Why was obesity so uncommon before the 1980's?

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Something else, OP referred to the Third World, people don't tend to realize that outside of total basketcases like Sub-Saharan Africa obesity rates are fairly similar worldwide and are decoupled from wealth. The fattest nations are in the Arabian Peninsula and Polynesia, the former from a culture that disincentivizes working out and the latter from having gone from one of the healthiest seafood and fruit based diets in the world to a diet based almost entirely off of processed food imports (since those islands are no longer self-sufficient and are too far away for fresh groceries).

Elsewhere in the world, Eurotrash like British are as fat as Americans.

The "fat American" is basically a myth and may as well be "the fat Egyptian," "the fat Mexican," "the fat Britbong." Societies becoming obese is just something that happens when they hit modernity, like collapsing fertility also is.

One possibility is that other societies may have high obesity rates but not so many cases of extreme obesity.

 

[Sweetpeaa]

Something else, OP referred to the Third World, people don't tend to realize that outside of total basketcases like Sub-Saharan Africa obesity rates are fairly similar worldwide and are decoupled from wealth. The fattest nations are in the Arabian Peninsula and Polynesia, the former from a culture that disincentivizes working out and the latter from having gone from one of the healthiest seafood and fruit based diets in the world to a diet based almost entirely off of processed food imports (since those islands are no longer self-sufficient and are too far away for fresh groceries).

Elsewhere in the world, Eurotrash like British are as fat as Americans.

The "fat American" is basically a myth and may as well be "the fat Egyptian," "the fat Mexican," "the fat Britbong." Societies becoming obese is just something that happens when they hit modernity, like collapsing fertility also is.

One possibility is that other societies may have high obesity rates but not so many cases of extreme obesity.

Yes, obesity rates are high in multiple countries. U.S ranks about 14 in the obesity by countries despite being assumed to be further up on that list.

I remember when I was a tween and went to see the movie ''Shallow Hal'' with my Mom. If you're not familiar with the film it was about a man who got hypnotized against his will to see ugly and fat women as pretty and thin and he started a relationship with one unaware of her actual looks.



I literally remember the audiences reaction through the whole film every time they would show how fat the woman was - people were gasping and screaming when she was finally revealed fully



That was how obesity was perceived in the early 2000's. Nearly the same as a disfigurement. It was nearly socially unacceptable at that time.

 

[Meat Target]

Manual/blue collar labor declined and was replaced by sedentary service industry jobs. This increase in the number of desk jockeys coincided with the aforementioned rise of Big Tech and Big Food.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

The biggest attributer in my opinion is lack of shame within society. Fat kids would (and should) be bullied and their parents will be shunned. Nowadays calling someone fat is considered hateful rather than objective reality, probably the cause of decades of the media putting the spotlight on anorexia as if it's the only alternative.

 

[The Ugly One]

Economists claim it’s because snack food became much cheaper. People ate large dinners before the 1980s and they really didn’t exercise that much more (jobs difference between mid1900s and now is way less than between either and 1800s). But people now tend to graze all day long on snack foods and soda IN ADDITION to their meals.

Not my field at all, but I heard that eating between meals causes your body to pack on a lot more fat.

At the end of his life, people were constantly commenting on how fat Elvis had gotten. He was so fat that how disgustingly huge he'd gotten was the subject of constant jokes, and after his death, it was obvious to everyone that his obesity killed him, along with the drugs. People speculated that he must be constantly drinking Pepsi and eating a pound of bacon a day. How else could you get that colossal?

Anyway, this is what he looked like at age 42, the year he died. In 1977, this was regarded as disgustingly fat for a man in his 40s.

 

[Gunter Hatherer]

NYC random working class crowd 1980s. Typical?

 

[George Floyd Sneed]

We are just really good at making fatty foods and we eat more of them now than ever.

Exhibit A is Starbucks. Back in the day, you could add a spoonful of sugar in coffee but today every featured Starbucks drink is like 10% coffee and 90% milk and sugar but mostly sugar. Most people, especially fats, don’t consider how quickly liquid calories add up. Fast food was considered a rare treat but there is a not insignificant percentage of the population that subsists almost entirely off fast food and DoorDash runs today. A child occasionally has a piece of candy but now we have adults who just graze all day on bits of candy here and there at the office. They don’t even think about it but that dish of Jolly Ranchers add up.

