7 ms·

In those pictures I counted just two people who looked overweight, and at worst they were a little chubby. Yet there's plenty of food in the photos, and it's ic

In those pictures I counted just two people who looked overweight, and at worst they were a little chubby. Yet there's plenty of food in the photos, and it's ice cream, soft drinks, burgers, hot dogs, etc., the same stuff routinely blamed for the obesity epidemic four score years later. I suppose a lot of that is that these photos are from public places, and most of these people ate out rarely, mostly eating healthier from their lunch boxes and at their dinner tables.

KSS42 8y ago
Also, they were more active: - most likely didn't own a car : transit + walking - no TV, internet etc - working in a factory
- nradov 8y ago
  Even in the 1940s, most middle-class families owned at least one car. But during WWII, gasoline was rationed so people did drive less for a few years.
gist 8y ago
> most of these people ate out rarely, mostly eating healthier from their lunch boxes Yes to 'eat out rarely' definitely was like that (even in the 60's). But more importantly food wasn't prepared at home to make you want to eat more of it than you needed to (the average person). Things were done by mom and not enhanced in a way to make you overeat. Very important and often overlooked.
- pm90 8y ago
  You have an interesting point. Although... I always seemed to think the culprit wasn’t just unhealthy meals but the snacks/soda etc.
adventured 8y ago
The US didn't have a meaningful problem with obesity until ~1990 forward. If you look at high school yearbook photos from the 1980s, almost all the people were thin. These are young persons that should have high metabolisms and high rates of activity, so you'd expect that. That thinness changed noticeably and rapidly through the 1990s. I went to high school in the 1990s and could see that shift very plainly during the decade. All childhood age range obesity was typically about 5% until the early 1980s. Now the combined average is around 15% From 1960 to 1980 adult obesity was typically 12% to 15%. Today that would nearly qualify as the thinnest country in the developed world (only Japan, South Korea and Singapore beat it now). From 1980 to 1990 it went up five or six points. By 2000 it had doubled (since the early 1980s) to ~30%. So approximately a doubling of the obesity rate in 15-20 years. Contrast 1980 US at ~15% obesity, with present day Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland which are all considered fairly thin at ~20% obesity rates.
- hef19898 8y ago
  Not sure why this was down voted. If the cited numbers are wrong, which is the only valid reason to down vote, please call it out and provide the correct numbers. If not don't down vote.
  - adventured 8y ago
    I've run into resistance to what I pointed out, pretty much every time I've ever pointed it out anywhere online. For some reason people like to believe a myth that the US always had a big problem with obesity. Factually that's simply not true at all, it's a relatively recent problem.
    - quotemstr 8y ago
      As a meta point, I've found people over the past few years less willing to even entertain facts that contradict their worldview. I blame the culture war, which has broken, in a serious way, the ability for lots of people to think critically and evaluate arguments on their own. People instead interpret posts that don't confirm their conclusions as attacks on their person, and then downvote, block, and counterattack as needed.
      - hef19898 8y ago
        Point in case the down votes on your post and the OP above as of now. Let's hope that changes again.
    - narrator 8y ago
      There is no official explanation for the obesity crisis except people are lazy and eat poorly. The only alternative to this is that officials are ignoring other explanations. This, in most people's minds, is conspiracy theory to even suggest and that's what makes people uncomfortable. Most people don't know how to answer questions outside their limited domain expertise without relying on authority figures. Telling them their authority figures are unreliable on such an important topic seriously complicates their lives.
digsmahler 8y ago
There are also way fewer cars in those photos that anywhere comparable in LA today. Maybe these things are related?
coldtea 8y ago
>Yet there's plenty of food in the photos, and it's ice cream, soft drinks, burgers, hot dogs, etc., the same stuff routinely blamed for the obesity epidemic four score years later. That "plenty of food" was not 24/7 bombarded into the population with ads, not was it 90% of a supermarket, portions at restaurants were much smaller, and the sugar content was less. Plus most people, and for decades more, cooked and ate at home.
- contingencies 8y ago
  Work was more physical.
  - olivermarks 8y ago
    much less processed food...
  - gerhardi 8y ago
    I believe in this and also that the overall cumulative amount of activity really makes the difference. A while ago we met with couple of childhood friends and even though none of us are really sedentary it was obvious that one of the guys in our group was in seemingly excellent physical condition. We discussed about this and he wasn't involved in any actual sports hobby or nutritional diet but lives in a small town with his wife and two dogs, works in a industrial production plant and turned out that his average daily step count over the last year or so with his current phone was something between 15 000 - 20 000 steps per day without even trying. Those of us who live in a city doing office work and mostly trying to hit the gym couple of times per week clocked in around 6000-7000 steps per day on average. That difference must add up somewhere!
