My grandparents' generation in my family, born in the late 1800's - early 1900's in England, ate:

white bread at every meal, with butter or hydrogenated margerines - toast for breakfast, bread and butter with lunch and tea (evening meal), toast for supper;

usually well under 6 ounces of meat each a day;

strong brown tea (never mind the iron!) at most meals as well;

sweets, cakes and biscuits daily, though never as "snacks" - supper at my grandfather's house was strong tea, toast with meat paste, one or two slices of cake, and then maybe some biscuits (cookies);

minimal amounts of veg, often canned or frozen, certainly NOTHING along the lines of "five portions a day" let alone "nine a day" or whatever's next...

My family were comfortable working class - once WW2 was over they held jobs like bus conductor and department store supervisor (not physically taxing) - and most of them lived well into their eighties, slim, cognitively sound and without, to be brutally honest, a lot of the aches and pains I have now in my 40's.

They also had many friends and colleagues etc who lived comparable lives, on similar diets (afaik, anyway - I mean I doubt they secretly kept steaks and organic coconut oil + acai berries stashed in the allotment) and they were also in many ways healthier and slimmer than most of my age group.

Bingeing, dieting and counting macro nutrients were concepts I don't think ever even crossed their minds.

To top it off, most of them SMOKED!

Without wishing to initiate conspiracy-theory stuff, what the HECK has gone wrong with us, that so many of us, who are perfectly smart and capable in all other areas of our lives (I know I am, I assume most of you are as well) have to go to such lengths these days to achieve a healthy body-weight, and have a healthy relationship with food?

Why are so many of us - again, I fully include myself - living our lives, our relationships to food, as a kind of ongoing chemistry experiment, working to balance carbohydrates, proteins, whatever-the-heck, always on the look out for new "super-foods" and new combinations of existing food to finally make us feel full?

And if we don't take that time, we "slip" and end up making choices that mess us up well and truly?

What do you think happened?

Is it the availability of high-calorie foods (I refuse to solely blame carbs, on the basis of family history above), is it our lifestyles, is is a combination of additives, lifestyles, stress?

I'm sick of hearing "experts" in the media pontificate about "obesity" and weight, when they very possibly don't have (or would never own up to) their own issues with food and weight, so I thought I'd ask here (I HOPE this isn't too controversial) for positive responses on whatever factors you feel are causing us now to be this weird around food.

I know I threw myself off track maintaining a low body-weight for a long time, usually without any care for nutrition, and that has done various rebound-like things, and I suspect that is probably true of many women, at least - but surely it's not the whole picture, even just for me?

Anyone care to chip in on this?

JMO

It's a cocktail mix of factors: genetics, polluted, industrialized, highly processed, and chemical laden foods, a more sedentary and confined lifestyle, habitual snacking, and a lack of nutrients in the diet, especially vitamin D3.

For instance, when I eat bread in the US I bloat and gain weight easily. When I was in Geneva for a week and ate bread every day and almost every meal, I lost 10 pounds. Geneva bans many food additives and flour conditioners that are standard in the US.

Many modern fruits and vegetables have been bred to be much sweeter and larger than older varieties yet contain fewer nutrients due to modernization of the farming industry.

Fruits and vegetables are processed, canned, or available fresh year round instead of seasonally. The human body is an ancient machine and is programmed to handle foods seasonally. Sweet fruits signal harvest, the end of the growing season, and is the body's signal to put on weight/fat for the long winter. Excess fat would naturally be shed with warmer months. Having sweet produce available year round messes with that fat loading/shedding process.

Snacking has been institutionalized; which leads to constant eating/grazing and elevated insulin levels. Higher insulin means more fat storage. Now everyone snacks all day, all the time, any time. Before only growing children got a (one) snack.

Lack of sleep, late eating, eating to volume/larger plates and not hunger all contribute to throwing the body's health and size equilibrium and metabolism off.

Water sources and water has been contaminated with pollutants and additives.

Many meat products and dairy are from animals that are treated with antibiotics and other chemicals including growth hormones. IMO these may transfer to and affect human physiology when consumed.

The standard of desirable physical attributes has changed and been propagandized. This standard is unattainable for most people/woman. Such an unrealistic standard leads to dieting.. Dieting leads to repetitive dieting which leads to yo-yoing which leads to throwing the body's control mechanisms off, lowers metabolism, and produces weight and fat gain.

Sun avoidance was promoted in the last 50 years. Sun avoidance leads to vitamin D deficiency which leads to higher cancer rates, more illness, birth defects, diabetes, and fatter bodies as well as babies programmed to be more likely to become obese and get diabetes.

The ills of vitamin D deficienty are passed on to each successive generaltion making each generation sicker and fatter than the last.

It all makes sense to me, lol!!

Great topic. Also being English and growing up there for the first 34 years of my life, I well recall all the bread and butter, sauceage rolls, steak and kidney puddings, cake, biscuits (cookies), etc. Not to mention everyone smoked and all the heavy beer drinking. Yet my grandparents and mother lived into their late 80s, active and self-sufficient, with no serious illnesses their whole lives.

One huge difference between then and now was that they were not eating processed and genetically engineered foods. The butter came from cows who grazed on grass, so did the meat. Monsanto had not filled the corn and wheat fields with genetically altered seeds. Fish and chips were a staple in our house but the fish didn't come from a "farm" and hadn't been fed on corn, genetically altered or otherwise. The batter around the fish wasn't made with genetically altered wheat either. The chips came from potatoes that hadn't been slathered with insecticides. Nothing had growth hormone in it.

