I watch lots of old movies. I'm addicted to TCM and not only the movie stars, but the people in documentaries and photographs taken during the 1940's and 50's were almost all thin.

Lots of people say they got more exercise then, but actually that was their parents. The time when most Americans lived on farms was past and everyone was riding in cars and watching TV by then. My mother, born in 1915, was always slender and so were all her June Cleaver type friends. They thought exercise was for "health nuts," and wouldn't have dreamed of doing something so unladylike as to perspire. They did a little vacuuming and then played canasta all afternoon.

When I went to college in 1964 I did a daily exercise routine I had put together from the rare exercise articles in my mother's magazines. All the other girls thought I was very quite funny doing my short routine of toe touches and side bends. Yet, not one person in my dorm was remotely fat.

What happened? It can't all be fast foods? We don't eat at McDonalds every day and their food isn't any more fattening than the burgers and shakes we used to get at the fabled malt shop (The Blossom Dairy in my town.)

Was it our baby formula made of Karo syrup and carnation milk? Or did we all just turn into gluttons with no shame attached?

Well I can say that my mom has always struggled with her weight, and she was put on speed (prescribed by a doctor) in the early 1960s as a weight loss drug. So weight loss drugs existed at least as early as 1960 and probably prior. Richard Simmons talks about being obese as a kid and he was born in the late 1940s. My father was also someone who was always overweight and he was born in the early 1950s (and weighed 500 lbs in the 1970s). From what I've seen, there have always been people of various sizes but obesity was more rare. And fitness has kind of always been there on some level, I remember the pictures of Marilyn Monroe lifting weights and many cities adopted fitness paths that still exist in places where you walk, then do an exercise, then walk and do another exercise, I think these were more of a 1970s thing though. My grandmother and her sisters (born in the 1930s/1940s) have talked about how they always had to control their weight, usually meaning smaller portions and some exercise. And if you search for things like "1920s weight loss tips", you will find them so it isn't something that is new.

I think overall, we have encountered a lot of changes and even societal pressures may have changed as well. Larger portions have become the norm, added sugars have become more normal (providing more calorie dense foods), people are overall less active, jobs are more office based where you don't even have to get out of your chair to have a meeting or talk to someone. So I don't think there is really 1 thing that you can point to and say 'that is it'.

Apologies to the moderators. I intended this thread to go in the Weight Loss Support section, but it landed here somehow.

Nellie, I know there were exceptions, and I didn't mean to imply no one was overweight, but the average woman in 1960 weighed 25 pounds less than the average woman today, so I think maybe something has changed.

I love reading old weight loss advice and I watched the Jack Lalanne show in the 60's. I know it's not entirely new for women to exercise, just that it was less common then. Maybe not. Maybe all my mother's skinny friends were up jogging in the middle of the night when no one could see them.

Weight loss support is meant to support individual weight loss efforts and not meant for more generic topics.

I don't think people were up jogging in the middle of the night but I know my grandmother has had a regimen forever which includes walking and also doing things like toe touches and side bends.

And obviously things have changed, but a lot has changed in the past 100 years.

I get where you're coming from. What changed? I still think it was home cooked meals. People only went to restaurants for special occasions, plus there weren't so many artificial additives and hormones in the food. That's my guess anyway.

I can say that lack of home cooked meals wasn't the reason I gained weight but I will say I'm surprised how many people my age (turning 40 next week) don't know how to cook. When I was in high school, I had to cook dinner for the family every day. We didn't have a lot of money growing up so we hardly ate out. Now I'll say that my husband and I eat out 2-4 times per month but we are pretty conscious of what we eat and portion sizes.

I think another factor is stress. I know the economy has had its ups and downs and in the last 20-30 years, companies have expected more work hours from people while commutes have gotten longer and then many companies have got rid of their pension plans, and lay off after lay off has left a lot of people on eggshells wondering if they'll have a job or not.

To top it off, credit cards went from something people rarely used to part of every day life. For some, that has meant massive debt which can eat at you and cause you stress.

And the other aspect is dieting itself can cause weight gain. Dieting has had a big focus in the last 30 years or so but dieting can also lead to weight gain because you can mess up your bodies natural food cues. So we enter into a restrict/overeat cycle that leads to higher weights as people try to fight with their bodies.

So yeah I say it is a mix of things including decreasing of natural movement, increase of stress, increase of easily available calorically dense foods, and messing up our bodies own signals with excessive dieting.