- ams6110 8y ago
  The portion sizes are really a big factor here I think. A bottle of CocaCola in 1940 was 6 ounces. Today, a small Coke at McDonald's is 16 oz.
bluedino 8y ago
>> soft drinks Those nickel sodas in the old days were only 6.5 oz A can of coke is 12 oz today, nearly double, and the 20 oz bottle is probably more common. And the fast food restaurants serve 16 oz as a 'small'...
- chrisco255 8y ago
  Yeah but they're filled with ice. And also we have diet soda options today. I don't believe they existed in the 40s.
  - jrace 8y ago
    > Diet Soda Maybe that is part of the problem? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drinking-diet-soda-linked-to-a-widening-waistline-with-age/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drinking-diet-sod... "People who drink diet soda may be more likely to overeat in other areas, he told Reuters Health."
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
benj111 8y ago
I wonder about the little things. In winter, indoors was colder, not much, but you expended energy keeping warm. Wanted to send a message to you colleague 10ft away? No email, so you'd get up and walk over. Your whisk would probably be a hand whisk, your hedge trimmer would probably have been shears. Even driving would have been without power steering. Everything was just slightly less automated, and required just a little bit more energy. It really starts adding up very quickly.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  I'm bemused by the effort people will go to to park as close as possible to their destination. Me, I park in the first slot that appears, often with a mind to being able to drive forward to get out rather than backing up into pedestrians and shopping carts. In a large parking lot, there'll be a pack of cars near the entrance, and then my lonely car a ways away. This never fails to annoy my passengers: "Why'd ya park here? The entrance is over there." "Wut, ya legs broke?"
  - megy 8y ago
    Yeah. I don't even drive anywhere, I cycle. I am bemused by people who drive when they don't have to. I am not sure a short walk through the car park is going to to do much for you.
    - benj111 8y ago
      My gp comment was precisely on the little things making a difference. Walking a few extra steps fits in with that.
- WalterBright 8y ago
  > your hedge trimmer would probably have been shears I'm sorry to say, I finally gave up on using a bellows to clean the driveway, and succumbed to the lure of a leafblower.
TimesOldRoman 8y ago
They were on their feet most of the day.
jorblumesea 8y ago
Baggier clothes were in style, so hard to tell what their actual weight/waist size could be.
gammateam 8y ago
Less processed sugar. I was surprised that so many of you all were grasping at physical activity nuances. A factor but it doesnt exist in a vacuum
GhostVII 8y ago
The percentage of families with both parents working has increased significantly over the last several decades - perhaps as more families have both parents working, healthy homemade meals are becoming less popular, since the parents just don't have the time required to prepare healthy food.
musha68k 8y ago
Less sedentary lifestyles and something Dr. Jason Fung always likes to point out: most people ate three times a day until a couple of decades ago. Very rarely would one have a snack, usually no snacks in between those three meals.
TomMckenny 8y ago
People ate those foods far less often because grocery prices were a tiny fraction of fast food prices. There were even intermittent price wars between competing grocery stores. Now the Savemart-Kroger duopoly means fast food and groceries have reached esentialy the same price point.
- atr_gz 8y ago
  Grocery stores now have cutthroat price competition, with some of the slimmest margins in retail. Not sure where you're getting these ideas.
will_brown 8y ago
Look at the ingredients, noticeably lacking in all of them in 1940 will be HFCS. And since the advent of HFCS in the 70s it would is now found in everything named above coke, ice cream, hotdog/burger buns (and condiments) and fries. And the amount of sugar in food stuffs has increased substantially. We have thousands of years of agriculture showing us forcefeeding corn to animals leads to fattening them up and in particular fatty livers (fois gras). Since the advent of HFCS in the 70’s we have seen the first cases of childhood t2 diabeties and non alcoholic fatty liver disease in the US in the 80’s. Once HFCS made its way into the UK we saw childhood diabeties there too with the first cases in the 90’s and you can follow the spread of western diseases to every country where western HFCS foodstuffs were introduced, for example Okinawa, which once had the best life expectancy in the world and now has western foods and an explosion of these chronic diseases.
diogenescynic 8y ago
Even when you adjust for physical activity and caloric intake, Americans weigh more than previous generations. Pesticides, non-stick chemicals, BPA, and antibiotics probably have something to do with it: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/whats-really-making-us-fat/254087/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/whats-rea...
- diogenescynic 8y ago
  Lol at whoever downvoted all my comments.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
rixrax 8y ago
Also, possibly only one photo in this set with a non-white persons in it.

