Weight Loss Tips From 1951

monkeefan1974 wrote: »

Even with the obvious milk propaganda, there’s some great info here. It makes sense that they are promoting milk for this diet, though.
Quote from the film: “This diet satisfies the appetite because it provides more FAT than most reducing diets”. The announcer even emphasizes the word fat.
I wonder if low fat, 1% and fat-free milk even existed back then?
I wonder if they already realized that eating fat doesn’t necessarily make you fat? And if they did, how did we get ourselves into the low-fat craze of the 80’s?! (Which still persists to some degree today!)

Fat free milk has existed for a long time. Farmers skimmed and sold the cream separately in some cases. My dad used to make fun of my mom drinking (grocery store) skimmed milk in the 1950s-60s (when I was a child) by saying that they didn't drink the skimmed milk when he was a kid (1920s-30s) because they fed it to the pigs.

I don't know for sure, but my impression is that in the 1950s-60s there was not as much common tendency to demonize any particular macro, though there were weird fad diets, leading to the same silly consequences.

Excerpt from the thread I linked earlier, with selections from a 1960 home ec book:




Dried skim milk powder has existed for a long time, I know. It's in the (short) food calorie list in the above book. Liquid skimmed milk isn't in that list, but there are only 7 items in the dairy section of the list, so it's far from exhaustive concerning what existed at the time.

The actual section of the book talking about milk lists 14 types, one of which is skim (i.e., liquid skim milk), which they describe as "milk with most of the fat removed". (This page is not in the thread linked, but I have the book in hand.)

I can't prove it, but my memory is that there were not all the milk products with different precise grades of fat (nonfat, 1%, etc.). I only remember whole and skim, though I wasn't really old enough to pay close attention. I think the processing may have been a little less precision-oriented at the time, and certainly the common range of grocery products of most types was substantially smaller than we have today in any case.

hesn92 wrote: »

I always wonder why people want to make losing weight more complicated than it needs to be. Why re-invent the wheel

Because the wheel isn't flashy and fancy. Because they want a boogeyman to blame rather than taking responsibility for their own decisions and behaviours.