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

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I grew up in the 60s and 70s.  I am 50.  We ate junk food all the time.  Twinkies, super sweet cereal, cokes, Kool-aide, ......  We weren't fat because we were active all the time.  It really is that simple. [/quote]

Yes.

The 70s diet was horrible compared to today.

[b]But most families had only one car so people biked and walked many places. We spent all day outside playing, running around, climbing trees, swimming.

Most people did not have AC so inside was HOT over the summer.

And lost of adults smoked in addition to being more active[/b].[/quote]

OMG no.  I was a child in the 70's.  I never heard of a single family that only had one car, that would have been very strange.  I lived in a middle class suburb and everyone had AC.  And no, most people did not smoke. [/quote]

I was a child in the 1960s.   We had one car, almost no one had two cars, quite a few families had no car.  We had AC in only one room[b].   But we lived in an outer borough of NYC.[/b]

[/quote]

This probably has a lot to do with it.  Many families in NYC still don't have two cars.  In the suburbs, it was the norm to have 2 cars and A/C, and my family was more lower middle class than upper. [/quote]

This was not Manhattan though, and it was a time when plenty of outer borough people were frightened of the crime riddden, graffitti covered subways.

Anyway, the national data show that over half of households in the entire USA  had one or zero cars in 1970. That has to include a lot of suburban households.  Maybe you are thinking 1978 not 1970,or your burb was particulary auto dependent (lots of burbs in greater NY, Boston, Chicago, Philly had very good commuter rail service) or it was more upper middle class than you remember (I mean these days people who are objectively rich consider themselves UMC, and I think lots of people who are really UMC consider themselves LMC) [/quote]

I think that because houses were generally smaller back then, people look at their parent's houses and think "We must have been poor/middle class."

My inlaws had a nice for the times 1970s home. 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, dining room, living room and big kitchen with separate eating area. They were upper middle class and that was considered a large spacious home back then.

Now it is considered a small starter home.

My family's middle class neighborhood was full of 3 bedroom/1 bathroom modest homes. They would be considered tear downs now, not fit for anyone but the poors.

Middle class people in the 70s did not generally have central air and middle class families in the 70s generally did not have 2 cars.

[/quote]

Ok, I wasn’t born until 1979 but my parents had 2 cars, AC, and a 3/2 ranch house. My dad worked construction and my mom was a bookkeeper.
[/quote]

So you are not a child of the 70s. You are a child of the 80s.

Most people had 2 cars and AC in the [b]80s[/b] and fewer people were smoking (but still smoked everywhere in public, classrooms, school bathrooms, church events, hospitals, etc)

In the 70s, middle class families had no or just one car, no AC or maybe just one window unit, and everyone from high school to grandparents smoked.[/quote]

I was born in the mid 60's and was growing up in the DC area during the 70's.  When my parents bought our house it did not have central AC.  We used window units and boy could the house get hot.  They later added central AC which was a big deal for them financially and boy did it ever feel like luxury.  Dad only ran the AC when it was really unbearably hot.  Otherwise, we used fans in the house.

We had two teenage drivers at the time and we had 3 cars which my dad worked on and maintained himself.  We lived in a modest, middle class neighborhood.[/quote]

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