Reply to Why were people so skinny in the 70s and 80s

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[quote=Anonymous]This thread is interesting because we are trying to take snapshots of an era (the typical 1970s diet, the typical 2020s work schedule) and extrapolate. But all of this is on a continuum that, for some metrics, started in the Industrial Age.

My grandparents smoke and drank and had stressful lives, but they also had to walk most places (cars existed but were a luxury for many), and day-to-day life would be considered hard labor for most people I know today -- hand washing clothes, scrubbing floors on your hands and knees, not only cooking your own meals but sometimes butchering your own meat, etc. No dishwashers. Sometimes the toilet was in an outhouse instead of in the house. No TV or if you had one, there was nothing on for much of the day, so no camping your kids in front of it -- you had to chase those babies around. Yes, there were fewer chemicals in food but also way less variety, and really fresh, healthy foods could be hard to come by, so canned food was common. On the other hand, working and middle class people did not eat at restaurants often if at all, and take-out didn't exist. My grandparents were relatively thin but incredibly unhealthy -- alcoholics, plus they smoked, super high stress lives. Two of my granparents died before the age of 55. One who didn't, my maternal grandfather, went blind in his 50s and this is likely nutrition-related.

My parents had their kids in the 70s and 80s. They were thin and fit in the 70s but by the 90s they were both obese, my father had had two heart attacks, and my mom was pre-diabetic. It's hard to pinpoint what went wrong. I do think reliance on cars and other technology is a big part of it. Neither of them worked office jobs but they were both very sedentary, even with young kids. Their diet was really not that different from what they grew up with, but add in more fast food options. We still didn't go to restaurants almost at all, though, and fast food was an occasional treat, so it's not just that. I do think TV might have played a role, but I the the availability of cars and other tech probably played a bigger role in discouraging exercise -- they had jobs so it's not like that sat around watching TV all day. Neither of them really exercised except with the occasional express purpose to lose weight. My mom did Nutrifast, Slimfast, Weight Watchers, Jazzercise, etc. But nothing stuck. I think it was a negative that these were all fads that were designed to extract money but not necessarily designed for longterm commitments. It would be better to just be in the habit of walking places than to get really into Jazzercise for a few months and then decide the class fees weren't worth it because you were bored or had trouble motivating.

I do think being raised in homes with alcoholic, often abusive parents, who were themselves probably experiencing PTSD from WWII and the Great Depression, likely contributed to my parents weight gain over those two decades, and probably continues to impact their health. There is a proven link between childhood abuse and not only obesity, but a lot of obesity-linked ailments like heart disease and diabetes. Read up on ACES and the research they've done in that area. There is a reasonably hypothesis that trauma, and especially childhood trauma, impacts your central nervous system in ways that have longterm health repercussions.

So I think it's a lot of things, and most of them are cultural, institutional, not really about individual willpower or choices. Weight is one factor that can play into health, and it's not as predictive as we like to think. Specifically, thin people are not automatically healthy (especially if thin because they smoke, have anxiety, are overworked, or malnourished). The cultural narrative is that fat=lazy/bad, though, so we all play into that. But it's much more complex. People are heavier now than they used to be, but it's definitely not clear that it's because they are lazier or eat worse. I think it has to do with our entire lifestyle and the way our environment shapes our choices.[/quote]

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