatives visiting and not a daily thing though.
It does seem that people, in general, have started turning their noses up at some of the simpler fare we used to eat regularly. Including basic salads, simple sandwiches,... And while I too would want that super complicated 1000-calorie tasty salad if paying for it, from what I understand from my own family at least, that wouldn't have happened back then to begin with - eating out was an extremely rare occasion for them (and salads probably weren't a feature course back then in the US at least). But no doubt this varied a lot by region, socioeconomic circles, and exactly when w/in the late 60's to early 80's you think of.
For me personally, the vast majority of the excess calories that made me fat came from [1] frequent (as in multiple times per week) restaurant meals (if not counting, one might easily have an appetizer, 1/2 an entree, 1/2-1 dessert, 1-2 glasses of wine and be in excess by many hundreds of calories), and [2] boredom snacking on readily available high-calorie-density no-prep-required food items... both of which weren't typical of previous decades.
Yeah, I think people's personal experiences of how they gained weight will play a key role in how they view this.
Since I gained most of my weight from poor portion control with pretty simple homecooked meals, I personally see how easy it can be to do. This isn't to say that restaurant meals and boredom snacking on calorie-dense snacks isn't also an issue.5 -
Tacklewasher wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »A key factor: she was cooking for a farmer who was on his feet all day and she herself was on her feet most of the day.
This is where I'm kinda struggling with the whole premise of this thread. I knew some farmers and their wives and, while the farmers were thin, some of the wives were well in excess of 250 lbs. But man could they cook. Good healthy fat free Ukrainian food. Loved it all except the borscht.
And, of course, everything Ukrainian has sour cream on it!
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Wheelhouse15 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »misskitty2018 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.
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??
What an odd odd string of conversation this is. I have three of my grandmothers cookbooks. She had all sorts of recipes handwritten as well as the actual cookbooks... She wrote them on the pages at the front and back of the book plus stuck them on tablet paper in between the other pages. Recipes for things like soups, goulash, bread, pies, cakes, meatloaf, meatballs... Not sure where this idea that recipes are some kind of new fangled thing came from. These cookbooks were from the 20s and 30s.
I get what you mean, but I had a lot of "plain" food at home, compared to what I see when we go out socially now. Why do good old healthy vegetables need to have oil, cheese, fruit, nuts, bacon, etc. added to them to make a modern SALAD!!?
Um, you get that people always cooked differently for social gatherings than just at home?
We eat plenty of plain stuff at home now (it's how I normally cook), but I'll fancy it up for dinner parties and so on, or even when bringing a dish to a potluck. As my mother and grandmother also did.
Cooking in the 70's often consisted of some pretty high calorie foods. There were no lower calorie options and the family recipes often use a lot of cream, butter, and sugar in cooking and baking. People just ate fewer snacks and were more active than now. There was never anything on TV lol.
Just for an example, my sister-in-law gave me a copy of "The Joy of Cooking" at my wedding shower in '71. All the recipes are made with all the traditional cream, butter, fat, sugar etc. The updated version I gave my daughters at their showers were considerably different, incorporating healthier, lower-calorie versions of those same recipes.3 -
Wheelhouse15 wrote: »lemurcat12 wrote: »misskitty2018 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.
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??
What an odd odd string of conversation this is. I have three of my grandmothers cookbooks. She had all sorts of recipes handwritten as well as the actual cookbooks... She wrote them on the pages at the front and back of the book plus stuck them on tablet paper in between the other pages. Recipes for things like soups, goulash, bread, pies, cakes, meatloaf, meatballs... Not sure where this idea that recipes are some kind of new fangled thing came from. These cookbooks were from the 20s and 30s.
I get what you mean, but I had a lot of "plain" food at home, compared to what I see when we go out socially now. Why do good old healthy vegetables need to have oil, cheese, fruit, nuts, bacon, etc. added to them to make a modern SALAD!!?
Um, you get that people always cooked differently for social gatherings than just at home?
We eat plenty of plain stuff at home now (it's how I normally cook), but I'll fancy it up for dinner parties and so on, or even when bringing a dish to a potluck. As my mother and grandmother also did.
Cooking in the 70's often consisted of some pretty high calorie foods. There were no lower calorie options and the family recipes often use a lot of cream, butter, and sugar in cooking and baking. People just ate fewer snacks and were more active than now. There was never anything on TV lol.
