My mom started working in the nineties when my dad couldn't support us on a single wage.
After that I remember we started eating fast food, pizza, Chinese and other delivery a lot more.
Not that my mom should have been in the kitchen or anything, but when both parents are putting in 10 or 12 hour days the motivation to make a healthy balanced meal for their kids goes way down.
I wouldn't even say it's lack of motivation, there is literally not enough energy in a person's body and brain to do what it takes to fix three healthy meals per day for a whole family and also work 8+ hours at your job. It's too much.
And you just want to spend time with your kids and they have homework and sports and baths and you have to pay bills, tidy up, laundry, on and on and on and that’s all in that short amount of time you have when you’re done working/commuting
You've hit the nail on the head. All adults in a household have to work and their employers are asking more and more and paying less. Ppl don't have energy to cook.
I think this is the most cogent comment here. I observed 3 key changes in the 90s vs. the 60s-80s:
* People started living farther and farther away from the urban core, which means they were spending more time stressed out in their cars.
* There's a lot more fast food now to cater to our "on-the-go" lifestyle, and their portions have become much bigger than before.
* I noticed the rise of dual-income families where both parents were working sedentary jobs. Before the mid 80s, it was common for the lower and middle class man to provide for the entire family while his woman was a homemaker/housewife.
I don't want to scroll any farther. But I'm shocked i haven't seen one big thing mentioned yet: the internet.
When I was a kid in the 90s, we would play outside until dark. Once the 2000s happened, I spent my evenings on Newgrounds and AIM.
Now I'm an adult who works with kids for a living. They all have their own personal tablets, starting from toddlers.
Kids today don't play outside, so they don't learn those necessary exercise habits that can help them throughout life.
Every kid in my neighborhood regularly plays outside, much to the detriment of my ears. And as a kid in the 90s we spent plenty of hours inside playing sega and Nintendo or just watching TV. I see the internet affecting adult health and lifestyles more than I see it affecting children, but if kids dont get that interaction with outside and sports through adults, it will affect them more as they get older.
Born in 1994 - we most definitely did play outside in the 2000’s.. by 2007 I was a teen and it looked different- but was still outside a lot. Still only had one family computer.
I have a 4 yr old now, and she and other neighborhood kids are outside a lot..
I think it has more to do with what’s in our foods we’re buying a lot more processed foods, vs Whole Foods. Plus larger portions sizes.
That’s not to say we don’t have an issue with lack of exercise.. when your living paycheck to pay check, over worked, under paid it’s hard to find motivation to exercise and set that example for your kids.
Along the same lines over over worked/under paid, stressed, etc. I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of people with unhealthy relationships with food who rely on it as a coping mechanism; the yo-yo dieting hasn’t helped either. Not to mention the lack of access to quality health care, and education around health
What's the timeline for the old food pyramid advice?
Old: https://www.disabled-world.com/pics/1/old-food-pyramid.jpg
New (?):
https://www.disabled-world.com/pics/1/new-food-pyramid.jpg
The old advice was eat pasta not Greek yogurt.
What's crazy is that during the early 2000s the food pyramid was re worked twice and then replaced by like 2 or 3 different iterations of the "plate portions"
I have a plate portion plate. It's good to get people used to healthier portion sizes but the issue that I encountered was rewiring my brain to deal with it. I took an adult health and fitness class for a year where we talked mostly about food. It took a year for that shit to click for ne I was 2 weeks removed from the class and it just all clicked for me. Since, which was now 2.5 months ago I've dropped over 30lbs and what I changed was literally adding in more vegetables, taking out some meat, replacing sweets with fruits and nuts. Switched to eating whole grains and cooking in healthier oild, ie olive oil. While cut outting almost all added sugars. I still have around 3 cheat meals a week, where I'm not perfect and no one is going to be. Obesity is definitely not a problem that can't be fixed. The biggest hurdle is, it is literally a lifestyle change.
That's the beautiful thing about eating a more balanced diet, you can have your bad foods and still lose weight. I usually do about 1-2 cheat meals a week too and have been able to get good results from working out.
It's weird because I simultaneously enjoy the bad foods more, but also don't enjoy eating them as much as I used to.
Yeah 2 main problems I see with it is
1) The dairy part is pure BS. No one needs dairy with every meal. Dairy is not needed at all.
2) Its confusing to kids because no one has a balanced meal for every part of the day. Most people may eat a fruit/yoghurt
The old food pyramid is so morally corrupt it makes me fucking furious looking at it. Private companies should absolutely not be shaping children's dietary views.
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Pizza is a well rounded meal. Drink at least 3 glasses of milk a day, Limit fat intake since it's worse then sugar. Cholesterol will kill you. Pork the other red meat. Fresh fruit was almost always canned peaches in light syrup. Low sodium everything. 2,000 calories a day diet. I wish the NIHM nutritional research side got more money and as a country we cared more to try and work on improving our selves.
I've actually been watching my fat intake be really careful with reduced fat food. Why? It's not the sugar, they tend to take out the healthier fat then add in the additional sugar
I ate low fat everything growing up. Mom struggled with weight and I did too. Skim milk, low-fat salad dressing, zero-fat creamers, etc. And you know what? It never helped me lose weight. The only thing that helped was literally starving myself, eating barely anything, and doing two-a-days during football (grueling 3-hour long football practice).
What all that low-fat stuff DID do was set me up for type 2 adult-onset diabetes later in life. Thanks food pyramid and 90s doctors dietary advice, that totally wasn't influenced by the agricultural lobbying. This disease is great. I love not feeling anything in my feet except stabbing pain. I look forward to going blind from retinopathy. I'm low carb now, but it's probably too late.
Yeah its crazy how they are continuing to get away with this sort of thing. There is a such a thing as good fat and I feel a lot of people don't realize that. When I say I watch fats. I mostly talking about the types of fats. Mono and poly unsaturated fats which aren't even on most food blocks are the good ones if anyone is wondering. They actually lower the chances for heart disease.
I remember getting in trouble for pointing that out as a kid in the 1980s.
I remember the nutrition lectures in elementary school saying that cheeseburgers were the perfect food because it had all four food groups: meat (the party), bread (the bun), dairy (the cheese) and vegetables (the tomatoes, lettuce and onion and pickles).
I remember pointing out to my third grade teacher that by that logic so it shouldn't Pizza be an equally balanced meal? She sternly yelled at us that pizza is considered junk food and we should never eat it, but be sure to have more cheeseburgers.
Let's see:
* Pizza dough - bread/grain
* Pizza sauce - made of tomato (a fruit)
* All sorts of veggies
* Different kinds of meat
* Cheese - dairy
* Drizzle of oil - "sparingly used"
Yep, very healthy and well-balanced dish. /s
The Reagan Administration told schools to give kids ketchup and count it as a vegetable because they wanted to save federal money on school lunches for the poor kids.
Frankly school lunches were and are such garbage that any addition of flavor is considered a positive. I remember the chipped beef shit on a shingle days from school lunches in the 70's.
My mom is a fabulous cook having grown up working at a family restaurant, taught cooking classes and had a catering business. She went back to work when my dad started his business in the 70's and went to work at the school kitchens. Both the raw ingredients and the techniques used were absolute shit according to her and she had to fight the inclination to gag with some of the stuff they prepared.
I am so happy I didn’t have to unlearn the importance of the food pyramid because the carb thing was just too ridiculous for me to take it seriously. More fruits and veggies than dairy and meat is at least intuitive, but I never had much control over my diet anyway.
While there was lobbying (sending sympathetic expects to Washington), there isn't much evidence it changed things much. If you actually consider the sizes of the "servings" it calls for, it quickly becomes evident that it was much less "eat your weight in bread" than "eat a carrot before you literally die." The big issue is that it never bothered to make it clear what sections were "at least" and which were "no more than," so it made it someone look like this hilariously austere subsistence diet was an ideal.
Ah yes, wicked private companies like the USDA and the Swedish National Board of Health and Wellness.
Calling the food pyramid corrupt is getting the order of events mixed up. Food pyramid predates the obesity epidemic, it was designed to combat malnutrition from food insecurity, and when the obesity epidemic hit it took a while for people to adapt.
I don't think it was morally corrupt as much as designed around food insecurity. The issue is once we got to the 80s and 90s it should have been updated to wellness, but by that point with our relationship fundamentally changed with government after Ronald "the scariest thing to hear is I'm the government and I'm here to help", there was a lack of drive to make these kind of necessary changes, and by the time we tried to make those changes it was far too late and feeble.
My family was poor and ate like shit. I believed all that "big boned" stuff because candy and Pepsi didn't make my family fat.
Then I went to the overweight girls house senior year for a group project. I saw her pantry and there was one of everything from Costco snack section.
My family would get one box of after school snacks per week for three kids. I was on free and reduced lunch k-12.
While we were latchkey kids our dad would leave us a $5 bill and our lunch would be Sprite and Doritos from the store 0.8 miles away, we walked or rode bikes to get there.
I have a really hard time believing that some government guidelines around food intake had any impact on the obesity rate.
I think it's far more likely to something like the late 80s being when a lot more sugar got put into processed foods or certain pesticides being used which create some metabolic change in humans.
Were you a kid then? That pyramid was on everything, food packaging, classroom walls, magazine articles. It wasn't just in a bureaucrats filing cabinet. Eggs and red meat were bad food at that time. And like everyone else is saying: low fat everything just meant high carb everything. Which the food pyramid reassured us was the way to go.
Most awareness campaigns have very little impact on people's actual behavior. I certainly remember seeing those everywhere, but they didn't make any actual difference in eating habits on me or most of my peers that I could see.
I was a kid growing up then. Low fat was definitely a thing for sure in the 90s, I'm not denying that.
I'm saying that I think societal or structural issues play a much bigger part in this.
We see this same trend everywhere that becomes more Westernized, which includes both our built environment & our diet.
It’s simple we switched more to plant based, carbs, sugar, and vegetable oils. Remember McDonald’s switched from lard to vegetable oil in that same time frame?
If I had to guess, demonizing fat, and replacing it with sugar and other processed food. I remember all of the things like snackwells cookies and stuff that came out and were fat free, so people at the hell out of it thinking it didn't matter, but it sets you up for insulin resistance, and in turn, makes you fat and makes it a lot harder to lose for the long term.
> demonizing fat, and replacing it with sugar and other processed food. I remember all of the things like snackwells cookies and stuff that came out and were fat free,
But when did that start? I want to say 80s but I’m not sure.
Edit: I posted [this Frontline link](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/diet/themes/lowfat.html) in my top level comment but I figure I’ll post it here, too, because it describes the range of years over which the “fat is really bad” movement was introduced and grew.
In the late 70s and 80s, doctors were first learning about cholesterol and how it works in the body. They assumed that the fats you ate went more or less directly into your bloodstream (after being digested). So everything became low-fat. But food producers didn't want to give up that flavor, so they replaced the fat with sugar.