Then the 60s happened, fashion suddenly existed, every young girl wanted to look like Twiggy (me included). We desperately looked around for methods to weigh less even when we were a normal, healthy weight - which almost every young girl in the 60s was, unlike so many young girls today sadly. We dieted unnecessarily and began the yo-yo phenomenon.

Then the 70s happened and we were told not to eat saturated fat, to keep calories low, and to have 11 servings of grains each day. Everyone on this forum knows what that did.

It's upsetting to think about how misguided and misled we were. We've been compounding our mistakes ever since, trying to solve one error with another until we have become a food and health-obsessed society desperately searching for answers that may have been there all along, before the corporations greedily and stupidly thought they could improve on nature and the rest of us blindly followed them like lambs to the slaughter.

I don't know if I really agree with the idea that women have come to have unrealistic body expectations in modern times. The truth is, we are much, much heavier on average than we were a few generations ago. I'm young, so maybe I missed a lot of "fat acceptance" movements, but in the 90s, women were downright hefty (I'm talking, even celebrities) and lies were always being spread about how Marilyn Monroe was a size 14 or 16 (NOT).

Truthfully, this particular last decade has seen more muscles and six packs on women than ever before, but other than that, women are just downright heavier, and yes, looking like Gisele might be pretty unrealistic, but only because on average we're eating total crap with the Standard American Diet. Just about nobody is 100 pounds anymore like they were a few generations ago.

I know that my Granny never ate anything like this

http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/1...itchen-counter/

Since reading your post I can't get the thoughts of a steak and kidney pie like my Gran used to make out of my mind.

Pat

Reading about your ancestors eating margarine got me to wondering ... I thought margarine was introduced during WWII, so I googled on the history and I ran across this gem:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margarine

For all those folks who think government intrusion is some new phenomenon.

Sounds like we had the best government money can buy back then, as well as now. Must have been a pretty strong dairy lobby.

Back to the OP's question and a possible answer, or part of an answer. There seems to be some research pointing to the fact that obesity begins in the womb. So the stage might have been being set in the early 1900's, or early during the industrial revolution when the human diet started getting more processed.

In one word: METABOLISM



This is a good point. Dieting, including low-carbing, harms the metabolism.

There are other things which harm it as well of course--for example birth control pills, and certain other drugs we've been taking, as well as soy infant formula. It's complex. There are many factors, many more than simply avoiding saturated fat, or eating too much sugar, as you point out. Even something like teachers forcing their left-handed students to become right-handed, against their genetic handedness, causes disorganization in the brain resulting in enormous stress. And chronic stress is the primary cause of disease.

I think your question is impossible to fully answer though, at least with the knowledge we have now. It will be interesting to see what epigenetics shows us in the near future.

We should also remember the difference between being slim, and having perfect facial structure and a strong body. I've seen a lot of photos from around 1900 of thin people with bad teeth, long faces, etc. Not such healthy campers.

My grandmother's parents (she's 84 and still spry and mentally healthy), were raised on raw butter, and they fed my grandmother raw butter also. They were gorgeous. I mean they ate sugar and white flour regularly, at least by the time my grandmother came along, but they were healthy and their facial structure was really really good. They became adorably stout in their old age, but not very.

My great-grandmother gave my grandmother cod liver oil every month which contained an "r" in it's name (September through April). She still has pretty nice skin.

My mother received soy infant formula instead. Her metabolism is really bad compared to my grandmother's. My mother has to take Armour (T3 and T4) daily. Sometimes I get really really angry at the people who told all these women it was practically barbaric to breastfeed. Disastrous consequences.

~NancyLC - How interesting. Have you ever read this part of Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi?

I've been reading Wheat Belly by Dr William Davis. He makes a good case against modern dwarf wheat as a singular driver of obesity. That kind of wheat wasn't available back then. And we've been eating less and less animal fat, and more and more vegetable fat. And we've been eating more and more refined carbs of all kinds.

LOL... my wife weighs 103 and eats whatever she wants (actually, she just corrected me. 102.)

I think it's just simply the overly processed foods and chemicals added to them to make people keep eating them. Potato chips are addicting for a reason. People in the early 1900's went from growing their own vegetables in their gardens and jarring/canning the extras to buying dead vegetables in cans. Add the sprayed pesticide chemicals to the vegetables and fruits they're now eating. Then eventually...most people just even stop eating canned fruits and vegetables and discovered Drive-Thrus.
Same with grains..they now come in boxes labeled as cereal.

Thinking back to my grandparents: yeah, they ate all sorts of food, but I don't remember my grandmother (who was in fact a little heavy) ever driving to the grocery store. When she went shopping, she would always walk to the store, and if she had a lot of stuff, the owner of the store would lend her a shopping cart. She would roll her groceries home, put them away, and then roll the cart all the way back to the store and walk back home. Altogether, that was over a mile...

If I was over there, sometimes I would get the job of returning the cart to the store for her.

You know, Americans drive EVERYWHERE now. I mean at least in the US. I have European friends who just find it bizarre that we tend to circle for the closest parking spot, or (their favorite) want to drive up to the movie theater when we just had lunch across the (albeit large) parking lot.

One thing our great-grandmother's DID know... when they wanted to lose a little weight, they eliminated the bread from dinner and skipped dessert.

Pfft. People in the UK take trains everywhere. I can't even take UK'ers seriously. I find them bizarre. How much of their time in life is wasted sitting on a train for an hour just to go grocery shopping? I know what I can accomplish in that time frame. UK is up there with the US in obesity rates too so not sure the public transportation thing makes much of a difference. Public transportation is popular in Boston..most people don't want to drive through that madness..and it's not like it's all skinny people taking buses and trains.

I don't think driving has that much to do with weight. It's a bunch of little things all combined. You can be skinny and lazy or fat with more energy.