Just for an example, my sister-in-law gave me a copy of "The Joy of Cooking" at my wedding shower in '71. All the recipes are made with all the traditional cream, butter, fat, sugar etc. The updated version I gave my daughters at their showers were considerably different, incorporating healthier, lower-calorie versions of those same recipes.
I can imagine the difference. I remember a typical meal at my house in the 70's consisted of things like roast beef with plenty of visible fat, mash potatoes with generous a buttering, buttered rolls, salad with oil and vinegar or salad dressing (Miracle Whip usually), and a cooked vegetable like turnips, broccoli, cauliflower, spinach or cooked carrots always with butter. Often we had a baked dessert or pudding as well. Those are some pretty high calorie meals but we didn't get a lot of treats during the day.3 -
As an 80s kid I can say that my lifestyle was WAY different as a kid.
Couple of things.
1. We weren't allowed in the house before dark. We were expected to be outside playing, which meant we were pretty darn active all the time because what else is there to do outside but run around and play?
2. Fast food was a HUGE rarity. Maybe once every few months at MOST.
3. Junk food was a rarity.
4. I went hungry. These days I only rarely feel hunger.
When I was a kid in the 80's my lifestyle was so opposite! We had fast food at least 2-3 times per week, usually McDonald's, and weekends meant Friday night Pizza Hut followed by Sonic burgers on Saturday, a big home cooked dinner on Saturday night, lunch in a steakhouse after church on Sunday, etc. Most "at home" meals were TV dinners, sandwiches with bologna and cheese or PB&J...there was absolutely ALWAYS dessert too. Cake mixes were an every time we went to the store purchase and we were a family of three who went through a cake in 2 days. I look back and understand why me and my dad were always overweight then. My mom ate salad for every meal and laxatives like candy...
Definitely agree though on the playing outside stuff. At family gatherings my cousins and I were expected to play outside for 5-6 hours at least before coming in for a drink or "bugging the adults". Now, kids are underfoot indoors usually with an iPad or handheld system playing games and if they're over 12, they are on their smartphone 24/7. Even the kids who are into sports do not play them recreationally at home it would seem.
One more thought - I actually didn't have an Atari, Nintendo, we rarely had cable TV...but I think some people even back in the 70s and 80s were just more inclined to pursue sedentary indoor hobbies and some of us (like me) ended up overweight. I strongly preferred drawing with Crayola markers or reading 63 library books to any of the Chinese jump rope and 4 square games my friends loved.
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Our food was real food and not Frankenfood. If the Highly F-ed up corn syrup isn't making us fat by the calorie count it does make most of us hungry and makes us crave more of that crap. We also have a lot of medications people take that cause weight gain or at least prevent weight loss. I would really like to punch those people that did these things to our food supply.12
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Carlos_421 wrote: »misskitty2018 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.
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??
What an odd odd string of conversation this is. I have three of my grandmothers cookbooks. She had all sorts of recipes handwritten as well as the actual cookbooks... She wrote them on the pages at the front and back of the book plus stuck them on tablet paper in between the other pages. Recipes for things like soups, goulash, bread, pies, cakes, meatloaf, meatballs... Not sure where this idea that recipes are some kind of new fangled thing came from. These cookbooks were from the 20s and 30s.
I get what you mean, but I had a lot of "plain" food at home, compared to what I see when we go out socially now. Why do good old healthy vegetables need to have oil, cheese, fruit, nuts, bacon, etc. added to them to make a modern SALAD!!?
Because it tastes better?? People don't tend to go out to eat with expectations of plain, boring food. If we're going to pay good money for a meal, we want it to be delicious.
Point is now now more than in the 1970's people are eating food not prepared at home for the convenience as opposed to the experience of delicious food.
I'm not much of a cook, but the stuff I make tastes better than McDonald's2 -
And while I too would want that super complicated 1000-calorie tasty salad if paying for it, from what I understand from my own family at least, that wouldn't have happened back then to begin with - eating out was an extremely rare occasion for them (and salads probably weren't a feature course back then in the US at least). But no doubt this varied a lot by region, socioeconomic circles, and exactly when w/in the late 60's to early 80's you think of.
Just moving to "memories of the '70s" (or in this case '80s), when I was little (so '70s) we (meaning the kids in my specific family and social group) rarely went out to eat and it was fast food as a treat or occasionally a buffet with my grandparents or something like Sambo's (as I mentioned above) or we were on vacation/a road trip. My parents went out more often, and we'd get a babysitter and TV dinners (which seemed like a special treat).
