Why were Americans of all ages so thin during the 1960s and 1970s?

[Anonymous]

Smaller family size and more working moms meant more eating out. And in the 1980s the variety of cuisines and our taste for them grew (people got into things like sushi and pad thai), meaning fast casual and takeout options exploded too.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Could somebody recommend an article or book that explains how food got so cheap, relative to already low inflation? We eat out constantly and microwave often. But, I'm fascinated at the number of restaurants and take out places. I think this is partly a function of highly dense urban cities, where catering to large numbers of busy people is a good model for restaurants - especially the fast casual ones. Is the cost of growing food, relative to wage gains, that much of a delta now than in the 70s?

Curious.

Food processing plants, artificial growth hormones, and factory farms for everything from dairy to wheat to chickens. Didn't have super-farms before 1990s really and with their explosion - every food staple is now cheaper. This is also why you'll almost never see a child in the u.s. die of malnutrition unless they live in an abusive household.

[Anonymous]

My grandpa owned a restaurant and we still have copies of his old menus and the photos from the staged photoshoots of the dishes for the menus, which show the growing portion size.

He owned the restaurant from the late 60s to the early 00s. 60s, 70s, and even most of the 80s, the portion sizes were pretty normal (standard). Things started getting bigger in the late 80s and then just kept increasing throughout the years.

An example of a breakfast that was on the menu in the 70s was 2 eggs over easy, 2 pieces of white toast, 2 slices of bacon, a side of seasonal fruit. That same breakfast on the last menu before he sold was 3 eggs any style, 3 pieces of bacon/sausage links, hash browns, and your choice of either 2 pieces of Texas-style toast/2 pancakes/1 waffle. He had to keep increasing the portion size and the items because there's nothing a consumer hates more than having to add on items a la carte.

A lunch special was a tuna melt on normal bread with some fries back then. A lunch special in the 90s was a tuna melt on huge, thick sliced bread with multiple kinds of cheese, and bottomless fries if eaten in the restaurant.

Factor in the huge portion sizes with a lack of movement and you get obesity. My siblings who have kids don't let them roam and play outside like we were allowed to do as kids. We're ages 29-38 for reference. They're too afraid of child predators and all of the what ifs that could happen. I don't have kids, so I won't pretend to know what that's like. But I see the same thing in my neighborhood. The kids don't really get to ride their bikes any farther than a few houses down from theirs or in circles in the cul-de-sac. Our bikes WERE our lives when we were kids. We rode those things all over our town to the library, our local water park, the mall, etc.

[Anonymous]

So here's some random kids from the 2000s. They don't look all that different in size from the kids in the other class picture above.

[Anonymous]

posting random pictures of schoolchildren is not a particularly statistically sound method of determining obesity rates across generations, LOL...

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:posting random pictures of schoolchildren is not a particularly statistically sound method of determining obesity rates across generations, LOL...

LOL, someone else posted a picture of a random class from the 70s as evidence that everyone was was "so thin" back then. Just showing how silly that is.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My grandpa owned a restaurant and we still have copies of his old menus and the photos from the staged photoshoots of the dishes for the menus, which show the growing portion size.

He owned the restaurant from the late 60s to the early 00s. 60s, 70s, and even most of the 80s, the portion sizes were pretty normal (standard). Things started getting bigger in the late 80s and then just kept increasing throughout the years.

An example of a breakfast that was on the menu in the 70s was 2 eggs over easy, 2 pieces of white toast, 2 slices of bacon, a side of seasonal fruit. That same breakfast on the last menu before he sold was 3 eggs any style, 3 pieces of bacon/sausage links, hash browns, and your choice of either 2 pieces of Texas-style toast/2 pancakes/1 waffle. He had to keep increasing the portion size and the items because there's nothing a consumer hates more than having to add on items a la carte.

A lunch special was a tuna melt on normal bread with some fries back then. A lunch special in the 90s was a tuna melt on huge, thick sliced bread with multiple kinds of cheese, and bottomless fries if eaten in the restaurant.

