How do we cure our obesity crisis
When I was growing up in the 50s and 60s hardly anyone was obese. Now we’ve become a fat nation. How can we reverse this?
A typical teatime for kids in the 1960s and 1970s. Sandwiches made with sliced white bread, buttered if you were very lucky, margarined if you weren’t, and filled with salmon paste, luncheon meat/spam or beef spread. Followed by a jam tart. Sunday tea was tinned fruit with evaporated milk and slices of white bread and butter. Maybe a biscuit or two to follow. School dinners, if you had them, would today be considered unpalatable and probably be rejected by all but those who were absolutely starving. They were very stodgy but they did the job and most kids ate them with relish. Many went back for seconds. Hardly anyone was overweight let alone obese.
We babyboomers did not eat particularly well as kids. I shudder now to think of those white bread sandwiches and jam tarts. Some even had sugar sandwiches - can you imagine!? Sweets were permitted but rationed. We got sixpence every Saturday morning which we’d clutch in our hot little hands as we rushed off to the nearest sweet shop to buy aniseed balls, pear drops and pineapple chunks - these weren’t fresh pineapple! They were lumps of sugar coloured yellow and supposedly flavoured with pineapple. No one was overweight. Maybe it was all the running to the sweet shops kept us slim? No. Course not. We were thinner in those days because our food wasn’t that appetising or enjoyable. It wasn’t something you looked forward to. It was a chore. It was something that had to be done. We didn’t want to come in for our dinner or tea. We just wanted to continue playing outside. If we weren’t forced to eat we probably wouldn’t have bothered until starvation forced us into the larder or pantry - few had ‘fridges in the Fifties and Sixties.
Food became delicious!
So what changed? Much blame is laid at the food industry for making food so delicious! Ready-made meals, microwaves, fast food outlets everywhere selling cheap but gorgeous food, aggressive advertising of foods ladened with sugar, fat and salt to hit that sweet spot making us enjoy them and want more more more. Coupled with people taking far less exercise than we did in the Fifties and Sixties. Far fewer had cars. Schools were within walking distance and often work was too. We walked. We ran. We ran about. We burned off whatever calories we ate. And we were, for the most part, a lot healthier than today’s generations. Hardly anyone had a food allergy, hay fever, or other food-related conditions. And for that matter I don’t call anyone having ADHD. One child in my class was overweight. Another had hay fever. That was it! Are all the additives in our food today to blame for higher incidences of food intolerance, ADHD and allergies? There must be something that’s caused the increase, surely?
Food is much nicer now but so are conditions that may be caused by it. A much higher percentage of people who are overweight or obese is surely caused not just by eating too much but eating too much of the kinds of food that encourage over eating!?
We need nanny!
There have been reams of articles lately on how to deal with this explosion in obesity. It’s pretty clear that leaving it up to individuals doesn’t work. Governments recoil from doing anything that gets labelled as nannying but maybe we need a bit of nanny? We didn’t eat that well in the Fifties and Sixties compared to now but the government did play a bigger role. Then it wasn’t about reducing obesity - it was ensuring kids were well fed. A reaction against The Depression of the 1930s when many kids went to bed hungry. So we had free school milk, free school dinners and free NHS orange juice fortified with vitamins. We got our name babyboomers because of the surge in babies born after the Second World War. We were nannied. But we weren’t for the most part overweight.
Maybe we need some of that spirit again? Free school meals for all, ideally, and go back to teaching schoolchildren how to cook and give lessons in nutrition. I treasure the memory of my domestic science lessons. I still use what I learned all those years ago. And we loved cookery lessons. It felt like playing. And when something feels like playing it’s the very best way to learn!
Just my tuppence ha’penny worth!
We, Americans at least, consume an incredible amount of processed food. Over the past year I’ve noted that many food items are made with genetically or bioengineered ingredients; nothing is sacred, not even our food. I’ve tried to eliminate them from my diet, or use sparingly.
Moreover, as a child in the 60’s and 70’s, fast food was not on every street corner and there were no shopping malls with the fast casual restaurants. We had a downtown, corner stores and family owned restaurants. I try to avoid chain restaurants still, but it is a challenge.
When my daughter was diagnosed with a gastrointestinal disease, she could mostly tolerate homemade bread. I suspect because there were no preservatives in it.
I think the food processing industry crept in corruptly and got the DfE to abolish Food and Nutrition and Home Economics in favour of ridiculous Food Technology, thus dooming children whose mothers no longer had time to teach them to being unable to cook. I loved Food and Nut O level, made a change from academic subjects. My mother was an amazing cook, and grew masses of veg, so food in our house was delicious, but I was at boarding school where it wasn't and not too much of it either particularly at prep school. We resorted to eating grass. It is very complex, but so much to do with not understanding what we are being fed by industry, over consumption, all the misery. I'm having to tackle it again, after a hard winter. If I don't stay on top of it, I don't fit my favourite dresses. Post menopause, 5 years of tamoxifen make it difficult - but not impossible.