Later on we'd get pizza occasionally or go out occasionally (choices were more limited than what I have now, but this was a middle-sized city and I live in a large city with a significant restaurant culture now, so I wouldn't use that to compare the '80s to now). One of our favorite places to go out (we'd bring my grandmother) was this seafood place where one of the features was the unlimited salad bar you could get as a starter, so I do remember salads -- and high cal, potentially, salads -- being a thing by the '80s, at least.
When waiting for our table we'd get to play the video games in the waiting area, especially Ms Pac Man and Donkey Kong.2 -
They weren't....it's just that those 70's mustaches made them appear to be thinner.7
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I love this thread. So many different experiences and remembrances of the era. I think it's safe to say that day to day life varied as much then as it does now.
I still maintain that activity level is the biggest, but certainly not only, reason for the increase in obesity.9 -
The adjusted per capita net income has increased significantly between 1970 and 2015, meaning there is considerably more discretionary money available in general.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.ADJ.NNTY.PC.CD
I went through a number of articles (didn't have time to locate specific figures and graphs) that noted that much of that rise was due to more women in the workforce and more two-income households. At the same time there has been a big drop in the cost of food relative to the average household income, resulting in a culture of less time for food prep in the home and affordable alternatives in the convenience, fast and restaurant food areas.
I believe there are multiple causes for the rise in obesity rates between the '70s and now. I also think it's very, very hard to isolate the things that are actual contributors to the epidemic from the things that are incidental or just randomly correlated.2 -
janejellyroll wrote: »cwolfman13 wrote: »misskitty2018 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.
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??
What an odd odd string of conversation this is. I have three of my grandmothers cookbooks. She had all sorts of recipes handwritten as well as the actual cookbooks... She wrote them on the pages at the front and back of the book plus stuck them on tablet paper in between the other pages. Recipes for things like soups, goulash, bread, pies, cakes, meatloaf, meatballs... Not sure where this idea that recipes are some kind of new fangled thing came from. These cookbooks were from the 20s and 30s.
I get what you mean, but I had a lot of "plain" food at home, compared to what I see when we go out socially now. Why do good old healthy vegetables need to have oil, cheese, fruit, nuts, bacon, etc. added to them to make a modern SALAD!!?
Really? People have been roasting and sauteing vegetables for ages. I have my Grandma's recipe box and there's tons of recipes for roasted vegetables and sauteed vegetables...even her Brussel sprouts cooked in bacon fat with the bacon bits added back...that card says 1952 on it. There's a cabbage and apples recipe from 1948. Here's one for roasted potatoes...she actually uses way more oil than I do...
Pretty sure salad dressings have always had oil too...it's like the base of most dressings and it's nothing newfangled.
Oil for dressing salads is so old that the Babylonians apparently did it: https://www.dressings-sauces.org/history-salad-dressings
We've been using it since before letters were invented.
Olive oil was in fact a major commodity in the ancient world, and exporting it supported the economies of entire nations.4 -
Noreenmarie1234 wrote: »misskitty2018 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.
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??
What an odd odd string of conversation this is. I have three of my grandmothers cookbooks. She had all sorts of recipes handwritten as well as the actual cookbooks... She wrote them on the pages at the front and back of the book plus stuck them on tablet paper in between the other pages. Recipes for things like soups, goulash, bread, pies, cakes, meatloaf, meatballs... Not sure where this idea that recipes are some kind of new fangled thing came from. These cookbooks were from the 20s and 30s.
I get what you mean, but I had a lot of "plain" food at home, compared to what I see when we go out socially now. Why do good old healthy vegetables need to have oil, cheese, fruit, nuts, bacon, etc. added to them to make a modern SALAD!!?
Mostly, so that people actually want to eat it.
But fresh veggies and salad taste perfectly fine and delicious on their own. If you aren't hungry enough to eat fresh veggies, you probably aren't that hungry.
This kind of attitude goes a long way toward explaining why some folks think all you have to do to get people to eat more fresh vegetables is to say, "Eat more fresh vegetables!"
No, they're not tasty, they're not appetizing, and they're not filling, and you're just going to have to accept that not everyone is like you. Even if I'm stomach-pinching hungry, vegetables don't look all that good to me, with one or two exceptions you might not approve of if oil in salad dressing seems beyond the pale to you.
I for one believe you when you say you enjoy fresh vegetables, so reciprocal courtesy would be nice.13 -
Wheelhouse15 wrote: »Wheelhouse15 wrote: »There were a lot of reason, but one people forget is that there were also stronger diet pills as well. There were a lot of people on diets even back then, it's not like everyone was thin and never had to work at keeping their weight down.
