why were people so skinny in the 70s?
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janejellyroll wrote: »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.
Yes, those who were in a healthy weight range were eating the appropriate amount of energy for their activity.
My post is about the (to me false) claim that there was a previous era where children were playing outside all the time and never had sedentary or indoor activities.
The truth is that children in the 1970s and 1980s had access to a wide range of activities, some sedentary, some active, some indoor, some outdoor. Individual children in those eras (or today) may have had the experience of being forced to stay outside until dark, but others didn't.
I remember being outside a lot, but not "forced" to stay outside. It was what we chose to do, and our parents actually had a hard time finding us to get us back inside.2 -
We have a lot of kids now that NEVER play outside. And NEVER walk anywhere. Even in the 80's and later (at least in my area), kids nearly universally still often walked to the friends' houses to play those sedentary board and video games together and they had to walk to school (or at least to a bus stop). Now you can play video games with those friends over internet, and more parents are willing to ferry their children around by car. Correct me if I'm wrong (maybe this was different in other regions), but parents in the olden days were not willing to play chauffeur to their kids except in rare instances.
We also didn't snack between meals, and often were quite hungry well before a fixed meal came around. I think this has gotten a lot rarer in all age groups currently.
Yes. As a child I played outside with the other neighbours' children, but my son now only plays group sports where he expects us to chauffeur him around to where everyone else is meeting.
But when there's no sports arrangements, he stays inside with his electronic gadgets. He insisted he needed a cell phone to talk to his friends. I said "what about the landline, you can use that anytime?". Apparently that's not how they talk these days!! You need to type and send messages to each other now, or else you're just not with it.
As to walking anywhere, I dropped a young lady home today and she said she never leaves the confines of the property where she lives unless in a car.4 -
Anecdotes are irrelevant.
I teach a class for some kids, and they are all pretty healthy weight and active, very similar to when I was a kid. Does that mean there's not a problem with childhood obesity? Obviously not, but it's much higher in certain subcultures and areas than others, and often being better off socio-economically means that kids are less likely to be overweight for a number of reasons. (The kids I am talking about go to schools where they have some active time and do lots of activities that their parents take them too. Similarly, my friends with kids spend a lot of time taking their kids to activities or (when small) places they can run around supervised. Those kids are all pretty fortunate probably.)
When I was a kid, we just went out into the cul de sac and played games and ran around in an really quite unsupervised way (we did organized sports when a bit older). Thinking back, it freaks me out almost how lost or missing we could have gotten if we'd wanted to, but it was considered no biggie. People around me now don't let their kids run around unsupervised like that, but it would be foolish to claim that's a difference between the '70s and now. It is more likely a difference between where I live now (a particular part of a big city) and where I lived in the '70s (a town of about 25,000 with a lot of open space).
Are people more freaked out about children getting abducted now? Dunno, I do know they were freaked out about a lot of things like that in the '80s (and Satanism and razor blades in candy at Halloween).
Re "kids today" and them not having landlines, I haven't had a landline for years other than at work.2 -
I just want to say the replacing of swear words with kitten is amusing the heck out of me.
Good input guys. Thanks.
My response to some of the points made is this: Isn't it true that childhood obesity is on the rise? Wouldn't that suggest children are, indeed, not as active as they've been in previous generations?
Not necessarily (although they could be). People become obese from consuming more energy than they're burning. The imbalance could be created through consuming more calories as well.