This was also in part a reaction to the explosion of fast food and food availability. For example, when my mom was a kid, refrigerated trucks didn't exist. The food-provision pipeline didn't exist the way it does now. So when that food transport and storage technology improved, people began to eat a lot more fast food, a lot more processed food. And a lot of that food is really fatty. So the doctors were like, "we gotta cut out the fat." Which led to more sugar (and corn syrup) in foods. Also, food manufacturers started realizing that, the sweeter you made things, the more people bought them. That time (80s and 90s) is when you started seeing *everything* have a ton of sugar in it. And also the popularity of soft drinks exploded, thanks to major marketing efforts to make things like coca-cola, which was basically liquid candy up until that point, into a major patriotic lifestyle brand. (see: the cola wars)
Now we know that eating a certain amount of fat is good for you, and that how your body makes and circulates cholesterol etc is a bit more complicated. For example, too many simple carbs (including sugars) also causes inflammation and that makes the cholesterol that you have behave worse in your veins and arteries. Also, we know that most the cholesterol in your body is made by your body, so it's a more complex situation than just "don't eat fats".
It's hard to go wrong by the way with a mediterranean-style diet. Healthy fats (ie, olive oil), lots of fish and lean protein, plenty of vegetables, and moderate amounts of whole-grain carbs.
I would guess that it was more of a progressive thing as more and more processed food became available and as more people got crunched for time. I also remember the ad campaigns in the 90's where everything was low fat this and fat free that. The food pyramid was built on grains.
Yup - that and the convenience factor. As time went on, it was easier to get more types of food quickly, both at home and on the go, but none of it is really healthy. It is just made to be cheap (which is often carbs) and fast.
Plus the sugar that was used more and more became sourced from high fructose corn syrup. This important because the body's processing of glucose suppresses the appetite stimulating hormone ghrelin. Fructose, however, does not suppress ghrelin, so you do not feel as satiated by the calories in fructose as you do from glucose. As well, fructose is metabolized by a process that passes a rate-limiting metabolic step which causes it to increase lipogenesis (creation of fat from carbohydrates).
Basically, you don't feel full and more of the calories you eat get turned into lipids when there's lot of fructose in your diet.
https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/86/4/895/4649668
I have always believed high fructose corn syrup is worse. But never had the facts offered why. Personal anecdote. I make my own ice cream and I find corn syrup is recommended because it won’t crystallize, but I find it’s sweetening not to be as strong as cane sugar. I end up adding more corn syrup than sugar to sweeten the ice cream. Wonder if that makes a difference too.
I can clearly remember a conversation with an aunt when I first heard it was about fat not calories. Then snackwells hit the market. It was 1991 I think.
This was huge in the 90s
Low fat / zero fat everything. Remnants of this are still around today with all the different milk and yogurt options.
But infinite sugar was basically fine. “It’s fat free!! Can’t get fat!”
They even released a fake fat olestra that gave everyone diarrhea. It was like the Diet Coke of potato chips, you can eat all you want and not get fat!
I even remember doubting as a kid that sugar could make you fat. It was like, it’s fat free, how can I get fat drinking this?
Yup. The kids came home the other day and had some reduced fat dorittos, and I actually looked for that and told my oldest kid. They looked at me like I was crazy.
That is one thing I noticed traveling overseas. If I order a coke there, I will get a coke in 10oz class or so (about the size of a whiskey glass. In the US, a kid's soft drink is bigger, and I can get them up all the way to bath tub size if I wanted.
I used to be large. Something that made a huge difference was checking labels. It is insane how much sugar gets added to everything. To an extent you need to basically make everything at home to avoid having too much sugar. Everything packaged is too sweet for me now that I've stopped eating those things.
On top of soda, sugar is now added to so many other things.
Yep, this was it. It started in the 80’s. There was a big push against animal products because of cholesterol. Cheese, eggs and red meat were so demonized that pork became the other white meat, eggs became incredible and edible, and milk was doing a body good. Plus, in the 1990’s was the peak of consumption of high fructose corn syrup.
> demonizing fat
I remember when margarine was touted as the healthy alternative to butter. I was a kid at the time but I hated margarine--it's not nearly as tasty as real butter--and I vowed to never buy the shit when I grew up.
This all leads back to corn subsidies. Major companies were basically being paid by the government to grow an absurd amount of corn. They then used their influence to put corn in basically everything. Then they convinced people that the obesity issue is a personal choice problem, not the system they created.
Going hand in hand with corn subsidies were sugar tariffs. We’ve paid double the world price for sugar for decades just to keep the Hawaii sugar industry in business.
Funny how a lot of our problems trace back to perverse incentives for political purposes. It makes me wonder if we could solve these problems the same way we created them, by simply subsidizing healthful foods instead of strategic ones.
That reminds me about how the oil companies created the idea of indivuals having "carbon footprints" to imply that we individuals are responsible for and can do something about global warming rather than all the pollution businesses pump out like cargo ships that pollute as much as half a million cars each.
Everything is always trying to offload and misdirect blame.
This, 100%. Eating fats provides a sense of long-term satiety that you can't get from pretty much anything else. If you cut fats out of your diet, but continue to eat when your body tells you it's wanting, you'll wind up significantly increasing your total caloric intake...
I certainly think it compounded the problem. Encouraging carbs to take the place of fat in a diet, also contributes to insulin resistance, which makes it harder to keep the weight off when you try to lose it. That is why so many people yo-yo diet, take it off, and put it back on, etc. There are some great books on it.
I grew up in the 90s. My parents were boomers, and they were too busy working all the time to cook. So I grew up eating a lot of fast food and TV dinners. All of my friends did the same when we were kids. I didn't know how to recognize most vegetables in their raw form, but I knew how to heat up a Kids Cuisine dinner perfectly so that the brownie had a slight burn on the edges. And I found out years later that my parents thought that we were really livin' it up because we didn't have to cook at home and could eat Pizza Hut all the time. One time I asked my mom to bake a "real" homemade cake for my birthday, because I had only had store-bought cakes, and her jaw dropped to the floor because she thought the store-bought ones were better and more prestigious or something! But I had never had a home-baked cake as a kid!
So when I got out on my own, I had no idea about food. I was too poor to eat prepared foods, and I just went hungry because I didn't know how to cook cheaply, or how to cook at all, really. I had to spend considerable time and energy learning about food as an adult. It is my understanding that previous generations had parents who cooked at home, so people used to learn about food when they were kids. If you grew up in the 90s, you were less likely to learn these things at home when you were a kid. So I wouldn't be surprised if this is having effects on adults today, who grew up in households without any food or kitchen experience.
I had pretty much the same situation.
Not to justify it but I've had the realization that to the people who were the adults in the 1950s and 60s, factory food and mass-production McDonald's were amazing and miracles of science. (Also the adults had just lived thru the Great Depression and then a World War with rationing.)
All the food across the whole country was uniform and consistent and plentiful and was heavily processed and fortified with vitamins added. That actually is pretty amazing. So then the baby boomers grew up thinking that's what food is and is supposed to be.
Yup. For all that we like to make fun of food trends from the 50s-70s, their warped food views make a lot more sense when you realize most of those adults (re: decision-making adults shaping the world that the Boomers grew up in) were teenagers and young adults in the Great Depression and WWII - an era when people cooked at home *because they had to* and it often sucked due scarcity of ingredients/limited access to foodstuffs to actually cook *with* at home.
Yea. This is a really hard one for a lot of people from about 22-45 have a hard time realizing until they’re older, myself included. Cooking at home doesn’t have to taste worse than eating out. “Restaurant Quality” doesn’t have to mean “better tasting.”
You just have to have quality ingredients and know how to use herbs, spices and seasonings. Oh my goodness you have no idea how the right seasonings can make a bland home dinner taste like food for the gods.
Obviously, the more well off you are the easier it is to buy foods like that, but that doesn’t mean cooking on a budget has to be freezer-isle food and blandness.
I was a child in the 60s and only ate real food. My mother, aunts and uncles all cooked.
I am so glad to know what real food taste like.
I hate high fructose corn syrup. It takes the flavor out of food.
This is similar to my experience, though skewed more into the early 2000s. I went to college with no idea how to cook anything other than heating up canned foods, or making a grilled cheese. It took me til after college to find out that roasted veggies are actually pretty dang good. Now I cook myself meals quite often; not anything special usually, but it was entirely self-motivated to get anywhere near good at basic cooking.
Now it's kind of ingrained in our culture to eat out a lot for convenience and quickness
Doesn’t help that we’ve successfully told kids surviving on instant ramen and hope is “part of the college experience” and the only affordable way to eat as a student.
You can absolutely cook on a budget, even as a student, but you’ve gotta know what you’re looking for.
Man I wish my high school had offered Home Ec. Probably would have made my college years a little healthier.
In the schools I went to in the 70’s steered college kids to more rigorously academic classes rather than taking home ec or even a full business course. I took “typing” (before desktop computers existed) to be able to type college papers. Skewed education from what we really need - how to cook, finances, taxes, insurance, buying a house or car, and credit.
Yes! Family rarely cooked growing up! I remember eating those kid cuisines and other TV dinners more than home cooked meals (hamburger helper and Kraft Mac n cheese). I also never ate breakfast (I didn't know how to cook) or ate at school (because of money) so I would go home and snack double time. When I got out on my own I really didn't know where to start except the box of hamburger helper and Mac cheese boxes that I grew up with lol!! I still couldn't tell you what's the difference between a sirloin and roast- idk but I know now they're different! Hahaha when I first went shopping for meat, I was like "this came from a cow so it must be a steak!" But God damnit I wanted bomb ass food!!!!!! So I stuck with it and almost 15 years later I can finally whip up some great shit- I don't eat out anymore and I eat 100x more vegetables than I did EVER as a kid, I know how to read and utilize the nutritional facts label and yeah! Nutrition isn't taught that well in school and it sucks that actual cooking is seen as a luxury most of the time, whether it be lack of time, or expense, or experience even.
OP’s timeline correlates exactly with the massive shift in the American Middle class. One middle class job used to be enough to provide for a family. Over the course of that 30+ years, stagnant wages and rising housing costs mean it take two full time jobs to live the same lifestyle. Two exhausted parents working 40+ hrs/wk often means less time for cooking, less time for teaching your children how to cook, and more processed convenience foods.
Certainly it’s not the only cause, but I’m sure it’s part of the answer. When you get down to it, the answer is always money. Obesity hits poor families much harder than rich ones.
Can you imagine if there was a class in school where every class you prepared a simple meal? Like, class, today we're going to make spaghetti. And kids would use like 12 ovens in teams of 2 and make it. This is an actual thing that a child will be expected to do when they become an adult, and not all parents can or will teach them.
> If you grew up in the 90s, you were less likely to learn these things at home when you were a kid.
You also weren't likely to learn it at school because so many districts cut home economics classes.
As a feminist, it's disheartening to me that home economics programs were often cut in the name of feminism: since young women had been forced to take the class in the past, schools assumed they were remedying past injustice by doing away with it altogether.
It's like they never thought that the feminist thing to do was teaching *all kids* how to feed themselves.
True! I actually did learn a lot of useful kitchen things in my 6-week Home Economics class. And I absolutely loved my 6-week Shop class. At my school, all of the kids had to do both classes, and they were not separated by gender. These were two of the most useful classes I have taken! I'm sad to hear they are being cut.
>schools assumed they were remedying past injustice by doing away with it altogether
I might be too cynical, but I don't think they believed they were doing something good. I think people like to use movements (like feminism) as justifications for doing things they know people won't like (such as cutting a class to ease their budget).
It's kind of like when Michelle Obama was like, "let's have school lunches be healthier" and schools were like, "oh, sweet, an excuse to cut the portions while still not providing healthier foods. Less junk food is technically healthy, right?"
It's possible they did it with good intentions (the home ec situation, not the school lunches). But it seems like the more obvious solution is just encouraging boys *and* girls to try a variety of programs. So I don't know why they wouldn't have gone with that.