KSS42 8y ago

Also, they were more active: - most likely didn't own a car : transit + walking - no TV, internet etc - working in a factory

nradov 8y ago
Even in the 1940s, most middle-class families owned at least one car. But during WWII, gasoline was rationed so people did drive less for a few years.

gist 8y ago

> most of these people ate out rarely, mostly eating healthier from their lunch boxes Yes to 'eat out rarely' definitely was like that (even in the 60's). But more importantly food wasn't prepared at home to make you want to eat more of it than you needed to (the average person). Things were done by mom and not enhanced in a way to make you overeat. Very important and often overlooked.

pm90 8y ago
You have an interesting point. Although... I always seemed to think the culprit wasn’t just unhealthy meals but the snacks/soda etc.

adventured 8y ago

The US didn't have a meaningful problem with obesity until ~1990 forward. If you look at high school yearbook photos from the 1980s, almost all the people were thin. These are young persons that should have high metabolisms and high rates of activity, so you'd expect that. That thinness changed noticeably and rapidly through the 1990s. I went to high school in the 1990s and could see that shift very plainly during the decade. All childhood age range obesity was typically about 5% until the early 1980s. Now the combined average is around 15% From 1960 to 1980 adult obesity was typically 12% to 15%. Today that would nearly qualify as the thinnest country in the developed world (only Japan, South Korea and Singapore beat it now). From 1980 to 1990 it went up five or six points. By 2000 it had doubled (since the early 1980s) to ~30%. So approximately a doubling of the obesity rate in 15-20 years. Contrast 1980 US at ~15% obesity, with present day Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland which are all considered fairly thin at ~20% obesity rates.

hef19898 8y ago
Not sure why this was down voted. If the cited numbers are wrong, which is the only valid reason to down vote, please call it out and provide the correct numbers. If not don't down vote.
- adventured 8y ago
  I've run into resistance to what I pointed out, pretty much every time I've ever pointed it out anywhere online. For some reason people like to believe a myth that the US always had a big problem with obesity. Factually that's simply not true at all, it's a relatively recent problem.
  - quotemstr 8y ago
    As a meta point, I've found people over the past few years less willing to even entertain facts that contradict their worldview. I blame the culture war, which has broken, in a serious way, the ability for lots of people to think critically and evaluate arguments on their own. People instead interpret posts that don't confirm their conclusions as attacks on their person, and then downvote, block, and counterattack as needed.
    - hef19898 8y ago
      Point in case the down votes on your post and the OP above as of now. Let's hope that changes again.
  - narrator 8y ago
    There is no official explanation for the obesity crisis except people are lazy and eat poorly. The only alternative to this is that officials are ignoring other explanations. This, in most people's minds, is conspiracy theory to even suggest and that's what makes people uncomfortable. Most people don't know how to answer questions outside their limited domain expertise without relying on authority figures. Telling them their authority figures are unreliable on such an important topic seriously complicates their lives.

digsmahler 8y ago

There are also way fewer cars in those photos that anywhere comparable in LA today. Maybe these things are related?

coldtea 8y ago

>Yet there's plenty of food in the photos, and it's ice cream, soft drinks, burgers, hot dogs, etc., the same stuff routinely blamed for the obesity epidemic four score years later. That "plenty of food" was not 24/7 bombarded into the population with ads, not was it 90% of a supermarket, portions at restaurants were much smaller, and the sugar content was less. Plus most people, and for decades more, cooked and ate at home.

contingencies 8y ago
Work was more physical.
- olivermarks 8y ago
  much less processed food...
- gerhardi 8y ago
  I believe in this and also that the overall cumulative amount of activity really makes the difference. A while ago we met with couple of childhood friends and even though none of us are really sedentary it was obvious that one of the guys in our group was in seemingly excellent physical condition. We discussed about this and he wasn't involved in any actual sports hobby or nutritional diet but lives in a small town with his wife and two dogs, works in a industrial production plant and turned out that his average daily step count over the last year or so with his current phone was something between 15 000 - 20 000 steps per day without even trying. Those of us who live in a city doing office work and mostly trying to hit the gym couple of times per week clocked in around 6000-7000 steps per day on average. That difference must add up somewhere!
ams6110 8y ago
The portion sizes are really a big factor here I think. A bottle of CocaCola in 1940 was 6 ounces. Today, a small Coke at McDonald's is 16 oz.