That said, I wouldn't rule out children being less active. My point was simply that sedentary activities like reading, art, and toys that don't require much movement have always been a part of childhood for some children. It happened in the 1970s too.4 -
As a 70s kid, I was remembering just this morning that I would routinely get on my bike at 9 AM, and ride around the hood, hike, climb trees, and not come home until 9 PM, in the summers. We didn't eat all day long, often, and could range up to 10 miles in any direction. Free range kids, less TV (we had 4 channels that stopped broadcasting at midnight, no internet, no video games, lots of chores, belonged to several extra currics at all times. Plus, there were lots of overweight and obese people in the 70s, just not as many as the 90s through now because of the "low fat" fallacy that pushed most to cut down on fat and dramatically increase sugar, the real culprit in easy weight gain.4
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It was before low fat diets became the in thing7
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Everyone pretty much covered it, but when my mom was a kid she played tons of sports and stayed lean, and ate what was given at the table or nothing at all. She had no internet, cable, ect. and played often. I also think there wasn't such a huge boom with the highly processed, sugary/unhealthy fatty foods. I don't think GMO is to blame entirely, but I just think it was the amount they ate and the amount of energy burned balanced out. Today, with more luxuries comes more problems with obesity (and solutions too!)1
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I agree with everything said, but there was one more sinister thing going on. Being skinny was popular and fat shaming was popular. Remember bumper stickers that said “No fat chicks”? I was in high school from 73-76 and many of the girls including me took “white crosses” which are ephedrine to lose weight. I had a friend who wouldn’t eat for a week at a time to lose weight. Lots of girls got anorexia nervosa. If you weren’t thin, you couldn’t get dates.
Again, I completely agree with everything that’s been said about there being less fast food and more exercise.3 -
It's calories in vs calories out. I went to HS in a small town. Many of the kids lived on farms and had chores. Those in town often worked for a farmer doing manual labor. Because of the size of the school most of the kids could be on one, often multiple HS teams. If they weren't practicing, they were getting ready for the next season.
Our PE teacher was working on his Masters at a university close to a large city. It was a night class and most of the students were PE teachers by day. His class did a stugy comparing urban kids to rural kids. They tested pushups. pull ups, sprints, agility runs and a 1/2 mile run (and a few other things I forget). The rural kids on average, outscored the urban kids by large margin. Given most of the tests were those where a higher % of lean body mass would be helpful, I'm guessing the rural kid's BMI was a lot lower.
They didn't study it as far as I know, but I would guess the rural kids consumed more calories. Also, even though they didn't serve the giant sizes, the nearest McDonalds was 20 miles away.1 -
I agree with everything said, but there was one more sinister thing going on. Being skinny was popular and fat shaming was popular. Remember bumper stickers that said “No fat chicks”? I was in high school from 73-76 and many of the girls including me took “white crosses” which are ephedrine to lose weight. I had a friend who wouldn’t eat for a week at a time to lose weight. Lots of girls got anorexia nervosa. If you weren’t thin, you couldn’t get dates.
Again, I completely agree with everything that’s been said about there being less fast food and more exercise.
It's still extremely hard to get a date of you aren't thin and I mean a guy just coming up to you and asking you out, not online dating. I'm not even talking plus size girls.1 -
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theGreatPondero wrote: »As a 70s kid, I was remembering just this morning that I would routinely get on my bike at 9 AM, and ride around the hood, hike, climb trees, and not come home until 9 PM, in the summers. We didn't eat all day long, often, and could range up to 10 miles in any direction. Free range kids, less TV (we had 4 channels that stopped broadcasting at midnight, no internet, no video games, lots of chores, belonged to several extra currics at all times. Plus, there were lots of overweight and obese people in the 70s, just not as many as the 90s through now because of the "low fat" fallacy that pushed most to cut down on fat and dramatically increase sugar, the real culprit in easy weight gain.
I grew up in the 90s and this is how my childhood was. However, now when I look around at relatives and friends children, they are WAY less active than I was at that age. I don't know when this trend started (or even if it is true), but kids were still super active in the 90s where I lived. We would be out all day everyday walking, biking, jumping on the trampoline, etc.1 -
People are always looking for a boogeyman like trying to blame the younger generation of being lazy or they like to blame food additives like high fructose corn syrup, but the answer is very simple. All you need to do is overlay a poverty rate by year chart and an obesity by year chart and you will see that as the poverty rate declines the obesity rate goes up.
It's simple prior to about 1976 there were far more people living in poverty then there is today.
Interestingly enough the rate of people overweight but not obese hasn't changed much since the 1970's2 -
Low fat diets are and were the thing to prevent heart disease especially in the UK back in the 1970's. Trouble is low fat is often counter productive.0
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I agree with everything said, but there was one more sinister thing going on. Being skinny was popular and fat shaming was popular. Remember bumper stickers that said “No fat chicks”? I was in high school from 73-76 and many of the girls including me took “white crosses” which are ephedrine to lose weight. I had a friend who wouldn’t eat for a week at a time to lose weight. Lots of girls got anorexia nervosa. If you weren’t thin, you couldn’t get dates.