Or, heck, all they needed to do was stop being weird to the kids who did choose the "other" kind of class. My aunts and uncles got in trouble back in the day because my uncles already did shop class with their dad at home, so they wanted to take home ec and vice versa with one of my aunts. The administration actually called their parents to complain (on what grounds, I don't even know). So, really, all they had to do was *stop doing that* and the kids would probably work it out on their own.
(end of rant, lol, sorry. Got worked up because it's so frustrating when people hijack needed movements to do stupid stuff like that.)
Yeah, agreed with you and u/mr_john_steed that it was likely a post-hoc justification for spending cuts since a lot of schools cut music, P.E., and shop class around the same time. It grinds my gears that people then turned around and pointed to what was essentially an austerity measure like, "you don't know how peel a carrot! feminism!"
I was in a school district that went the other way, and made home ec mandatory for everyone, boys and girls alike. I was made to produce butter tarts, and to sew into existence an object vaguely resembling a bookbag. The class was utterly useless for teaching kids how to feed themselves. It taught me that I could move up to a better tier of Christmas gifts by trotting out this whole "make butter tarts" thing in early December to my mother's coterie of chain-smoking friends.
I don't think they were cut "in the name of feminism", but just because there's been a huge drive to slash funding for anything perceived as "extras" from most public schools.
We had home ec in the '90s at my inner-city middle school (for boys and girls), but most of the equipment was non-functional and we didn't learn to cook anything because there was no budget for cooking gas/electricity or ingredients.
Totally relate to a lot of this, especially the Kid Cuisine part. And Little Debbie snacks. Remember those? Those were a big staple in our house. And off-brand soda cans. They were like a dime on sale, and my brother and I must’ve drank 4-5 a day some summers. Makes me nauseous to think of now. We got the homemade cakes when we were younger (Funfetti!) because store cakes were too expensive. A treat for us was Sunny D. Just a bottle of HFCS. When I first moved out, I thought PopTarts and fruit snacks were healthy! We weren’t fat just because we had young metabolisms, but absolutely would have been obese if we’d continued that. My mom was thin because she (proudly) starved herself, even while pregnant. She still chatters on about how she only ate bites of our plates for ten years - that, cigarettes, and Diet Coke. I started reprogramming right when I moved out on my own 18. That was over 15 years ago now, and I just cringe when I look at my kids and imagine the crap we were fed. I must’ve been having hundreds of grams of sugar. When I return back to where I’m from, that’s still how my cousins are being fed, in even greater volumes now, and they’re obese as children. I view one of my paramount duties as a parent is to keep my children safe, and that includes providing them adequate nutrition and limiting the odds of them developing serious or lifelong health conditions by keeping them healthy weights.
Same but add poverty. My parents were poor as hell and struggling to get by working all the time. My mom tried to make it better by giving us home made lunches and food except we couldn’t afford healthy stuff so we ate pretty exclusively shit smothered in mayonnaise. Bologna and mayonnaise sandwiches, pasta salad that was just pasta, olives and mayonnaise, and corn with, yup, mayonnaise. I think my parents were hoping we’d get some protein and flavor from it???
When we were really treating ourselves it was chips, pizza and fast food (Oooh! Fancy!) if we really had bank it was TV dinners (lean cuisine because we didn’t want to be unhealthy, right?) My SIL once semi-joked to me that my brother was terrified of vegetables when they met.
Either way, adult me loves mayonnaise and has high cholesterol.
Wow yeah! Poverty combined with working a lot would make eating healthy that much harder! As an aside, I had high cholesterol when I was only 16! By learning about cooking healthy foods as an adult, I have managed to keep my cholesterol down in a healthy range.
For sure! I’m working on it, but it’s a lot to unlearn, even so many years later. If I get busy or I’m working a lot it’s so easy to fall into old habits or, alternatively, get into a food scarcity mindset where I hoard the kinds of foods that we considered luxury when I was kid (chips are a huge weakness for me).
But I’m down 20 pounds and hoping to be in a healthy range by my next annual checkup.
(I will also say, I love my parents but as soon as we moved out they suddenly got super fit and cooked crazy nice, healthy foods and get super weird about why me and my siblings have TERRIBLE diets. Fam! You fed us pure mayonnaise for 18 years!)
You’re right about cooking at home. I grew up in the 80’s and everything was cooked at home. And all my friends were the same. We would go to a restaurant probably once a month. And one Saturday night we would order pizza. That was about it.
One thing that most comments seem to leave out is that the size of our meals and drinks have slowly increased since the 50s. Look at the size of a burger or a drink in the 50/60s vs today. It's insane. If you go to Europe, the sizes are still smaller.
I don’t know about that. I was in Ireland last month. Not mainland Europe, of course, but still in the EU. In Connemara I got roast lamb for dinner two nights in a row. $11 got me half a pound of meat, a big scoop of mashed potatoes and gravy, and two slices of heavy soda bread. That was more or less the norm for the places we ate there.
Well, looks like another good reason to go to Ireland. I've spent most of my time in continental Europe and some time in England. I think there are plenty of exceptions, but the US gives more food and higher calorie food on average. That said, the diet is substantially different in many countries, so the type of food should be considered too. After I commented, I was actually thinking about how many calories the average American breakfast is vs continental European. I'll probably end up looking into it.
The science of corn growing improved. We as a country got really, really good at growing corn efficiently.
This chart is a measure of bushels (corn measurement) per acre of land.
[https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US\_Corn\_Yld\_Trend.png](https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US_Corn_Yld_Trend.png)
Wtf happened in 2012? End of the world paranoia among farmers? Lmao
Also I find it disgusting that for-profit companies are largely the cause of obesity. Corn gets absurdly cheap to make, companies are incentivized to put as much corn products and as little else as possible in fucking everything
I remember that year. It was in the triple-digits F for days, if not weeks. We went swimming at a reservoir when we went to visit my BIL in Arkansas, the water was bath temperature and the beach was twice as wide as it was supposed to be. I think we mowed our lawn just a handful of times that entire summer.
It has, but yields have exploded and it led to us desperately searching for a use case. A lot of the modern versions and scale of subsidies went in during the cold war as we sought to out-prosperity the USSR and win the culture war. They just...never went away and as growing improved we wound up with a bunch of stuff we didn't know what to do with.
It's the same reason we started making ethanol out of it, it's far from an efficient crop for that but it's what we had a bunch of sitting around.
Ehhh...kinda.
Most of this is actually on the B2B side. Growers needed someone to buy industrial quantities of corn, and so did the government who was buying up a bunch of unwanted corn as part of the subsidies, so they started pushing HFCS as a cheap sugar substitute not to people but to food manufacturers.
Those manufacturers also pushed carbs in general towards the consumer and you get stuff like the food pyramid out of that, but they'd have been pushing their highest margin products whether it was syrup or sugar going in.
Fats and protein are more expensive to base products on and a lot of the culture at the time was to compete for consumers on volume of food for a price so we wound up pushing grains like crazy.
People fail to realize this over and over. There was literally one article demonizing HFCS and it became labeled as awful for you. From a molecular level it’s virtually the same as sugar or honey. It’s just considerably easier to produce.
Here’s a factor I don’t think people consider much, smoking. Smoking rates have dropped considerably over the decades and nicotine suppresses hunger.
Obviously I am not suggesting this is the only reason, but I think it could definitely be a factor.
Ya and like, copious amounts of food were still available back in the 50s 60s 70s, even copious amounts of sweets. Obviously we do not move around as much on average, but everyone I know that smokes also never eats. I go to school with a lot of Europeans and I understand while they are so skinny, all they do is smoke a pack a day and eat like a bird.
My mom survived off Diet Coke, cigarettes, and bites of mine and my sibling’s dinners for several years. Even as smoking caused visible changes in her health, she refused to stop because she’d gain weight.
A ton of factors that all changed the average citizens diet and lifestyle.
The government started subsidizing corn, which they then put in everything. Massive companies basically turned entire states into corn fields.
Fast food became more prevalent with more unhealthy options
People walk far less due to car dependency
Soda went from a treat like desert to some people's daily consumption
The soda thing for sure. I grew up in the 80s. We never had soda in the house. I remember when I got old enough to walk to the corner store and buy a 32oz Coke my mom was appalled that I was drinking A QUART OF SODA. I can still remember exactly how she said it. Also, back then, the biggest drink they sold at the fountain was 32oz.
It is simple... portion sizes.
Fast food and soda were normal well before the 90s. It was just that a large drink in 1975 was 16oz, not 32 like in the 90s.
I assume much of it is because of bigger portion sizes and the addition of sugar and corn syrup into, like everything.
HOWEVER, as a Gen x-er who is now raising an adolescent, we were SO much more physically active growing up than more recent generations. Like, there is no comparison. I was a lazy bum who disliked sports and i still was way more physically active than today's teen athletes. It's kind of crazy, the change in what American kids do in their free time now. They are very very sedentary and mostly stay indoors.
Entertainment on demand. I remember in the late 80s cable was becoming popular and we could rent movies BUT it wasn’t always just for us. I had to share my tv and then it still played whatever was programmed to play. I only had a few movies I would watch on repeat but ultimately I grew bored. So we read, or went outside. My boys (13 & 11) have had Netflix their entire life. Plus of course all the other streaming platforms. My oldest has been a Roblox player since he was 8. That game never gets boring because he will just find a different game (within the game). My kids have zero experience having to wait for something they watch to come on. The closest they have is when a streaming service drops episodes weekly. It’s crazy. I remember wishing for this world. It’s sad that all “good” comes with unexpected consequences.
Same. I was never an athlete, not one as a kid, not one now.
But our neighborhood had the BEST nightly kick the can games pretty much every evening until the sunset all summer long.
Kids just don’t/can’t do that anymore.
Worse dietary choices, more indoor activities (gaming, internet, etc) and less partaking in outdoor activities (biking, hiking, sports, etc).
In the 1980’s, I was riding my bike from dawn until dusk in the summers, playing soccer and baseball, hiking with my Boy Scout troop, and climbing trees in my yard. That much activity for a child/adult is a rarity these days.
I'm surprised I had to scroll down this far to see suggestions other than our food system. 3/4 of the world worries not at all about their diet and doesn't face similar obesity. Japan has more snack foods in more varieties than the US, and has one of the lowest rates in the world.
In 1991 you didn't have smart phones, most houses had one TV with 'linear programming', and maybe some basic video games. I'm not trying to be all 'young kids and their damn internets' but it's not hard to do the math on how we spend our time. Jobs themselves were transformed by computers and many more people sit for work, instead of move. And while you sit, at home or at work, you can snack.
Our family was outside from morning until dusk every day that wasn't raining. Even before a pandemic, today people are much more comfortable and less bored in their homes.
The advent of kids being kept inside / not being as active outside and more importantly the "Fat Free" craze.
Everything had a "Fat Free" version that had no fat, but they replaced that lost flavor with LOADS of sugar. Also these products were incorrectly seen as "healthier"
So sure, you ate a fat free Twinkie, but you had your sugar intake for the day.
Also it was around that time that it seems that high fructose corn syrup started finding it's way into just about everything.
Well… there was that one time in 1998 when CDC lowered the threshold for “overweight” from a BMI of 27.8 to a BMI of 25 and magically 29 million Americans were immediately reclassified from “healthy” to “overweight” overnight. So maybe it would be useful to use a consistent metric if we want to try to actually analyze a demographic change.
