I was just listening to a podcast discussion by two prominent doctors discussing this and the answer was somewhere between we don’t know and all of the above, so forgive me for saying the answer isn’t totally clear. But For those of us who grew in the middle of the 20th century there should be some things that are obvious.
We primarily ate at home, and that was primarily home prepared meals. Takeout (delivery wasn’t really a thing yet) was rare. Often my father would pick something up, maybe once a week, to give my mother a break from cooking. Eating out was a special occasion. Eating fast food was maybe a once a month stop while out and about, but again was mostly a treat. McDonald’s actually didn’t come to our town until just over 50 years ago, it was mostly a local chain. In general, it just wasn’t a big part of everyday life.
What was a meal at McDonald’s (or other fast food chains) 50–60 years ago? A small burger, small fries, and a small drink. JUST one small burger. Note the emphasis on SMALL. And that was for adults not just kids. As kids we would often get a burger and then share my father’s fries and drink.
Talk about sugary drinks, this is what a Coke looked like when I was growing up
That’s a 6oz bottle. Today 12oz is considered very small, 16.9oz is the typical small bottle you find. At the fountain they are usually 24 or 32oz.
What about candy? We had candy right? Again, small. Hershey Bars started out at 1.05oz early in the 20th Century. By the time we are talking about they were ~1.5oz, like other candy (e.g., M&Ms came in a similar sized package). You can still buy them at that size, but that’s become rare. Going into a convenience store and you are presented with the 2.6oz King Size and 4.4oz XL. And candy is everywhere, like the checkout at Best Buy. When I was a kid you would go to a candy store, stationary store, or a few other outlets to get candy.
There was often candy in our house, but there was also nuts and fruit. There was always cake and cookie in our house too, but somehow we weren’t going crazy on it. It was dessert. And it usually wasn’t packaged stuff, it was home made or from a bakery. A real bakery, not like your Safeway that gets it frozen from a factory and defrosts it.
We’ve supersized everything. Baked potatoes are now much larger. And where as a kid they were generally served with a little butter or margarine, today you get butter, sour cream, cheese, and bacon bits. So a lot more carbs topped with a lot of unhealthy calorie dense fats.
Which brings us to all the claims of unhealthy ingredients in today’s food. I’m not going to go there other than to assert it is likely true that we had healthier ingredients in general in what we ate and that is probably a factor.
The reality is that what were treats consumed in small quantitues in the 50s, 60s, and 70s has become the mainstay of our diets in the 2020s. So we are eating a lot more calorie dense/nutrient poor foods. “A lot more” doesn’t even really cover it.
A lot of things:
- Although a lot of people steadfastly refuse to believe this because it ruins their political narratives (both right and left), Americans were materially poorer 50 years ago than they are today. This meant that they had less money to spend on food.
- Because people had less money to spend on food, portion sizes (both at home and at restaurants) were noticeably smaller than they are today. In the 80s and 90s during the Reagan/Clinton economic booms, there was an arms race to give people more, more, more when it came to serving sizes, and we’re still living in that world today where being “prosperous” requires eating enough for four people at a sitting.
- If you go back 50 years (to 1975), there were no real personal computers (just toys for hobbyists), video games were in their infancy (the Atari 2600 was released in ‘77), and there was no internet. You had maybe a dozen channels of TV, and a lot of those channels didn’t even have 24-hour programming. In sum, sitting on the couch/a chair all day was a lot less appealing, and people were more physically active.
- Ironically given that the world of the 1970s/80s was statistically much more dangerous than today, the culture of the time didn’t treat children as fragile objects who had to be monitored closely by adults. Kids would often walk/bike long distances from home to play with friends.
- Finally, what we now call fat-shaming was broadly tolerated. That is, within reason, it was socially acceptable to make fun of people for being fat, and being fat was treated as a bad thing. To be clear, I’m not advocating that people should be ridiculed over their weight and don’t view the past as “good” in that regard, but culturally, we have swung too far in the opposite direction, to the point where we’re embracing delusional beliefs about obesity in the name of alleged sensitivity.
IMPORTANT: fans of “cheto” and “paleo” idiotic diets are invited to not comment: anything they write will be deleted and they will be blocked. I consider them the perfect equivalent of antivaxxers spreading dangerous disinformation.
- Activity levels. In the 1950’s even in the US there was one family car. When the car wasn’t available everyone else walked or went by bike. And lots more people did manual jobs, or to do things by hand inside the home. nd even if you went by car, you usually drove in the general vicinity of the places where you needed to be, then walked from one to the other.
- People stuck to meals. There were three family meals, breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and people didn’t eat much outside the meals. Meals were also usually homecooked from scratch: on week days, especially if both parents worked, the mean may have been something on the simple and quick side, but homemade it was. Besides, eating at a table means that you have a healthy break in your day, which allows you to digest better your meal.
- Snacking was the exception. Yes, you could have a soda or a sweet treat, but these weren’t regular events. On most days you maybe had a cup of coffee between lunch and dinner, not a new snack every 20 minutes. Maybe on Saturday afternoon you went somewhere and had a small glass of coke and a burger with your friends for lunch, you didn’t idle around chugging soda and snacking on crisps from gigantic packages.
- Portion sizes were smaller. Despite people being more active and burning more calories, portions were smaller and meals were more balanced, with half the plate taken up by vegetables. You ate on a smaller plate, which held a portion of meat, one of potatoes, and two of vegetables, and the dessert was often fruits or fruit-based and not nearly as sweet. Also snack portions were smaller, instead of a huge bar, a candy was often a single piece.