bluedino 8y ago

>> soft drinks Those nickel sodas in the old days were only 6.5 oz A can of coke is 12 oz today, nearly double, and the 20 oz bottle is probably more common. And the fast food restaurants serve 16 oz as a 'small'...

chrisco255 8y ago
Yeah but they're filled with ice. And also we have diet soda options today. I don't believe they existed in the 40s.
- jrace 8y ago
  > Diet Soda Maybe that is part of the problem? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drinking-diet-soda-linked-to-a-widening-waistline-with-age/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drinking-diet-sod... "People who drink diet soda may be more likely to overeat in other areas, he told Reuters Health."
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]

benj111 8y ago

I wonder about the little things. In winter, indoors was colder, not much, but you expended energy keeping warm. Wanted to send a message to you colleague 10ft away? No email, so you'd get up and walk over. Your whisk would probably be a hand whisk, your hedge trimmer would probably have been shears. Even driving would have been without power steering. Everything was just slightly less automated, and required just a little bit more energy. It really starts adding up very quickly.

WalterBright 8y ago
I'm bemused by the effort people will go to to park as close as possible to their destination. Me, I park in the first slot that appears, often with a mind to being able to drive forward to get out rather than backing up into pedestrians and shopping carts. In a large parking lot, there'll be a pack of cars near the entrance, and then my lonely car a ways away. This never fails to annoy my passengers: "Why'd ya park here? The entrance is over there." "Wut, ya legs broke?"
- megy 8y ago
  Yeah. I don't even drive anywhere, I cycle. I am bemused by people who drive when they don't have to. I am not sure a short walk through the car park is going to to do much for you.
  - benj111 8y ago
    My gp comment was precisely on the little things making a difference. Walking a few extra steps fits in with that.
WalterBright 8y ago
> your hedge trimmer would probably have been shears I'm sorry to say, I finally gave up on using a bellows to clean the driveway, and succumbed to the lure of a leafblower.

TimesOldRoman 8y ago

They were on their feet most of the day.

jorblumesea 8y ago

Baggier clothes were in style, so hard to tell what their actual weight/waist size could be.

gammateam 8y ago

Less processed sugar. I was surprised that so many of you all were grasping at physical activity nuances. A factor but it doesnt exist in a vacuum

GhostVII 8y ago

The percentage of families with both parents working has increased significantly over the last several decades - perhaps as more families have both parents working, healthy homemade meals are becoming less popular, since the parents just don't have the time required to prepare healthy food.

musha68k 8y ago

Less sedentary lifestyles and something Dr. Jason Fung always likes to point out: most people ate three times a day until a couple of decades ago. Very rarely would one have a snack, usually no snacks in between those three meals.

TomMckenny 8y ago

People ate those foods far less often because grocery prices were a tiny fraction of fast food prices. There were even intermittent price wars between competing grocery stores. Now the Savemart-Kroger duopoly means fast food and groceries have reached esentialy the same price point.

atr_gz 8y ago
Grocery stores now have cutthroat price competition, with some of the slimmest margins in retail. Not sure where you're getting these ideas.

will_brown 8y ago

Look at the ingredients, noticeably lacking in all of them in 1940 will be HFCS. And since the advent of HFCS in the 70s it would is now found in everything named above coke, ice cream, hotdog/burger buns (and condiments) and fries. And the amount of sugar in food stuffs has increased substantially. We have thousands of years of agriculture showing us forcefeeding corn to animals leads to fattening them up and in particular fatty livers (fois gras). Since the advent of HFCS in the 70’s we have seen the first cases of childhood t2 diabeties and non alcoholic fatty liver disease in the US in the 80’s. Once HFCS made its way into the UK we saw childhood diabeties there too with the first cases in the 90’s and you can follow the spread of western diseases to every country where western HFCS foodstuffs were introduced, for example Okinawa, which once had the best life expectancy in the world and now has western foods and an explosion of these chronic diseases.

diogenescynic 8y ago

Even when you adjust for physical activity and caloric intake, Americans weigh more than previous generations. Pesticides, non-stick chemicals, BPA, and antibiotics probably have something to do with it: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/whats-really-making-us-fat/254087/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/03/whats-rea...

diogenescynic 8y ago
Lol at whoever downvoted all my comments.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

rixrax 8y ago

Also, possibly only one photo in this set with a non-white persons in it.