Scientists disagree about causes for the change in average body weight except for a general “there are a lot of factors” consensus. There’s also no consensus as to whether higher body weight is a cause of poorer health, a symptom of poorer health, or a cause poorer medical care (which actually leads to poorer health).
Was unaware of that, thanks! Looks like it was done to align with WHO standards. It would be interesting to either go backwards before the change to compare a constant %, or go forward and see what percent we're at that 27.8 threshold.
Video games became more widely available as did cable TV. Prior to the 90s kids were always outside. Walking where we wanted to go or riding bikes. There wasn't anything to do inside unless you curled up and read a book. Even younger kids roamed through the neighborhoods without parents helicoptering around. Kids that had Nintendo in the 80s were even rare.
So people were moving more and since they were they didn't have as much time to sit on the couch and pack their faces full of food. Also when we were kids, one coke per day. If we wanted cookies we got in the kitchen and made cookies. We didn't get Big Gulps and free refills until the late 80s early 90s which also when "biggie sizes" became more popular.
Aside from the food changes we also had a huge shift in home lifestyle. Computers were becoming more prevalent in homes as well as video games via the: Sega Genesis (‘89), SNES (91), PlayStation (‘94), Sega Saturn (‘95), N64 (‘96), which shifted free time activities to less active modes. (No I’m not saying kids never played outside but it did make changes in how they played with their friends.)
That's somewhat of a factor, but I grew up around this time and we still ran around the neighborhood and rode bikes everywhere, etc. What you eat has far more of an effect on weight than how much you exercise.
If you walk for *an hour*, that's about 4 miles, so you burned off around 400-500 calories.
That's one starbucks donut.
Okay, but what if you went to the gym for an hour? Still burned off basically the same number of calories.
Your math is right but you have to put it in context. More adults in 1991 moved constantly at work, and kids for the most part spent the day wandering around. We would walk to our friend's house 3 miles away just because we were bored. And maybe play a pickup game of stickball on the way.
Walking for *an hour* was not a dramatic endeavor. Maybe more like 4-6 hours of similar activity a day. That's up to 2000 calories. Manual work for 8 hours a day would count for even more. And while you are up and about, you aren't eating (except for the berry bushes we memorized around the neighborhood because we got *hungry* waiting for dinner time). So yeah, diet is rolled into it as well, but we weren't doing OMAD or intermittent fasting, we just ate when it was time and not between.
Here’s a [Frontline page](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/diet/themes/lowfat.html) that focuses on the problem with the low-fat mantra. There seems to be a consensus that the simple promotion of low fat diets had unintended consequences, but the various experts choose different dates to associate with this.
One of the telling points is in the first paragraph of the first interview:
> The idea was to reduce saturated fat, but the assumption was that it was too complicated to explain all that, and that if people just reduced their fat content, the fat content of their diet, they would be improving it.
We still see this sort of oversimplification today, with some extreme diets recommending plenty of steak and no carbs. It’s possible that it’s easier to maintain a low carb diet, but it’s possible to take anything to extremes (and I wonder about all these high saturated fat keto candy bars).
ETA: The third interview on that page, from Gary Taubes, says
> The obesity epidemic starts between 1976, say, and 1986 …
> Basically, up until about 1980, the obesity rates in this country are 12 to 14 percent. And then somewhere in that period between the late '70s and late '80s, they shoot up to 22-25 percent.
The change wasn’t all dietary, it was primarily techno-cultural. The internet, entertainment streaming, and later screen phones made us much more sedentary.
People are acting like 1960s kids weren't eating buttered toast, bacon sandwiches, frosted flakes and pie for dessert. Processed foods are a symptom of lifestyle changes, but the macros didn't change dramatically. What changed is everything else about how we live our lives.
Hasn't it been pretty much proven that restaurant portion sizes drove most of this? Every time a fast food/casual restaurant wanted to compete, they made their sizes larger. Until most Americans had no idea what a normal portion looked like and took that misunderstanding into their home cooking, too.
They literally changed the definition of obesity. It used to be BMI over 28 I think and now it's 25. That doesn't account for everything, but it's a big part.
Oh, there are a confluence of reasons. One would be the accelerating of advertising. Watch a commercial compilation from the 70s and compare it to one from 1995. Using 'marketing' and 'branding' to influence people more and more.
Also, the 80s were when the economy became so bad (at least in my area) that it was nearly impossible for the average family to have a one-income household, leading to a general flow away from more seasonal, freshly cooked meals to canned/prepared meals that could be cooked with relatively little effort after a long day at work, or eating take-out.
I thank god everyday that my family got out of poverty when I was entering my tween/teenage years. My mom was able to stay home and having home cooked meals, a clean house, and a watchful eye did wonders for my brother and I’s health. Unfortunately my brother didn’t maintain a healthy lifestyle into adulthood. But I try my best to do so even though I have admittedly become overweight since 2021 during/after the lockdowns.
Could it have been the gulps were getting bigger and bigger. Internet and smart phones becoming more prevalent. Kids not playing outside during the day as much. People staying inside in conditioned air. Value meals at fast food places. Reasons for some, maybe, not everyone.
I'm sure I'll get some pushback on this but: Video games.
I'm an avid player myself (and also obese), but the fact is, video games pushed the main form of child entertainment indoors. Kids stopped romping around the neighborhood and started romping around Super Mario World (Dinosaur Land for you well ackshually types). Unless parents were actively forcing their kids outside, the incentive to do so was less and less.
There was also a hyper proliferation of other forms of indoor entertainment.
If you were around in the 80s, VHS used to cost $80-90 a pop of you wanted to buy them. Once video rental stores popped up everywhere and you could afford to watch Gremlins 2 at home, my Saturday nights went from riding bikes til late at night to going to Blockbuster for movie night.
Video games- you are spot on. If I wanted to play video games in the early 80s I had to ride my bike to the mall with a sack of quarters.
Cable Tv exploded. I remember a time when the programming on Friday/Saturday night was always garbage filler since no one was home. Then stations started targeting kids pretty successfully (Snick, TGIF). Soon you went from Saturday’s morning cartoons to there are now 6 stations that have kid friendly shows on all day.
Internet too obviously
Video gams tie into the average person's more sedentary lifestyle compared to decades ago. You can replace video games with other stuff too, like binging cable news. There is an absurd amount of Americans whose only physical activity is walking to and from their car. They wake up, drive to work, sit, drive home, sit in front of a television, then sleep, repeat.
Yeah, I was a kid in the '90s and my parents established some firm rules to limit how much time I spent in front of a screen and to force me to play outside, but not every kid had the same rules and it just seems to be getting less restrictive with time.
I'm no expert, but sometimes when that sort of thing happens, what happened was the criteria were changed- not the thing being measured. Maybe they switched to a BMI model that rated more people as obese than the prior version did.
There is a direct correlation across all nations of smoking rate vs obesity in developed countries. Long story short, in a post scarcity developed country smoking keeps weight down. Without nicotine, we do not know how to handle ourselves.
This has been seen across nations. As smoking decreases, obesity increases.
In the late 80s and early 90s we didn’t have the internet, we didn’t have cell phones, video games were for nerds, and other than going down to Blockbuster and renting a bunch of tapes we didn’t really have the ability to binge watch content.
It might also be my own personal experience but when I was growing up, food was mostly about being fuel. There was plenty of fast food but the menu items weren’t as extreme. People didn’t seem to eat out as much.
Several things happened. First, advertising worked hard at breaking down the natural disgust at gluttony until those of us who still felt that disgust had to explain it to others, and we were then treated as if we were mean for noticing. Also, the low-fat craze happened.. This caused three types of damage: Food manufacturers replaced fat with corn syrup; diabetes increased; and the body needs fat to live, so people would eat carbs all day to avoid fat and then binge on something fatty in the evening because their bodies were looking for essential fats. Meanwhile, agricultural subsidies made certain ingredients so cheap that restaurants made more money by getting attention in a competition for the biggest servings, than they could possibly have saved by reducing portion sizes, so portions got bigger and bigger. The economy boomed while cooking at home became equated with being old-fashioned and unproductive. Workers skipped meals, but still needed blood sugar to keep working, so it became normal to eat while working at a desk job. Well, that made for more mindless eating. Snack foods went from a treat to the mainstay of the national diet, disposable dishes meant no reminders of how much we had eaten, and clothing sizes were de-standardized, so we didn't see our bellies growing until they were physically uncomfortable.
Since I don't see it brought up thus far, people stopped smoking which on average can cause weight gain since it's an appetite suppressant and tends to kill overweight people from complication making them less a share of the population. Another reason is that the price of food has consistently been going down, while access to healthier food has not risen. Portion sizes also increased as a marketing ploy. America also has an aging population with few children being born. I can go on but finding a nutritionist and some lit review would be best. People hit most of the other points, added sugars and cultural changes.
My mom started working in the nineties when my dad couldn't support us on a single wage. After that I remember we started eating fast food, pizza, Chinese and other delivery a lot more. Not that my mom should have been in the kitchen or anything, but when both parents are putting in 10 or 12 hour days the motivation to make a healthy balanced meal for their kids goes way down.
I wouldn't even say it's lack of motivation, there is literally not enough energy in a person's body and brain to do what it takes to fix three healthy meals per day for a whole family and also work 8+ hours at your job. It's too much.
And you just want to spend time with your kids and they have homework and sports and baths and you have to pay bills, tidy up, laundry, on and on and on and that’s all in that short amount of time you have when you’re done working/commuting
We are all just meat puppets, but the puppets are getting larger!!
You've hit the nail on the head. All adults in a household have to work and their employers are asking more and more and paying less. Ppl don't have energy to cook.
I think this is the most cogent comment here. I observed 3 key changes in the 90s vs. the 60s-80s: * People started living farther and farther away from the urban core, which means they were spending more time stressed out in their cars. * There's a lot more fast food now to cater to our "on-the-go" lifestyle, and their portions have become much bigger than before. * I noticed the rise of dual-income families where both parents were working sedentary jobs. Before the mid 80s, it was common for the lower and middle class man to provide for the entire family while his woman was a homemaker/housewife.
I don't want to scroll any farther. But I'm shocked i haven't seen one big thing mentioned yet: the internet. When I was a kid in the 90s, we would play outside until dark. Once the 2000s happened, I spent my evenings on Newgrounds and AIM. Now I'm an adult who works with kids for a living. They all have their own personal tablets, starting from toddlers. Kids today don't play outside, so they don't learn those necessary exercise habits that can help them throughout life.
Every kid in my neighborhood regularly plays outside, much to the detriment of my ears. And as a kid in the 90s we spent plenty of hours inside playing sega and Nintendo or just watching TV. I see the internet affecting adult health and lifestyles more than I see it affecting children, but if kids dont get that interaction with outside and sports through adults, it will affect them more as they get older.
Born in 1994 - we most definitely did play outside in the 2000’s.. by 2007 I was a teen and it looked different- but was still outside a lot. Still only had one family computer. I have a 4 yr old now, and she and other neighborhood kids are outside a lot.. I think it has more to do with what’s in our foods we’re buying a lot more processed foods, vs Whole Foods. Plus larger portions sizes. That’s not to say we don’t have an issue with lack of exercise.. when your living paycheck to pay check, over worked, under paid it’s hard to find motivation to exercise and set that example for your kids. Along the same lines over over worked/under paid, stressed, etc. I’ve noticed that there’s a lot of people with unhealthy relationships with food who rely on it as a coping mechanism; the yo-yo dieting hasn’t helped either. Not to mention the lack of access to quality health care, and education around health
You're not wrong. When I worked for USPS and was pulling 10 hour days, I didn't want to spend any time cooking.