Lots of empty calories that all add up over time to hundreds of thousands into millions of calories that people just didn’t used to eat until the last 30 years or so.

 

[Rei is Shit.]

Its a mystery to everyone

 

[RussianBlonde]

One major thing was convincing people that fat was bad and fat was replaced with sugars. When you remove the fat from the product it becomes tasteless, so you have to add sugar. In EU food is actually pretty good quality because of strict regulations, ie in Poland you have tons of different breads to chose from but each will have 3-4 ingredients. When I'm in the US I'm terrified sometimes when I look at the bread packaging and there is like 40 ingredients listed.

The same with ready food items, like spaghetti sauce or canned goods, sugar often listed as first ingredient, corn syrups etc.

Something else, OP referred to the Third World, people don't tend to realize that outside of total basketcases like Sub-Saharan Africa obesity rates are fairly similar worldwide and are decoupled from wealth. The fattest nations are in the Arabian Peninsula and Polynesia, the former from a culture that disincentivizes working out and the latter from having gone from one of the healthiest seafood and fruit based diets in the world to a diet based almost entirely off of processed food imports (since those islands are no longer self-sufficient and are too far away for fresh groceries).

Elsewhere in the world, Eurotrash like British are as fat as Americans.

The "fat American" is basically a myth and may as well be "the fat Egyptian," "the fat Mexican," "the fat Britbong." Societies becoming obese is just something that happens when they hit modernity, like collapsing fertility also is.

One possibility is that other societies may have high obesity rates but not so many cases of extreme obesity.

That's actually not true. Brits are fat, a lot of them actually, but in Europe I've never seen the kind of obesity I've seen in the US. And it's not only how big people are but obese people in US seem to have something weird going on when it comes to their shapes. They will often be fat just in the middle, with giant fupas and bellies and their arms and legs remain relatively normal looking. A lot of them seem to have really fatty neck with skin hanging down. It's just very different to fat people in Europe who seem to be fat all over basically.

Not my field at all, but I heard that eating between meals causes your body to pack on a lot more fat.

At the end of his life, people were constantly commenting on how fat Elvis had gotten. He was so fat that how disgustingly huge he'd gotten was the subject of constant jokes, and after his death, it was obvious to everyone that his obesity killed him, along with the drugs. People speculated that he must be constantly drinking Pepsi and eating a pound of bacon a day. How else could you get that colossal?

Anyway, this is what he looked like at age 42, the year he died. In 1977, this was regarded as disgustingly fat for a man in his 40s.

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Elvis was heavily addicted to opiates and actually died from drug induced constipation. The autopsy showed that his colon was full of more than 30 pounds of feces, and was twice the size of a normal colon. He wasn't eating too much, he just couldn't take a shit for a very very long time.

 

[FatalTater]

Lack of shame over gluttony has to be the #1 factor.

Also, Karen Carpenter died in 1983 and suddenly schools and Very Special Episodes of shows were warning teen girls of the dangers of anorexia, even the fat ones.

TV was telling kids they needed to snack to be healthy. TV and women's magazines were telling parents that kids needed to snack to be healthy.
Before the late 80s/early 90s, snacks were for fatties, everyone one else had self control and could wait until mealtime.

Vending machines full of fat, salt, and sugar were allowed into SCHOOLS.

There are other things too, but from my observations constant snacking and overeating with no guilt are the biggest problems.

 

[Absurdist Laughter]

Big sugar, big dairy, and other industrialization processes that has made food (or not food) cheap to make and plentiful. Some might even blame the food pyramid and a general lack of knowledge of health compared to now.

 

[FatalTater]

Kinda funny thing I had forgotten but remembered today because I was looking up stuff about SlimFast and other diet plans from The Past...

