Quote:
Originally Posted by s93uv3h
I recently watched the documentary Apollo 11 (2019) at the theater. I was amazed at at all of the think people. They showed the crowd (hundreds, thousands) who drove and camped / parked to watch the 1969 lift off. They were all thin. I had to look hard, and saw one guy with a beer belly (with a can of beer in hand). That was it. Kids were not over weight either. Amazing.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WereBear
THAT’s what I’m talking about!
I once looked up circus fat men and women, and at the turn of the 20th century, they were people we now see on the street, in stores, working with us at our jobs.
Last century’s outliers are this century’s “normal” and what would be the first thing any true scientist would think?
It’s got to be the food supply.
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If you look at archival photos from Woodstock, you'll see thin to normal sized people too - almost all of them. Granted, they were mostly those in their late teens and early 20's at the time...
BUT - Woodstock is where the the masses were first introduced to granola, a food that up to that point was really only the province of "weird" (for that day and age) natural food stores.
The food services contracted for the concert weekend were not expecting nearly so many people to show up, so they were ill-prepared to feed such a huge crowd for an entire weekend. The local stores were sold out of pretty much everything, just because of the sheer number of those who stopped to pick up some food on their way to the concert. Once the barriers were down and it became a free concert, sooooo many more showed up (estimated to be nearly 1/2 million total) than anyone had ever imagined would attend.
There was a "hippie" farm nearby that still had some food, but all they had left was granola, something most attendees had never even heard of before. But the guy handed out little paper cups of it to anyone who was hungry, telling them that he didn't have much to offer, but "it's called granola, and it's really good." They served it in little water cooler cups (the old fashioned paper cone shaped cups - they held about 1/4 cup of granola), and obviously many of those who took him up on his offer of this strange looking food agreed with him, because the Woodstock generation (even those of us who did not go to Woodstock) might as well be called the granola generation.
We're in our 60's and 70's now, and even among those of us who have switched over to LC, a great many of us are still wearing the results of decades of eating ever-increasing servings of granola (because 1/4 cup really isn't much, especially for something that's mostly sugar and starch, so you're hungry again in an hour or two), as well as tons of other whole grains. Sadly, my generation also passed the taste for granola on to our own kids, many of them are now adults, still eating their "healthy" granola - which nowadays is usually made much lower fat than it was back then (I made lots of granola over the years - the higher the fat content, the more crunchy the result, so much more appealing when high fat), so despite all that hearthealthywholgrainfiber, it has even less staying power than it did back then.
Despite all the other changes since the 60's and 80's - the increased use of plastics and Styrofoam, household microwaves, increased use of antibiotics (although back when I was a kid, every single time we became sick - which was very frequent - we were automatically prescribed antibiotics, even if only for prophylactic purposes, so that a viral illness would not turn into a bacterial infection), and hormones used in raising livestock, HFCS in almost everything, etc, the single biggest change has been the macro content of our diet. Not that the other changes can't be factors (they probably are), but I don't really think they're the primary cause of the exponential rise in obesity.