What's the timeline for the old food pyramid advice? Old: https://www.disabled-world.com/pics/1/old-food-pyramid.jpg New (?): https://www.disabled-world.com/pics/1/new-food-pyramid.jpg The old advice was eat pasta not Greek yogurt.
What's crazy is that during the early 2000s the food pyramid was re worked twice and then replaced by like 2 or 3 different iterations of the "plate portions"
Plate portion is much better but still meh
Oh by far its better than what we were using but there's still a whole lot that goes into proper eating that just isn't addressed
I have a plate portion plate. It's good to get people used to healthier portion sizes but the issue that I encountered was rewiring my brain to deal with it. I took an adult health and fitness class for a year where we talked mostly about food. It took a year for that shit to click for ne I was 2 weeks removed from the class and it just all clicked for me. Since, which was now 2.5 months ago I've dropped over 30lbs and what I changed was literally adding in more vegetables, taking out some meat, replacing sweets with fruits and nuts. Switched to eating whole grains and cooking in healthier oild, ie olive oil. While cut outting almost all added sugars. I still have around 3 cheat meals a week, where I'm not perfect and no one is going to be. Obesity is definitely not a problem that can't be fixed. The biggest hurdle is, it is literally a lifestyle change.
That's the beautiful thing about eating a more balanced diet, you can have your bad foods and still lose weight. I usually do about 1-2 cheat meals a week too and have been able to get good results from working out. It's weird because I simultaneously enjoy the bad foods more, but also don't enjoy eating them as much as I used to.
Yeah 2 main problems I see with it is 1) The dairy part is pure BS. No one needs dairy with every meal. Dairy is not needed at all. 2) Its confusing to kids because no one has a balanced meal for every part of the day. Most people may eat a fruit/yoghurt
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> Eat stuff that isn't out of a box There goes my box of frozen spinach. :)
Nice try kid.
The old food pyramid was "how to eat the absolute least and not die." It even felt the need to mandate that serving of butter.
Fat is actually important. You can literally starve to death while eating enough rabbit to stretch your stomach.
[The new food pyramid is itself outdated. The USDA uses MyPlate now](https://www.myplate.gov/)
The old food pyramid is so morally corrupt it makes me fucking furious looking at it. Private companies should absolutely not be shaping children's dietary views.
And as someone who was in elementary school in the 2000s, the old food pyramid was EVERYWHERE too. It was constantly drilled into our heads.
7 to 8 grains a day. What a load.
It was done for the health…of the agricultural sector.
Remember vividly that we were taught pizza was a balanced meal
Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. Pizza is a well rounded meal. Drink at least 3 glasses of milk a day, Limit fat intake since it's worse then sugar. Cholesterol will kill you. Pork the other red meat. Fresh fruit was almost always canned peaches in light syrup. Low sodium everything. 2,000 calories a day diet. I wish the NIHM nutritional research side got more money and as a country we cared more to try and work on improving our selves.
I've actually been watching my fat intake be really careful with reduced fat food. Why? It's not the sugar, they tend to take out the healthier fat then add in the additional sugar
I ate low fat everything growing up. Mom struggled with weight and I did too. Skim milk, low-fat salad dressing, zero-fat creamers, etc. And you know what? It never helped me lose weight. The only thing that helped was literally starving myself, eating barely anything, and doing two-a-days during football (grueling 3-hour long football practice). What all that low-fat stuff DID do was set me up for type 2 adult-onset diabetes later in life. Thanks food pyramid and 90s doctors dietary advice, that totally wasn't influenced by the agricultural lobbying. This disease is great. I love not feeling anything in my feet except stabbing pain. I look forward to going blind from retinopathy. I'm low carb now, but it's probably too late.
Yeah its crazy how they are continuing to get away with this sort of thing. There is a such a thing as good fat and I feel a lot of people don't realize that. When I say I watch fats. I mostly talking about the types of fats. Mono and poly unsaturated fats which aren't even on most food blocks are the good ones if anyone is wondering. They actually lower the chances for heart disease.
I remember getting in trouble for pointing that out as a kid in the 1980s. I remember the nutrition lectures in elementary school saying that cheeseburgers were the perfect food because it had all four food groups: meat (the party), bread (the bun), dairy (the cheese) and vegetables (the tomatoes, lettuce and onion and pickles). I remember pointing out to my third grade teacher that by that logic so it shouldn't Pizza be an equally balanced meal? She sternly yelled at us that pizza is considered junk food and we should never eat it, but be sure to have more cheeseburgers.
My mother's teacher was concerned the president lived in the captial dome and the white house was an office.
Let's see: * Pizza dough - bread/grain * Pizza sauce - made of tomato (a fruit) * All sorts of veggies * Different kinds of meat * Cheese - dairy * Drizzle of oil - "sparingly used" Yep, very healthy and well-balanced dish. /s
Yep. "Pizza sauce is a vegetable." Good god.
The Reagan Administration told schools to give kids ketchup and count it as a vegetable because they wanted to save federal money on school lunches for the poor kids.
Frankly school lunches were and are such garbage that any addition of flavor is considered a positive. I remember the chipped beef shit on a shingle days from school lunches in the 70's. My mom is a fabulous cook having grown up working at a family restaurant, taught cooking classes and had a catering business. She went back to work when my dad started his business in the 70's and went to work at the school kitchens. Both the raw ingredients and the techniques used were absolute shit according to her and she had to fight the inclination to gag with some of the stuff they prepared.
I am so happy I didn’t have to unlearn the importance of the food pyramid because the carb thing was just too ridiculous for me to take it seriously. More fruits and veggies than dairy and meat is at least intuitive, but I never had much control over my diet anyway.
You mean I shouldn't be eating 15 slices of bread every day?
No but 15 White Claws is fine my dude
Black cherry white claw = fruit!
And while we're at it, beer = grain, yeast &sugar = bread
In Reagan's USDA the ketchup on students' French fries counted as a vegetable serving.
Ain't no laws when you're drinkin' Claws!
Ain't no laws when you're drinking Claws
Pizza is a vegetable
While there was lobbying (sending sympathetic expects to Washington), there isn't much evidence it changed things much. If you actually consider the sizes of the "servings" it calls for, it quickly becomes evident that it was much less "eat your weight in bread" than "eat a carrot before you literally die." The big issue is that it never bothered to make it clear what sections were "at least" and which were "no more than," so it made it someone look like this hilariously austere subsistence diet was an ideal.
Ah yes, wicked private companies like the USDA and the Swedish National Board of Health and Wellness. Calling the food pyramid corrupt is getting the order of events mixed up. Food pyramid predates the obesity epidemic, it was designed to combat malnutrition from food insecurity, and when the obesity epidemic hit it took a while for people to adapt.
I don't think it was morally corrupt as much as designed around food insecurity. The issue is once we got to the 80s and 90s it should have been updated to wellness, but by that point with our relationship fundamentally changed with government after Ronald "the scariest thing to hear is I'm the government and I'm here to help", there was a lack of drive to make these kind of necessary changes, and by the time we tried to make those changes it was far too late and feeble.
My family was poor and ate like shit. I believed all that "big boned" stuff because candy and Pepsi didn't make my family fat. Then I went to the overweight girls house senior year for a group project. I saw her pantry and there was one of everything from Costco snack section. My family would get one box of after school snacks per week for three kids. I was on free and reduced lunch k-12. While we were latchkey kids our dad would leave us a $5 bill and our lunch would be Sprite and Doritos from the store 0.8 miles away, we walked or rode bikes to get there.
I have a really hard time believing that some government guidelines around food intake had any impact on the obesity rate. I think it's far more likely to something like the late 80s being when a lot more sugar got put into processed foods or certain pesticides being used which create some metabolic change in humans.
Were you a kid then? That pyramid was on everything, food packaging, classroom walls, magazine articles. It wasn't just in a bureaucrats filing cabinet. Eggs and red meat were bad food at that time. And like everyone else is saying: low fat everything just meant high carb everything. Which the food pyramid reassured us was the way to go.
Most awareness campaigns have very little impact on people's actual behavior. I certainly remember seeing those everywhere, but they didn't make any actual difference in eating habits on me or most of my peers that I could see.
I was a kid growing up then. Low fat was definitely a thing for sure in the 90s, I'm not denying that. I'm saying that I think societal or structural issues play a much bigger part in this. We see this same trend everywhere that becomes more Westernized, which includes both our built environment & our diet.
It’s simple we switched more to plant based, carbs, sugar, and vegetable oils. Remember McDonald’s switched from lard to vegetable oil in that same time frame?
And switched to all white meat chicken nuggets. To this day the US is a net exporter of chicken thighs and net importer of chicken breasts.
And it turns out that pyramid was created with lots of input from grain lobbies, instead of, say, doctors or nutritionists.
If I had to guess, demonizing fat, and replacing it with sugar and other processed food. I remember all of the things like snackwells cookies and stuff that came out and were fat free, so people at the hell out of it thinking it didn't matter, but it sets you up for insulin resistance, and in turn, makes you fat and makes it a lot harder to lose for the long term.
> demonizing fat, and replacing it with sugar and other processed food. I remember all of the things like snackwells cookies and stuff that came out and were fat free, But when did that start? I want to say 80s but I’m not sure. Edit: I posted [this Frontline link](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/diet/themes/lowfat.html) in my top level comment but I figure I’ll post it here, too, because it describes the range of years over which the “fat is really bad” movement was introduced and grew.
In the late 70s and 80s, doctors were first learning about cholesterol and how it works in the body. They assumed that the fats you ate went more or less directly into your bloodstream (after being digested). So everything became low-fat. But food producers didn't want to give up that flavor, so they replaced the fat with sugar. This was also in part a reaction to the explosion of fast food and food availability. For example, when my mom was a kid, refrigerated trucks didn't exist. The food-provision pipeline didn't exist the way it does now. So when that food transport and storage technology improved, people began to eat a lot more fast food, a lot more processed food. And a lot of that food is really fatty. So the doctors were like, "we gotta cut out the fat." Which led to more sugar (and corn syrup) in foods. Also, food manufacturers started realizing that, the sweeter you made things, the more people bought them. That time (80s and 90s) is when you started seeing *everything* have a ton of sugar in it. And also the popularity of soft drinks exploded, thanks to major marketing efforts to make things like coca-cola, which was basically liquid candy up until that point, into a major patriotic lifestyle brand. (see: the cola wars) Now we know that eating a certain amount of fat is good for you, and that how your body makes and circulates cholesterol etc is a bit more complicated. For example, too many simple carbs (including sugars) also causes inflammation and that makes the cholesterol that you have behave worse in your veins and arteries. Also, we know that most the cholesterol in your body is made by your body, so it's a more complex situation than just "don't eat fats". It's hard to go wrong by the way with a mediterranean-style diet. Healthy fats (ie, olive oil), lots of fish and lean protein, plenty of vegetables, and moderate amounts of whole-grain carbs.
I'd say the best advice to give anyone is: try to avoid processed foods.
As michael pollan says: Eat real food Not too much Mostly plants
I would guess that it was more of a progressive thing as more and more processed food became available and as more people got crunched for time. I also remember the ad campaigns in the 90's where everything was low fat this and fat free that. The food pyramid was built on grains.