All very good points.

In addition to all these there are some frightening food factors that have changed as well.

- GMOs: crops aren't what they used to be. They are genetically bred now to produce more and more
- artificial sweeteners: think of how many kid friendly foods these appear in causing a dependency that plagues people through their whole adulthood
- preservatives - unless you're making a conscious effort to eat whole foods then the majority of convenience foods has preservatives, artificial sweeteners, colors and additives.
- low fat mania - remember when fat was evil? When they removed the fat from your favorite foods (like milk, mayo, cookies etc) they replaced it with sugar sugar sugar sugar. On average people today eat much more sugar than they did 60yrs ago.
- the disappearance of bitter foods such as wild greens, even coffee or tea is problematic. Our palettes can't handle bitter foods anymore and that means we're missing out on some very important antioxidants from these foods OR we're adding so much sugar to them that it's causing it's own problem.
- Physical Education is disappearing from schools - I've been teaching in Harlem for 15yrs and I can tell you that obesity and asthma in young children is really scary. Yet budget cuts continuously hit physical education, art and music programs (the stuff that makes kids want to go to school!). In the inner city this is a huge problem. My students have one 45 minute period of phys ed per week and the teacher does not require them to be active if they don't want to.
- School lunches, although they've gotten slightly better over the years it's easy to see that not much money is spent on these. They are very carb heavy and skimpy on protein. The only type of protein I see is chicken and cheese. The veggies are overcooked and not appealing and the fruit is often overlooked. They simply do not look appetizing.
- The ice cream truck is parked outside of all schools at the end of the school day and kids flock to it. Everyday when I pick up my son at school he collapses into a pool of tears because I don't indulge him in a daily treat. This is certainly not how I want his school to end every day.
- Social pressure: with supermodels showing off their post baby bodies just 3weeks after birth, the deceptive amount of retouching and airbrushing in magazines, and the constant stream of media making people feel inferior about their bodies causes a lot of stress and body shame. OP, I'm thinking that this is the reason why you may not remember seeing people that were larger back then. People weren't hyper vigilant about the standards of beauty like they are now. There was no Star magazine circling and enlarging the cellulite on a 105lb woman back then.

I agree with nelie that restrictive dieting has caused the most amount of damage in how people eat, and is the cause of the rise of eating disorders amongst young women.

I'd agree with school lunches and cutting of physical activity, those are things that should be improved, not reduced or subsidized out to the highest bidder.

As for GMOs, they are the mostly widely studied aspect of our food supply and nothing that I've read indicates obesity in relation to GMOs. What I will say is we have been messing with food ever since we learned to grow it. I recently saw a picture of a wild banana, it had huge seeds. We have hybridized our food to be sweeter, such as our fruits which have only grown sweeter over the past few thousand years and our vegetables have even become sweeter.

And one aspect is due to globalization and refrigeration, we tend to eat out of season. I don't know how much this would affect us but we used to get a wide variety of nutrients from the different foods we ate throughout the year. Instead you can eat zucchini or corn all year long.

Nelie when crops are engineered to produce more, have certain qualities over others, and become patented it starts to mess with the true nature of the crop. Lately I've been hearing about some heritage breeds of wheat. Supposedly they are much easier to digest and even people with gluten sensitivity are reporting no problems after eating it.

The reasons obesity has risen so drastically are many and complicated. Suffice it to say that there are a number of factors in food supply, education, technology, media etc. Few here would agree with us about how damaging the diet industry has been because so many are under the illusion that it has a benefit (yes, to their own pockets)

One thing I read recently was the idea of getting back to ancestral diets as a way of combating ill health/obesity. Of course when doing so, you are eating less processed foods, higher fiber, more vegetables, etc, etc. A lot of people though often embrace the eating habits due to a connection they feel with their ancestors. This one study was with Africans and African Americans, swapping diets to see the effects on both. Of course African Americans are of mixed heritage and Africa is a big continent so an ancestral diet in one part, may not equate to an ancestral diet in another part.
http://thinkprogress.org/health/2015...he-motherland/

Cigarettes and girdles.

Personally, I think a lot of it is social and food availability. There was a generation that went through some really, really tough times. When things like food and all became abundant/affordable they wanted their children to have whatever they wanted. Stuff like they grew up having nothing, so they want to give their children everything.. and they probably over indulged (bigger portion sizes and the like). Those portion sizes and habits of eating can definitely carry from generation to generation. Add to that the addition of sugar into everything and it's probably a big part of the problem. It also kind of ties in to another thread in this forum about finishing the food on your plate. I think that attitude was also born out of growing up with nothing, and has just kind of been passed down since.

