Why were people thinner in the 1970s?

RIP Soul Train.

It’s a less marvelous world now that it’s gone.

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I question the contention that kids move around as much now as they did in the 70s.

In the time period 1970-1979 there were children playing hide and seek, kick the can, and smear the queer every single weekday in my mother’s street. Today, there are just as many kids in the neighborhood, but every single one of them is indoors using a computer, TV or game console… the cars used to have to creep along the streets at 10mph or less, now they blow through doing 40, because there’s no kids outdoors.

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Seems like an odd distinction. Olives are barely food, unless you are a goat or you process them substantially.

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You’re absolutely right. I imagine it might be possible to process rapeseed to make it edible in the same way we process olives. Hence (in part) my hedging about hedging. On the other hand, my understanding is that you can eat straight olive oil from fresh olives with no problem, but rapeseed oil yet needs to be de-acidulated in order to be made edible. One of the big deals about canola oil is that it’s a low-acid varietal of rapeseed and hence requires less post-processing to make the oil edible.

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“Smear the queer”??

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Sweet jebus, 42 ounces of soda? Fuuuuck that’s a LOT of sugar, man.

Like, why not just bust out a bag of the best grocery store white and eat it with a fucking spoon?

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As of 1992 we called that game “Smear the Homophobe,” but we were in our last year of college by then.

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Holy Crap. I had completely forgotten that that was a thing. How far we’ve come.

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image

There’s strong evidence that viral infections play a role in obesity. There’s evidence that almost 90% of obese people have a particular viral infection (about a third or less of the non-obese population has it). Correlation isn’t causation, but animal studies show that infection with the virus causes obesity and in-vitro experiments show it causes fat cells to multiply.
So there’s probably a lot of different causes for obesity, and some of them aren’t controllable.

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Dammit; that was my snarky reply.

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Works for runway models

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You don’t eat olives by themselves?

Same here, the standard activity was riding bikes, playing kickball in the street, hide and seek (sometimes with water guns), or smear the queer. And yeah, not only did we call it that, it was a popular, organized sport in the school my dad taught at. I think these days it’s called things like Maul Ball or Kill the Guy with the Ball.

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EDIT: There’s a thread to discuss Smear The Queer over here and it’s been pointed out to me that my experience of the game was filtered by my age and locality - your experience may well have differed, which you can discuss in the other thread. END EDIT

The game was invented when “queer” meant “odd” or “strange”, not homosexual.

When the meaning of the word changed, the name of the game changed, because American children didn’t want to be labeled queer. So, yah, there’s homophobia involved, just not in the most obvious way.

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I wonder whether they got their conclusion by comparing levels of ORGANIZED Activities. Because levels of unorganized (self-organized, really) activity seemed higher back in the day.

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I do. Love 'em.

They are often an appetizer at Greek or Italian places. Olives in a dish with sometimes a bit of feta.

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You don’t eat grapes or drink wine? Grapeseed oil is pretty popular, especially in restaurants, since it’s so neutral-flavored and has a high smoke point.

That’s what’s really interesting to me — I feel like kids had way more access to sugary fatty foods in the 70s than now. Seems like every single kid at lunch had PB&J sandwiches, one of those bright-red ‘fruit drink’ plastic jugs that’s pure sugar water, and a Hostess fruit pie or snack cake for desert. If you didn’t have real butter on everything at home, you had good ol’ trans-fatty margarine. The diet cola trend hadn’t taken off, and things like salads or grilled chicken sandwiches at fast food places didn’t exist. Yet the obesity trend didn’t seem to really accelerate until we got “healthy” in the late 70s and into the 80s.

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MORE SUGAR! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wcVEDyro2sE

I eat grapes, but I avoid the seeds. Also, grapes aren’t oily.

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