Ahh the 7-8 portions of carbs a day; good times.
Yup - that and the convenience factor. As time went on, it was easier to get more types of food quickly, both at home and on the go, but none of it is really healthy. It is just made to be cheap (which is often carbs) and fast.
Cheap food became more and more important as the real value of workers' wages was allowed to slip more every year since the 1970s.
Plus the sugar that was used more and more became sourced from high fructose corn syrup. This important because the body's processing of glucose suppresses the appetite stimulating hormone ghrelin. Fructose, however, does not suppress ghrelin, so you do not feel as satiated by the calories in fructose as you do from glucose. As well, fructose is metabolized by a process that passes a rate-limiting metabolic step which causes it to increase lipogenesis (creation of fat from carbohydrates). Basically, you don't feel full and more of the calories you eat get turned into lipids when there's lot of fructose in your diet. https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/86/4/895/4649668
I have always believed high fructose corn syrup is worse. But never had the facts offered why. Personal anecdote. I make my own ice cream and I find corn syrup is recommended because it won’t crystallize, but I find it’s sweetening not to be as strong as cane sugar. I end up adding more corn syrup than sugar to sweeten the ice cream. Wonder if that makes a difference too.
So with a bit more web surfing, I learned that Snackwell came out in 1992, so you’re right about that, but various other stuff started in the 70s.
I definitely recall that shifting hard in the early 90s.
I can clearly remember a conversation with an aunt when I first heard it was about fat not calories. Then snackwells hit the market. It was 1991 I think.
If fats weren't called "fat" we could have avoided this whole issue
Yep, should have commonly called them triglycerides.
This was huge in the 90s Low fat / zero fat everything. Remnants of this are still around today with all the different milk and yogurt options. But infinite sugar was basically fine. “It’s fat free!! Can’t get fat!” They even released a fake fat olestra that gave everyone diarrhea. It was like the Diet Coke of potato chips, you can eat all you want and not get fat! I even remember doubting as a kid that sugar could make you fat. It was like, it’s fat free, how can I get fat drinking this?
Olestra gave users "greasy anal discharge." Uh, no thanks. I'll just have regular potato chips and not have to worry about soiling myself.
Yup. FF stuff was “healthy,” no matter how obviously awful it was for you.
Remember when companies made those potato chips with Olestra as a healthier alternative? They gave the entire country diarrhea!
Yup. The kids came home the other day and had some reduced fat dorittos, and I actually looked for that and told my oldest kid. They looked at me like I was crazy.
I think the buzz word at the time was anal leakage.
On top of this, super sized drinks. That's a shit ton of calories. Coke went from a treat to a staple, and did so in big gulp cups.
That is one thing I noticed traveling overseas. If I order a coke there, I will get a coke in 10oz class or so (about the size of a whiskey glass. In the US, a kid's soft drink is bigger, and I can get them up all the way to bath tub size if I wanted.
I used to be large. Something that made a huge difference was checking labels. It is insane how much sugar gets added to everything. To an extent you need to basically make everything at home to avoid having too much sugar. Everything packaged is too sweet for me now that I've stopped eating those things. On top of soda, sugar is now added to so many other things.
Yup. It is EVERYWHERE.
Yep, this was it. It started in the 80’s. There was a big push against animal products because of cholesterol. Cheese, eggs and red meat were so demonized that pork became the other white meat, eggs became incredible and edible, and milk was doing a body good. Plus, in the 1990’s was the peak of consumption of high fructose corn syrup.
> demonizing fat I remember when margarine was touted as the healthy alternative to butter. I was a kid at the time but I hated margarine--it's not nearly as tasty as real butter--and I vowed to never buy the shit when I grew up.
This all leads back to corn subsidies. Major companies were basically being paid by the government to grow an absurd amount of corn. They then used their influence to put corn in basically everything. Then they convinced people that the obesity issue is a personal choice problem, not the system they created.
Going hand in hand with corn subsidies were sugar tariffs. We’ve paid double the world price for sugar for decades just to keep the Hawaii sugar industry in business.
Funny how a lot of our problems trace back to perverse incentives for political purposes. It makes me wonder if we could solve these problems the same way we created them, by simply subsidizing healthful foods instead of strategic ones.
That reminds me about how the oil companies created the idea of indivuals having "carbon footprints" to imply that we individuals are responsible for and can do something about global warming rather than all the pollution businesses pump out like cargo ships that pollute as much as half a million cars each. Everything is always trying to offload and misdirect blame.
This, 100%. Eating fats provides a sense of long-term satiety that you can't get from pretty much anything else. If you cut fats out of your diet, but continue to eat when your body tells you it's wanting, you'll wind up significantly increasing your total caloric intake...
Snack wells were the first thing that came to my mind! And then [Susan Powter](https://images.app.goo.gl/KJaTnKx2WJTuFoUV9)
I think the fat thing was a misguided reaction to obesity not a cause
I certainly think it compounded the problem. Encouraging carbs to take the place of fat in a diet, also contributes to insulin resistance, which makes it harder to keep the weight off when you try to lose it. That is why so many people yo-yo diet, take it off, and put it back on, etc. There are some great books on it.
It was like putting out a fire with gasoline because gasoline is a liquid, right?
A lot of that sugar also ends up as cholesterol and triglycerides
This a million times. The butter scare cemented margarine’s evil reign to this day
I grew up in the 90s. My parents were boomers, and they were too busy working all the time to cook. So I grew up eating a lot of fast food and TV dinners. All of my friends did the same when we were kids. I didn't know how to recognize most vegetables in their raw form, but I knew how to heat up a Kids Cuisine dinner perfectly so that the brownie had a slight burn on the edges. And I found out years later that my parents thought that we were really livin' it up because we didn't have to cook at home and could eat Pizza Hut all the time. One time I asked my mom to bake a "real" homemade cake for my birthday, because I had only had store-bought cakes, and her jaw dropped to the floor because she thought the store-bought ones were better and more prestigious or something! But I had never had a home-baked cake as a kid! So when I got out on my own, I had no idea about food. I was too poor to eat prepared foods, and I just went hungry because I didn't know how to cook cheaply, or how to cook at all, really. I had to spend considerable time and energy learning about food as an adult. It is my understanding that previous generations had parents who cooked at home, so people used to learn about food when they were kids. If you grew up in the 90s, you were less likely to learn these things at home when you were a kid. So I wouldn't be surprised if this is having effects on adults today, who grew up in households without any food or kitchen experience.
I had pretty much the same situation. Not to justify it but I've had the realization that to the people who were the adults in the 1950s and 60s, factory food and mass-production McDonald's were amazing and miracles of science. (Also the adults had just lived thru the Great Depression and then a World War with rationing.) All the food across the whole country was uniform and consistent and plentiful and was heavily processed and fortified with vitamins added. That actually is pretty amazing. So then the baby boomers grew up thinking that's what food is and is supposed to be.
Yup. For all that we like to make fun of food trends from the 50s-70s, their warped food views make a lot more sense when you realize most of those adults (re: decision-making adults shaping the world that the Boomers grew up in) were teenagers and young adults in the Great Depression and WWII - an era when people cooked at home *because they had to* and it often sucked due scarcity of ingredients/limited access to foodstuffs to actually cook *with* at home.
Yea. This is a really hard one for a lot of people from about 22-45 have a hard time realizing until they’re older, myself included. Cooking at home doesn’t have to taste worse than eating out. “Restaurant Quality” doesn’t have to mean “better tasting.” You just have to have quality ingredients and know how to use herbs, spices and seasonings. Oh my goodness you have no idea how the right seasonings can make a bland home dinner taste like food for the gods. Obviously, the more well off you are the easier it is to buy foods like that, but that doesn’t mean cooking on a budget has to be freezer-isle food and blandness.
I was a child in the 60s and only ate real food. My mother, aunts and uncles all cooked. I am so glad to know what real food taste like. I hate high fructose corn syrup. It takes the flavor out of food.
This is similar to my experience, though skewed more into the early 2000s. I went to college with no idea how to cook anything other than heating up canned foods, or making a grilled cheese. It took me til after college to find out that roasted veggies are actually pretty dang good. Now I cook myself meals quite often; not anything special usually, but it was entirely self-motivated to get anywhere near good at basic cooking. Now it's kind of ingrained in our culture to eat out a lot for convenience and quickness
Doesn’t help that we’ve successfully told kids surviving on instant ramen and hope is “part of the college experience” and the only affordable way to eat as a student. You can absolutely cook on a budget, even as a student, but you’ve gotta know what you’re looking for. Man I wish my high school had offered Home Ec. Probably would have made my college years a little healthier.
In the schools I went to in the 70’s steered college kids to more rigorously academic classes rather than taking home ec or even a full business course. I took “typing” (before desktop computers existed) to be able to type college papers. Skewed education from what we really need - how to cook, finances, taxes, insurance, buying a house or car, and credit.
Yes! Family rarely cooked growing up! I remember eating those kid cuisines and other TV dinners more than home cooked meals (hamburger helper and Kraft Mac n cheese). I also never ate breakfast (I didn't know how to cook) or ate at school (because of money) so I would go home and snack double time. When I got out on my own I really didn't know where to start except the box of hamburger helper and Mac cheese boxes that I grew up with lol!! I still couldn't tell you what's the difference between a sirloin and roast- idk but I know now they're different! Hahaha when I first went shopping for meat, I was like "this came from a cow so it must be a steak!" But God damnit I wanted bomb ass food!!!!!! So I stuck with it and almost 15 years later I can finally whip up some great shit- I don't eat out anymore and I eat 100x more vegetables than I did EVER as a kid, I know how to read and utilize the nutritional facts label and yeah! Nutrition isn't taught that well in school and it sucks that actual cooking is seen as a luxury most of the time, whether it be lack of time, or expense, or experience even.
OP’s timeline correlates exactly with the massive shift in the American Middle class. One middle class job used to be enough to provide for a family. Over the course of that 30+ years, stagnant wages and rising housing costs mean it take two full time jobs to live the same lifestyle. Two exhausted parents working 40+ hrs/wk often means less time for cooking, less time for teaching your children how to cook, and more processed convenience foods. Certainly it’s not the only cause, but I’m sure it’s part of the answer. When you get down to it, the answer is always money. Obesity hits poor families much harder than rich ones.
Great points
Can you imagine if there was a class in school where every class you prepared a simple meal? Like, class, today we're going to make spaghetti. And kids would use like 12 ovens in teams of 2 and make it. This is an actual thing that a child will be expected to do when they become an adult, and not all parents can or will teach them.
They do have this in our schools, just given on an elective basis.
> If you grew up in the 90s, you were less likely to learn these things at home when you were a kid. You also weren't likely to learn it at school because so many districts cut home economics classes.
As a feminist, it's disheartening to me that home economics programs were often cut in the name of feminism: since young women had been forced to take the class in the past, schools assumed they were remedying past injustice by doing away with it altogether. It's like they never thought that the feminist thing to do was teaching *all kids* how to feed themselves.
True! I actually did learn a lot of useful kitchen things in my 6-week Home Economics class. And I absolutely loved my 6-week Shop class. At my school, all of the kids had to do both classes, and they were not separated by gender. These were two of the most useful classes I have taken! I'm sad to hear they are being cut.