I remember my grandmother (who was morbidly obese) eating "Ayds" diet candies in the '70s. The active ingredient was benzocaine, later changed to Phenylpropanolamine (aka beta-hydroxyamphetamine).
My mother did Dexatrim, which was Dexedrine and I remember Ayds and a few others. Then there were also the fad diets like the Scarsdale Diet and my mother was at Weight Watchers so often I thought I was an orphan!
My grandmother did Weight Watchers too.1 -
janejellyroll wrote: »
My parents were definitely 'different'. No TV and we were forced to stay outside until dark. LOL. But I'm guessing my upbringing in the 80s is probably similar to what it would have been like in the 70s.
PS: I was not attempting to push some Utopia. Just sharing my experience. That childhood led to me being a healthy weight. It wasn't until I abandoned the ways of my youth, started staying indoors to watch TV and play games and just in general changed my lifestyle that I gained weight. Apparently my parents were onto something with their weird ways. Haha.2 -
janejellyroll wrote: »
My parents were definitely 'different'. No TV and we were forced to stay outside until dark. LOL. But I'm guessing my upbringing in the 80s is probably similar to what it would have been like in the 70s.
Kids had sedentary activities (coloring, reading, toys like dollhouses and Lincoln Logs) in the 1970s though. Some kids have always played outside more, but I don't know if we can assume that was a universal 1970s experience.5 -
seltzermint555 wrote: »As an 80s kid I can say that my lifestyle was WAY different as a kid.
Couple of things.
1. We weren't allowed in the house before dark. We were expected to be outside playing, which meant we were pretty darn active all the time because what else is there to do outside but run around and play?
2. Fast food was a HUGE rarity. Maybe once every few months at MOST.
3. Junk food was a rarity.
4. I went hungry. These days I only rarely feel hunger.
When I was a kid in the 80's my lifestyle was so opposite! We had fast food at least 2-3 times per week, usually McDonald's, and weekends meant Friday night Pizza Hut followed by Sonic burgers on Saturday, a big home cooked dinner on Saturday night, lunch in a steakhouse after church on Sunday, etc. Most "at home" meals were TV dinners, sandwiches with bologna and cheese or PB&J...there was absolutely ALWAYS dessert too. Cake mixes were an every time we went to the store purchase and we were a family of three who went through a cake in 2 days. I look back and understand why me and my dad were always overweight then. My mom ate salad for every meal and laxatives like candy...
Definitely agree though on the playing outside stuff. At family gatherings my cousins and I were expected to play outside for 5-6 hours at least before coming in for a drink or "bugging the adults". Now, kids are underfoot indoors usually with an iPad or handheld system playing games and if they're over 12, they are on their smartphone 24/7. Even the kids who are into sports do not play them recreationally at home it would seem.
One more thought - I actually didn't have an Atari, Nintendo, we rarely had cable TV...but I think some people even back in the 70s and 80s were just more inclined to pursue sedentary indoor hobbies and some of us (like me) ended up overweight. I strongly preferred drawing with Crayola markers or reading 63 library books to any of the Chinese jump rope and 4 square games my friends loved.
Yeah, I was a big reader too in the 80s. I preferred that to being outside. I didn't really like to exercise as a kid but I don't mind it now. We still would ride around our neighborhood on our bikes a lot. We didn't eat out all the time or I didn't go. I hated eating out and still do. I can get hige on prepackaged food though that is ready made. I try not to get them so I guess weight gain can just come from being sedentary and eating too much! I have never been very busy so boredom eating comes into play a lot. I don't feel as hungry when I am on my feet more.3 -
janejellyroll wrote: »janejellyroll wrote: »
My parents were definitely 'different'. No TV and we were forced to stay outside until dark. LOL. But I'm guessing my upbringing in the 80s is probably similar to what it would have been like in the 70s.
Kids had sedentary activities (coloring, reading, toys like dollhouses and Lincoln Logs) in the 1970s though. Some kids have always played outside more, but I don't know if we can assume that was a universal 1970s experience.
True enough but I think it's just obvious that those who WERE skinny were moving more than they were eating. Isn't that the science? And if we're going to presume that people in the 70s were skinnier, then the obvious reason is that more people were moving more than eating, IE: more calories out than in.
I can only take my experience (and those of kids I know) and say: huh, well, it's probably because we moved a lot more than other kids.0
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