Again, I completely agree with everything that’s been said about there being less fast food and more exercise.
I definitely think there's some truth to that. I wouldn't say it's the "main reason" things have changed, but yeah.
My stepsister graduated HS in 1986 and there was a ton of really extreme fat-bashing stuff in her school yearbook. One girl actually had the nickname "Miss Piggy" and she looked like Pat Benatar with a burrito food baby!?
By the time I went to the same HS (class of 1995) that would NEVER have been in the yearbook...and now, say 2008 to present, they even have plus size cheerleaders, dance team captain, etc, and people don't really make a fuss about it. I remember being in college very late 90s and shocked when a lot of teenage girls who were my size at the time (large plus sizes) wore spaghetti strap tanks and dresses to the mall. Just a few years earlier, I feel like teenage girls doing that would have been openly mocked & laughed at, and were expected to wear baggy sweatshirts & flannels. Also, in 1995 at my HS there were almost ZERO heavier girls at prom. Even girls who were a little bit overweight but very popular & well liked...absent from prom. I was there in a velvet babydoll dress with my gothy friends and was the fattest girl at prom by 60 lb, easily. Now I see all shapes & sizes in prom photos.
Times change!
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I feel like there was an overt stigma to being overweight, and since there was very little political correctness in the 70s and mid-80s, people would casually reference your fatness in social situations in ways that would be completely inappropriate today.
Also, people weren't as quick to accept gaining weight. People wore tighter clothing and the trigger for action was often clothing snugness - if your clothes were too tight, you reacted and tried to lose weight. Today, baggy clothing is more prevalent and many just shrug off outgrowing their pants by buying bigger pants.4 -
stevencloser wrote: »
It was also not what caused the obesity rates to skyrocket over the past few decades. Low fat dieting was pretty prevalent in the 80's and early 90's but low carb has been the predominant paradigm for over 25 years yet obesity rates are still climbing. Might have something to do with more available calories and a less active lifestyle---nah, can't be that simple...
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CaptBligh001 wrote: »People are always looking for a boogeyman like trying to blame the younger generation of being lazy or they like to blame food additives like high fructose corn syrup, but the answer is very simple. All you need to do is overlay a poverty rate by year chart and an obesity by year chart and you will see that as the poverty rate declines the obesity rate goes up.
It's simple prior to about 1976 there were far more people living in poverty then there is today.
Interestingly enough the rate of people overweight but not obese hasn't changed much since the 1970's
Not so simple really. The traditional relationship was actually that those with lower incomes had higher obesity rates and that higher income populations had lower obesity rates. To a degree that's still true but obesity rates are now much higher in the upper income levels than they were historically.0 -
Low fat diets are and were the thing to prevent heart disease especially in the UK back in the 1970's. Trouble is low fat is often counter productive.
The only thing counter productive is that they replaced fat calories with an nearly equal amount of carb calories and people started to eat more overall calories. The low fat diets that were studied and shown to reduce levels of obesity were much different than what many dieters ate. The low fat diets studied consisted of large amounts of fruits and vegetables with less animal fats. These diets tend to fill people up with a lot of fiber and few calories so people employing them at fewer calories.
Compare that to the low fat fad diets that were pushed that featured low fibre and highly calorific foods such as Snackwell cookies and sugary candies for snacks. All these diets did was shift the caloric intake from fat to carbs without reducing overall calories.3 -
You got it, wheelhouse. My gripe with the 1970's low fat diet is exactly as you say. In my view it was falsely directed at cardiac patients as it was overly low in omega 3, beneficial animal fats/protein and this sort of thing, placing the emphasis on low value carbs. We needed more scientific information and we are not there yet.
I once worked in a care facility where the manager did not understand that not all diabetics needed the amount of white bread she was wanting to push onto this one person. Saying, "she can always have 2 slices of bread, when the person was trying to reject it because, although elderly she knew her system best, wanting protein!3
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