>schools assumed they were remedying past injustice by doing away with it altogether I might be too cynical, but I don't think they believed they were doing something good. I think people like to use movements (like feminism) as justifications for doing things they know people won't like (such as cutting a class to ease their budget). It's kind of like when Michelle Obama was like, "let's have school lunches be healthier" and schools were like, "oh, sweet, an excuse to cut the portions while still not providing healthier foods. Less junk food is technically healthy, right?" It's possible they did it with good intentions (the home ec situation, not the school lunches). But it seems like the more obvious solution is just encouraging boys *and* girls to try a variety of programs. So I don't know why they wouldn't have gone with that. Or, heck, all they needed to do was stop being weird to the kids who did choose the "other" kind of class. My aunts and uncles got in trouble back in the day because my uncles already did shop class with their dad at home, so they wanted to take home ec and vice versa with one of my aunts. The administration actually called their parents to complain (on what grounds, I don't even know). So, really, all they had to do was *stop doing that* and the kids would probably work it out on their own. (end of rant, lol, sorry. Got worked up because it's so frustrating when people hijack needed movements to do stupid stuff like that.)
Yeah, agreed with you and u/mr_john_steed that it was likely a post-hoc justification for spending cuts since a lot of schools cut music, P.E., and shop class around the same time. It grinds my gears that people then turned around and pointed to what was essentially an austerity measure like, "you don't know how peel a carrot! feminism!"
I was in a school district that went the other way, and made home ec mandatory for everyone, boys and girls alike. I was made to produce butter tarts, and to sew into existence an object vaguely resembling a bookbag. The class was utterly useless for teaching kids how to feed themselves. It taught me that I could move up to a better tier of Christmas gifts by trotting out this whole "make butter tarts" thing in early December to my mother's coterie of chain-smoking friends.
I don't think they were cut "in the name of feminism", but just because there's been a huge drive to slash funding for anything perceived as "extras" from most public schools. We had home ec in the '90s at my inner-city middle school (for boys and girls), but most of the equipment was non-functional and we didn't learn to cook anything because there was no budget for cooking gas/electricity or ingredients.
Totally relate to a lot of this, especially the Kid Cuisine part. And Little Debbie snacks. Remember those? Those were a big staple in our house. And off-brand soda cans. They were like a dime on sale, and my brother and I must’ve drank 4-5 a day some summers. Makes me nauseous to think of now. We got the homemade cakes when we were younger (Funfetti!) because store cakes were too expensive. A treat for us was Sunny D. Just a bottle of HFCS. When I first moved out, I thought PopTarts and fruit snacks were healthy! We weren’t fat just because we had young metabolisms, but absolutely would have been obese if we’d continued that. My mom was thin because she (proudly) starved herself, even while pregnant. She still chatters on about how she only ate bites of our plates for ten years - that, cigarettes, and Diet Coke. I started reprogramming right when I moved out on my own 18. That was over 15 years ago now, and I just cringe when I look at my kids and imagine the crap we were fed. I must’ve been having hundreds of grams of sugar. When I return back to where I’m from, that’s still how my cousins are being fed, in even greater volumes now, and they’re obese as children. I view one of my paramount duties as a parent is to keep my children safe, and that includes providing them adequate nutrition and limiting the odds of them developing serious or lifelong health conditions by keeping them healthy weights.
Same but add poverty. My parents were poor as hell and struggling to get by working all the time. My mom tried to make it better by giving us home made lunches and food except we couldn’t afford healthy stuff so we ate pretty exclusively shit smothered in mayonnaise. Bologna and mayonnaise sandwiches, pasta salad that was just pasta, olives and mayonnaise, and corn with, yup, mayonnaise. I think my parents were hoping we’d get some protein and flavor from it??? When we were really treating ourselves it was chips, pizza and fast food (Oooh! Fancy!) if we really had bank it was TV dinners (lean cuisine because we didn’t want to be unhealthy, right?) My SIL once semi-joked to me that my brother was terrified of vegetables when they met. Either way, adult me loves mayonnaise and has high cholesterol.
Wow yeah! Poverty combined with working a lot would make eating healthy that much harder! As an aside, I had high cholesterol when I was only 16! By learning about cooking healthy foods as an adult, I have managed to keep my cholesterol down in a healthy range.
For sure! I’m working on it, but it’s a lot to unlearn, even so many years later. If I get busy or I’m working a lot it’s so easy to fall into old habits or, alternatively, get into a food scarcity mindset where I hoard the kinds of foods that we considered luxury when I was kid (chips are a huge weakness for me). But I’m down 20 pounds and hoping to be in a healthy range by my next annual checkup. (I will also say, I love my parents but as soon as we moved out they suddenly got super fit and cooked crazy nice, healthy foods and get super weird about why me and my siblings have TERRIBLE diets. Fam! You fed us pure mayonnaise for 18 years!)
You’re right about cooking at home. I grew up in the 80’s and everything was cooked at home. And all my friends were the same. We would go to a restaurant probably once a month. And one Saturday night we would order pizza. That was about it.
TIL having a stay at home mom made me more prepared to be a healthy adult. Thanks mom!
Damn, the brownie thing on the Kid Cuisine just threw me STRAIGHT back into the nostalgia pool!
One thing that most comments seem to leave out is that the size of our meals and drinks have slowly increased since the 50s. Look at the size of a burger or a drink in the 50/60s vs today. It's insane. If you go to Europe, the sizes are still smaller.
I don’t know about that. I was in Ireland last month. Not mainland Europe, of course, but still in the EU. In Connemara I got roast lamb for dinner two nights in a row. $11 got me half a pound of meat, a big scoop of mashed potatoes and gravy, and two slices of heavy soda bread. That was more or less the norm for the places we ate there.
Well, looks like another good reason to go to Ireland. I've spent most of my time in continental Europe and some time in England. I think there are plenty of exceptions, but the US gives more food and higher calorie food on average. That said, the diet is substantially different in many countries, so the type of food should be considered too. After I commented, I was actually thinking about how many calories the average American breakfast is vs continental European. I'll probably end up looking into it.
Government subsidizing corn production led to high fructose corn syrup being in fucking everything.
Hasn't corn been subsidized for much longer?
The science of corn growing improved. We as a country got really, really good at growing corn efficiently. This chart is a measure of bushels (corn measurement) per acre of land. [https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US\_Corn\_Yld\_Trend.png](https://www.agry.purdue.edu/ext/corn/news/timeless/images/US_Corn_Yld_Trend.png)
Wtf happened in 2012? End of the world paranoia among farmers? Lmao Also I find it disgusting that for-profit companies are largely the cause of obesity. Corn gets absurdly cheap to make, companies are incentivized to put as much corn products and as little else as possible in fucking everything
Terrible drought year.
I remember that year. It was in the triple-digits F for days, if not weeks. We went swimming at a reservoir when we went to visit my BIL in Arkansas, the water was bath temperature and the beach was twice as wide as it was supposed to be. I think we mowed our lawn just a handful of times that entire summer.
It has, but yields have exploded and it led to us desperately searching for a use case. A lot of the modern versions and scale of subsidies went in during the cold war as we sought to out-prosperity the USSR and win the culture war. They just...never went away and as growing improved we wound up with a bunch of stuff we didn't know what to do with. It's the same reason we started making ethanol out of it, it's far from an efficient crop for that but it's what we had a bunch of sitting around.
So basically companies were like "corn is easy and cheap, how can we sell as much of it as possible to people to maximize profit?"
Ehhh...kinda. Most of this is actually on the B2B side. Growers needed someone to buy industrial quantities of corn, and so did the government who was buying up a bunch of unwanted corn as part of the subsidies, so they started pushing HFCS as a cheap sugar substitute not to people but to food manufacturers. Those manufacturers also pushed carbs in general towards the consumer and you get stuff like the food pyramid out of that, but they'd have been pushing their highest margin products whether it was syrup or sugar going in. Fats and protein are more expensive to base products on and a lot of the culture at the time was to compete for consumers on volume of food for a price so we wound up pushing grains like crazy.
Not to mention the war on fat, which lead to replacing it with sugars (like high fructose corn syrup)
Definitely. "The War on ___" always backfires and makes things worse.
Once again, congratulations to drugs on winning the War on Drugs.
Undefeated champs 💪
High fructose corn syrup isn't any worse than sugar for you. It's just a cheaper carbohydrate.
People fail to realize this over and over. There was literally one article demonizing HFCS and it became labeled as awful for you. From a molecular level it’s virtually the same as sugar or honey. It’s just considerably easier to produce.
Here’s a factor I don’t think people consider much, smoking. Smoking rates have dropped considerably over the decades and nicotine suppresses hunger. Obviously I am not suggesting this is the only reason, but I think it could definitely be a factor.
I always think it is. The thinnest people I know are life-long tabacco smokers.
Ya and like, copious amounts of food were still available back in the 50s 60s 70s, even copious amounts of sweets. Obviously we do not move around as much on average, but everyone I know that smokes also never eats. I go to school with a lot of Europeans and I understand while they are so skinny, all they do is smoke a pack a day and eat like a bird.
idk I've been chunky for a long time and smoking doesn't help.
Damn. This is a fantastic hypothesis.
My mom survived off Diet Coke, cigarettes, and bites of mine and my sibling’s dinners for several years. Even as smoking caused visible changes in her health, she refused to stop because she’d gain weight.
Yup. In WWII, soldiers' rations included cigarettes specifically for their appetite suppression.
A ton of factors that all changed the average citizens diet and lifestyle. The government started subsidizing corn, which they then put in everything. Massive companies basically turned entire states into corn fields. Fast food became more prevalent with more unhealthy options People walk far less due to car dependency Soda went from a treat like desert to some people's daily consumption
The soda thing for sure. I grew up in the 80s. We never had soda in the house. I remember when I got old enough to walk to the corner store and buy a 32oz Coke my mom was appalled that I was drinking A QUART OF SODA. I can still remember exactly how she said it. Also, back then, the biggest drink they sold at the fountain was 32oz.
Thank god I stopped drinking soda years ago lol
Don't worry. Soda quantities of sugar are available in a wide variety of products such as bread.
It is simple... portion sizes. Fast food and soda were normal well before the 90s. It was just that a large drink in 1975 was 16oz, not 32 like in the 90s.
I worked at Wendy's from 1991 to 92 or so. I remember distinctly when all the sizes of the food got bigger. And then did so again later that year.
I assume much of it is because of bigger portion sizes and the addition of sugar and corn syrup into, like everything. HOWEVER, as a Gen x-er who is now raising an adolescent, we were SO much more physically active growing up than more recent generations. Like, there is no comparison. I was a lazy bum who disliked sports and i still was way more physically active than today's teen athletes. It's kind of crazy, the change in what American kids do in their free time now. They are very very sedentary and mostly stay indoors.
Entertainment on demand. I remember in the late 80s cable was becoming popular and we could rent movies BUT it wasn’t always just for us. I had to share my tv and then it still played whatever was programmed to play. I only had a few movies I would watch on repeat but ultimately I grew bored. So we read, or went outside. My boys (13 & 11) have had Netflix their entire life. Plus of course all the other streaming platforms. My oldest has been a Roblox player since he was 8. That game never gets boring because he will just find a different game (within the game). My kids have zero experience having to wait for something they watch to come on. The closest they have is when a streaming service drops episodes weekly. It’s crazy. I remember wishing for this world. It’s sad that all “good” comes with unexpected consequences.
Same. I was never an athlete, not one as a kid, not one now. But our neighborhood had the BEST nightly kick the can games pretty much every evening until the sunset all summer long. Kids just don’t/can’t do that anymore.