Americans, at least, also tend to be a lot more over-worked now. If you really want to advance in your career family/social time pretty much disappears. If you're on the more poor side of the spectrum it often means you're going to be working two jobs to make ends meet. Even middle class families the norm is more for both parents to be out working. So there isn't nearly as much time as there use to be to actually cook meals, which means lots of people taking short cuts and either buying meals that are quick to cook at home, or picking up fast food/getting delivery. Then of course diet industry and all that has already been mentioned.

I don't think GMOs really account for it. They may play some sort of small role, but the overwhelming majority of studies don't support that GMOs (which is a super broad term) in general are harmful. Correlation doesn't equal causation and all that. I am not a scientist, therefore I have to trust the people who's job it is to research that sort of stuff, and when around 88% of scientists (source) say it's safe to eat GMOs, I'm gonna go with that. That isn't to say scientists are infallible or anything, but they have been studying GMOs in general for over 25 years.

Before someone brings up the low fat thing about how science has been wrong.. the low fat deal actually wasn't supported by science. It was government implemented without scientific support. (source)

I really don't want to spark a debate about GMO's and whether or not they're good for you. Bottom line is that it's one of many factors that contribute to the deterioration of common health. Let's leave it at that.

Family habits play a huge role which is why I'm so vigilant about being low key around food with my son. He's not forced to finish his food, he's not forced to eat anything if he doesn't want to.

Some of the habits I grew up with made it very difficult for me to navigate food. I was never taught appropriate portion sizes and platters of food were at the family table and we served ourselves at will. This is ok for some people but for me this set me up for bad future habits. It might've been better if my Mother had put an appropriate amount of food on my plate, pointing out the right balance of foods rather than allowing us to eat as much as we wanted. Also, my Dad would go out to buy us donuts or bagels and he'd bring back 2 dozen for the 4 of us! I mean seriously, what does one do with 2 dozen bagels and not told to stop after eating one? Same with donuts? It might have been nicer if our parents taught us that one donut is plenty, we didn't need to be dipping into 4 or 5 donuts each!!

In college, I remember a study done in the 1960's of something like 200 secretaries weights a year after switching from manual typewriters to electric, compared to a control group off secretaries who were still using manual typewriters. After a year, the group of secretaries making the switch had gained a small, but significant amount of weight.

There are thousands of ways in which our calorie intake and calorie expenditures have changed in the last few decades. Just a few

Serving sizes are so much bigger that folks in the "antique business" frequently have to explain tha the vintage and antique dinner plates are not salad plates, and some collectors will use the antique serving plates and platters as dinner plates to be more in keeping with modern dinnerware.

Home heating and cooling is more efficient, so we need fewer calorie to maintain a normal body temperature.

Using modern appliances and machinery require fewer calories than vintage and antique ones. From can openers to lawn mowers to power steering and brakes, to washing machines, to baby strollers...


Modern homes have fewer stairs, more efficient layouts, and more labor-saving devices.

Modern chores and "exercise" at the gym burn fewer calories than every day activity did in the past.

We eat more foods that digests easily (require fewer calories to process), and requires less energy to prepare and even less energy to eat. We actually CHEW less than people in the past.

Snacking (and snacking on junk) is more common.

Hobbies have become much more sedentary and have moved more and more indoors (and because of thermal efficiency we burn fewer calories indoors).

Shopping requires less movement than in the past. Shipping carts are easier to push (and more commonly available). More shipping can be done in one convenient location, indoors.

There are thousands and thousands of tiny differences that all add up to huge differences. So many are so small, you'd never even think of them as actual changes, but when every last one of these are added up, the cumulative change is huge.

If I might chime in:

Smaller portions, people did more housework themselves, less dining out, less fast food, more home cooked meals, less food convenience, less sugary foods, etc. I also think that the advancement of technology and the world becoming a smaller place helped contribute.

Plus, food was a lot different back then. I know my grandmother up in Upper Michigan didn't have pizza or pasta when she was growing up. I think people really ate differently. Everything was home made, and there weren't really grocery stores. Nothing was really mass-produced, food-wise.

As for GMOs.... they're fine. There is zero evidence that GMOs contribute to any deterioration of health whatsoever.