Factor in the huge portion sizes with a lack of movement and you get obesity. My siblings who have kids don't let them roam and play outside like we were allowed to do as kids. We're ages 29-38 for reference. They're too afraid of child predators and all of the what ifs that could happen. I don't have kids, so I won't pretend to know what that's like. But I see the same thing in my neighborhood. The kids don't really get to ride their bikes any farther than a few houses down from theirs or in circles in the cul-de-sac. Our bikes WERE our lives when we were kids. We rode those things all over our town to the library, our local water park, the mall, etc.

He was probably also trying to compete with national 'local' chains that like to give a mom-and-pop sort of feel like Cracker Barrel or IHOP or Waffle House. They were founded anywhere from 58 - 69 but all started going national in the 70s and 80s right when he would have had to add more-and-more food items to a single entree. Right now, I can go into any CBarrel across the country and get a 'Grandmas's Breakfast Sampler' for $7.69 with meats (two pieces of bacon, sausage, or ham), hashbrown casserole, two pancakes or french toast, two scrambled eggs, and biscuits.



That single plate would have been a meal for 3 in the 70s.

Americans want to feel like they're getting a bang for their buck. Even though overeating is making us fat, it's about value. Contrast that to summers in Europe where a tiny meal costs $15 Euros ($22 dollars).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

So here's some random kids from the 2000s. They don't look all that different in size from the kids in the other class picture above.

This looks like a private school pic. Wealthy, white aren't a "random kids" sample.

[Anonymous]

If you don't really plan your meals, it is significantly cheaper to eat crap than to eat healthy.

I feed my kids cut up strawberries with blueberries and banana as a summer evening snack. Buying a big tub of ice cream would be cheaper and, yes, they would like that more.

[Anonymous]

I agree with PPs that say that: (1) people are more sedentary with more A/C and screen viewing options, and more cars; (2) food has more HFCS (worse than old corn syrup); (3) chemicals in water and environment are hormone imitators, making everyone chubbier -- this may actually be the biggest factor; and (4) fewer people smoke.

I also think that people are just richer, and food is relatively cheaper. We were a working class or middle class family, and we basically never went out to eat except for special occasions; my parents bought snack food only occasionally because it was expensive and we knew we weren't supposed to eat much of it, etc. By the '80s we had a econd car, but in the '70s and '60s, I don't think my mom had a car at home, so we walked places or rode bikes.
Food in this country is really ridiculously cheap, compared to other family expenses. In places like Europe, food is a much larger portion of people's daily spending. Americans spend a lot of money, relatively speaking, on housing and transportation.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Random picture found online.

Only 1 out of the 22 children is heavy.

These kids are also all white, and look well off for that era from the clothes they're wearing.

[Anonymous]

A combination of 11:12 and 11:13.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

So here's some random kids from the 2000s. They don't look all that different in size from the kids in the other class picture above.

This looks like a private school pic. Wealthy, white aren't a "random kids" sample.

It looks like a Catholic school. Catholic schools typically have a wide range of families of different economic backgrounds.

Are you saying white peoples tend to be the same weight they were back in the 70s?

[Anonymous]

Jumping rope was a required activity from elementary school until college.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:People ate far less processed food. Sugar wasn't snuck into everything.

Part of it is this. People did eat junk food, but there wasn't as much sugar in regular processed food, because high fructose corn syrup was not so cheap.

Uhhhhh were you alive in the 1970s? I think it's an era where food was especially crappy. All kinds of junk food, candy bars, deep fried everything, fast food as ubiquitous as today without the healthy options. I was born in 1969 and have many friends my age who never tried a vegetable that wasn't canned until going to college. Plenty of people were obese although I suppose not as high a percentage as today. There was definitely a subset of people that were into health food in a hippie way. All I can imagine is that when I was growing up in the summer we left the house by 9am and didn't come home until 6-7pm. We were on our bikes, playing in the woods, etc. Except when we were watching Scooby Doo.