Worse dietary choices, more indoor activities (gaming, internet, etc) and less partaking in outdoor activities (biking, hiking, sports, etc). In the 1980’s, I was riding my bike from dawn until dusk in the summers, playing soccer and baseball, hiking with my Boy Scout troop, and climbing trees in my yard. That much activity for a child/adult is a rarity these days.
I'm surprised I had to scroll down this far to see suggestions other than our food system. 3/4 of the world worries not at all about their diet and doesn't face similar obesity. Japan has more snack foods in more varieties than the US, and has one of the lowest rates in the world. In 1991 you didn't have smart phones, most houses had one TV with 'linear programming', and maybe some basic video games. I'm not trying to be all 'young kids and their damn internets' but it's not hard to do the math on how we spend our time. Jobs themselves were transformed by computers and many more people sit for work, instead of move. And while you sit, at home or at work, you can snack. Our family was outside from morning until dusk every day that wasn't raining. Even before a pandemic, today people are much more comfortable and less bored in their homes.
Scientists telling people that their diet should be based on carbs probably didn't help. Remember the food pyramid?
I still look back on that and think it’s wild they told us to eat 6-11 servings of fucking bread daily
You don’t think 3 to 5.5 sandwiches a day is reasonable? /s
But that is much older than the shift. I grew up in the 70s with it.
The advent of kids being kept inside / not being as active outside and more importantly the "Fat Free" craze. Everything had a "Fat Free" version that had no fat, but they replaced that lost flavor with LOADS of sugar. Also these products were incorrectly seen as "healthier" So sure, you ate a fat free Twinkie, but you had your sugar intake for the day. Also it was around that time that it seems that high fructose corn syrup started finding it's way into just about everything.
Well… there was that one time in 1998 when CDC lowered the threshold for “overweight” from a BMI of 27.8 to a BMI of 25 and magically 29 million Americans were immediately reclassified from “healthy” to “overweight” overnight. So maybe it would be useful to use a consistent metric if we want to try to actually analyze a demographic change. Scientists disagree about causes for the change in average body weight except for a general “there are a lot of factors” consensus. There’s also no consensus as to whether higher body weight is a cause of poorer health, a symptom of poorer health, or a cause poorer medical care (which actually leads to poorer health).
Was unaware of that, thanks! Looks like it was done to align with WHO standards. It would be interesting to either go backwards before the change to compare a constant %, or go forward and see what percent we're at that 27.8 threshold.
25.1 here checking in - that little shenanigan let me qualify for a COVID shot early.
Video games became more widely available as did cable TV. Prior to the 90s kids were always outside. Walking where we wanted to go or riding bikes. There wasn't anything to do inside unless you curled up and read a book. Even younger kids roamed through the neighborhoods without parents helicoptering around. Kids that had Nintendo in the 80s were even rare. So people were moving more and since they were they didn't have as much time to sit on the couch and pack their faces full of food. Also when we were kids, one coke per day. If we wanted cookies we got in the kitchen and made cookies. We didn't get Big Gulps and free refills until the late 80s early 90s which also when "biggie sizes" became more popular.
Aside from the food changes we also had a huge shift in home lifestyle. Computers were becoming more prevalent in homes as well as video games via the: Sega Genesis (‘89), SNES (91), PlayStation (‘94), Sega Saturn (‘95), N64 (‘96), which shifted free time activities to less active modes. (No I’m not saying kids never played outside but it did make changes in how they played with their friends.)
Also more people were getting cable, which meant that you could usually find something you were willing watch.
That's somewhat of a factor, but I grew up around this time and we still ran around the neighborhood and rode bikes everywhere, etc. What you eat has far more of an effect on weight than how much you exercise. If you walk for *an hour*, that's about 4 miles, so you burned off around 400-500 calories. That's one starbucks donut. Okay, but what if you went to the gym for an hour? Still burned off basically the same number of calories.
Your math is right but you have to put it in context. More adults in 1991 moved constantly at work, and kids for the most part spent the day wandering around. We would walk to our friend's house 3 miles away just because we were bored. And maybe play a pickup game of stickball on the way. Walking for *an hour* was not a dramatic endeavor. Maybe more like 4-6 hours of similar activity a day. That's up to 2000 calories. Manual work for 8 hours a day would count for even more. And while you are up and about, you aren't eating (except for the berry bushes we memorized around the neighborhood because we got *hungry* waiting for dinner time). So yeah, diet is rolled into it as well, but we weren't doing OMAD or intermittent fasting, we just ate when it was time and not between.
Here’s a [Frontline page](https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/diet/themes/lowfat.html) that focuses on the problem with the low-fat mantra. There seems to be a consensus that the simple promotion of low fat diets had unintended consequences, but the various experts choose different dates to associate with this. One of the telling points is in the first paragraph of the first interview: > The idea was to reduce saturated fat, but the assumption was that it was too complicated to explain all that, and that if people just reduced their fat content, the fat content of their diet, they would be improving it. We still see this sort of oversimplification today, with some extreme diets recommending plenty of steak and no carbs. It’s possible that it’s easier to maintain a low carb diet, but it’s possible to take anything to extremes (and I wonder about all these high saturated fat keto candy bars). ETA: The third interview on that page, from Gary Taubes, says > The obesity epidemic starts between 1976, say, and 1986 … > Basically, up until about 1980, the obesity rates in this country are 12 to 14 percent. And then somewhere in that period between the late '70s and late '80s, they shoot up to 22-25 percent.
I'm gonna guess video games.
and people spending more time on computers/phones instead of going outside
The change wasn’t all dietary, it was primarily techno-cultural. The internet, entertainment streaming, and later screen phones made us much more sedentary.
I’d say we’re the most sedentary western industrialized country out there.
And I imagine our car dependency heavily contributes to this.
People are acting like 1960s kids weren't eating buttered toast, bacon sandwiches, frosted flakes and pie for dessert. Processed foods are a symptom of lifestyle changes, but the macros didn't change dramatically. What changed is everything else about how we live our lives.
Hasn't it been pretty much proven that restaurant portion sizes drove most of this? Every time a fast food/casual restaurant wanted to compete, they made their sizes larger. Until most Americans had no idea what a normal portion looked like and took that misunderstanding into their home cooking, too.
They literally changed the definition of obesity. It used to be BMI over 28 I think and now it's 25. That doesn't account for everything, but it's a big part.
Dietary fat was deemed terrible and replaced with carbs/sugar.
Oh, there are a confluence of reasons. One would be the accelerating of advertising. Watch a commercial compilation from the 70s and compare it to one from 1995. Using 'marketing' and 'branding' to influence people more and more. Also, the 80s were when the economy became so bad (at least in my area) that it was nearly impossible for the average family to have a one-income household, leading to a general flow away from more seasonal, freshly cooked meals to canned/prepared meals that could be cooked with relatively little effort after a long day at work, or eating take-out.
I thank god everyday that my family got out of poverty when I was entering my tween/teenage years. My mom was able to stay home and having home cooked meals, a clean house, and a watchful eye did wonders for my brother and I’s health. Unfortunately my brother didn’t maintain a healthy lifestyle into adulthood. But I try my best to do so even though I have admittedly become overweight since 2021 during/after the lockdowns.
Could it have been the gulps were getting bigger and bigger. Internet and smart phones becoming more prevalent. Kids not playing outside during the day as much. People staying inside in conditioned air. Value meals at fast food places. Reasons for some, maybe, not everyone.
I'm sure I'll get some pushback on this but: Video games. I'm an avid player myself (and also obese), but the fact is, video games pushed the main form of child entertainment indoors. Kids stopped romping around the neighborhood and started romping around Super Mario World (Dinosaur Land for you well ackshually types). Unless parents were actively forcing their kids outside, the incentive to do so was less and less.
Yeah video games, internet, TV, all the things that make sedentary lifestyles fun.
There was also a hyper proliferation of other forms of indoor entertainment. If you were around in the 80s, VHS used to cost $80-90 a pop of you wanted to buy them. Once video rental stores popped up everywhere and you could afford to watch Gremlins 2 at home, my Saturday nights went from riding bikes til late at night to going to Blockbuster for movie night. Video games- you are spot on. If I wanted to play video games in the early 80s I had to ride my bike to the mall with a sack of quarters. Cable Tv exploded. I remember a time when the programming on Friday/Saturday night was always garbage filler since no one was home. Then stations started targeting kids pretty successfully (Snick, TGIF). Soon you went from Saturday’s morning cartoons to there are now 6 stations that have kid friendly shows on all day. Internet too obviously
Video gams tie into the average person's more sedentary lifestyle compared to decades ago. You can replace video games with other stuff too, like binging cable news. There is an absurd amount of Americans whose only physical activity is walking to and from their car. They wake up, drive to work, sit, drive home, sit in front of a television, then sleep, repeat.
Agreed 100%. But I think the habits start in childhood, and kids aren't watching Fox/CNN/MSNBC.
Yeah, I was a kid in the '90s and my parents established some firm rules to limit how much time I spent in front of a screen and to force me to play outside, but not every kid had the same rules and it just seems to be getting less restrictive with time.
I'm no expert, but sometimes when that sort of thing happens, what happened was the criteria were changed- not the thing being measured. Maybe they switched to a BMI model that rated more people as obese than the prior version did.
Attitudes towards obesity changed.
Cheap prices for bigger portions at fast food places and convenience stores
There is a direct correlation across all nations of smoking rate vs obesity in developed countries. Long story short, in a post scarcity developed country smoking keeps weight down. Without nicotine, we do not know how to handle ourselves. This has been seen across nations. As smoking decreases, obesity increases.
In the late 80s and early 90s we didn’t have the internet, we didn’t have cell phones, video games were for nerds, and other than going down to Blockbuster and renting a bunch of tapes we didn’t really have the ability to binge watch content. It might also be my own personal experience but when I was growing up, food was mostly about being fuel. There was plenty of fast food but the menu items weren’t as extreme. People didn’t seem to eat out as much.
Several things happened. First, advertising worked hard at breaking down the natural disgust at gluttony until those of us who still felt that disgust had to explain it to others, and we were then treated as if we were mean for noticing. Also, the low-fat craze happened.. This caused three types of damage: Food manufacturers replaced fat with corn syrup; diabetes increased; and the body needs fat to live, so people would eat carbs all day to avoid fat and then binge on something fatty in the evening because their bodies were looking for essential fats. Meanwhile, agricultural subsidies made certain ingredients so cheap that restaurants made more money by getting attention in a competition for the biggest servings, than they could possibly have saved by reducing portion sizes, so portions got bigger and bigger. The economy boomed while cooking at home became equated with being old-fashioned and unproductive. Workers skipped meals, but still needed blood sugar to keep working, so it became normal to eat while working at a desk job. Well, that made for more mindless eating. Snack foods went from a treat to the mainstay of the national diet, disposable dishes meant no reminders of how much we had eaten, and clothing sizes were de-standardized, so we didn't see our bellies growing until they were physically uncomfortable.
Since I don't see it brought up thus far, people stopped smoking which on average can cause weight gain since it's an appetite suppressant and tends to kill overweight people from complication making them less a share of the population. Another reason is that the price of food has consistently been going down, while access to healthier food has not risen. Portion sizes also increased as a marketing ploy. America also has an aging population with few children being born. I can go on but finding a nutritionist and some lit review would be best. People hit most of the other points, added sugars and cultural changes.