Remember when SlimFast shakes were meant to replace two of three meals in your day? Like, have a shake for breakfast and one for lunch, then eat a reasonably human-sized dinner? I think on an episode of Golden Girls Blanche was even doing something like it, as I recall her shaking Rose and saying "You ate my sensible meal!"

There was no snacking, but now? Now SlimFast, Weight Watchers, etc all sell SNACKS.
Constant grazing is killing people.

Found the Golden Girls clip I was thinking of.
The episode was called "What A Difference A Date Makes"

 

[Big Judge Cock]

1) Replacing fat with sugar
2) Seed oils in fucking everything
3) Promoting salad as food for people instead of for livestock (five a day, or is it seven, or twelve? Turns out the number was pulled out of someone's ass!)
4) "Snacks" as previously mentioned
5) Sedentary lifestyle (TV, mobile phones etc.)
6) Almost forgot - the food pyramid. Complete bollocks.

The schools in Bongland push snacks constantly, along with the ever present need to hydrate - people used to shrivel up and die without water every ten minutes in the old days! Don't you know the Science says you can't learn if you haven't eaten something recently!

A little anecdote; when I used to send my daughter to school (before we started homeschooling) we would see the various dregs handing out sausage rolls and packaged sandwiches to their children in the morning, and then haribo and other sweets in the afternoon at pickup time. Kids go into the supermarket and buy 150g chocolate bars and eat them like they are single serving bars. The biggest fatties would show up late with Costa food every day. It's not a mystery, they have no self-control. The school would also reward children with sweets and cake in the daytime, while scolding parents for the contents of their packed lunches.

The problem is everywhere, it's not just one thing. It's everything.

 

[Chongqing]

Simple, OP. Changes in lifestyle choices.

When was the last time anyone you know, from friends to family to coworkers or literally anyone you know IRL, walked for more than a mile without a dog?

Maybe just one person 15 years ago in an emergency?

I myself have only one person I know who walks as a hobby. He puts weights in a rucksack and walks long distances for his fitness, but this is a very unique and eccentric person who does things most people would never think to do.

As far as anyone saying, "I walked a mile or more to pick up something from the grocery store," it's just not something we hear. That's the difference.

 

[Thiletonomics]

Would the amount of countries that were still under communism, pre-1980, be also the reason why obesity was lower? Also, 1980 was the earlier years of Deng Xiaoping's rule in China, compared to his predecessor Mao Zedong and his era, when the Great Leap Forward happened, resulting in millions of people dying of starvation.

 

[Ghost of Wesley Willis]

Because it was around the 70s and 80s we started getting really retarded health fads, but also the sad reality that the USDA food pyramid insists that fruit loops and frosted flakes are healthier for you than red meat.

 

[PipTheAlchemist]

Because it was around the 70s and 80s we started getting really retarded health fads, but also the sad reality that the USDA food pyramid insists that fruit loops and frosted flakes are healthier for you than red meat.

What's healhy for the government is healthy for it's citizens, after all

 

[celebrityskin]

I asked my mother not too long ago what she thought about it, and she said when she was growing up (child in the 70s, teen in the 80s), basically no one snacked. Your mother would cook a meal for the family in the evening and if you didn't eat that, you didn't eat period.

Even if you did snack it would have just been one bag of sweets here and there, there wasn't huge supermarket shelves of 15 varieties of pringles and oreos and shit like there is today.

Add in the increase in white collar work meaning less people working in manual labour, industry, farming etc. and the decline of smoking (which suppresses your appetite).

 

[Haint]

When products produced with apples are cheaper than a whole apple. Chemically processed, subsidized crops such corn and soybeans. Computers and the internet are also responsible. So get out and grow your own food, fat fucks.

 

[Black Man Underwear]

Apologies if this has already been said, but here we go:

Changes to the dietary recommendations from the U.S. Government in the mid-late 70s. Obesity shot up after the 80s started because "breakfast cereal" became a concept and fatty foods became a horror.

"Gained weight? Stop eating meat." That became the advice. Why? Because the grain lobby, that's why.

My advice? If you're hungry, grab some meat and/or veggies. Hershey's certainly packs on the pounds but I don't recall anyone dying of a bacon overdose.