In the early 70’s if you were eating sugar, it was most likely cane sugar. Now it’s most likely high-fructose corn syrup, and as it’s a dandy, cheap preservative, it’s added to everything. Bread, canned soup, yogurt, everything. Quite difficult to avoid it, unless you do a level of from-scratch cooking that’s rarely seen these days.
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Nice correlation Wazroth. Something horribly unholy is represented here in these graphs. Also, 1980 was when Raygun was elected. I would roughly say, the mid 70’s was the turning point and the election of RunnyRaygun was the beginning of the end.
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It’s pretty easy to avoid if you eat meals with single food ingredients. Nothing processed or prepackaged. It’s more of a mind over food than anything else.
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Sure, and mostly I do manage it, but I’m self employed and work from home and don’t have a bunch of kids who are squalling for lunchables or chicken nuggets like all their friends eat.
My mother cooked like that, in the early 70’s. Then she died, and my poor father switched all of us to heat-and-eat convenience foods because he didn’t have the know how or time. We all inflated like balloons instantly.
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Love me some olives. One of the first things i look forward to when i go on holiday is that first cold beer and a side plate of olives. That’s when i know i’ve arrived 
Also, try as i might, i can never find olives at home that we get on holiday (home being england, holiday being mainland europe). I guess that’s part of their charm.
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I get what you’re saying now. You’re expressing amazement that some people don’t eat olives by themselves.
Yeah, it’s not common in the US except in authentic mainland European restos. And the Americanized Greek and Italian places are far more numerous (at least where I live) than the ones which resemble the food I’ve had in mainland Europe.
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yeah we’ve seen cultural moves away from letting our kids disapear on bikes into the neighborhood for 8 hours at a streatch.
Theres also been a concurrent ecconomic shift away from blue collar and physical work and towards white collar and service jobs.
Theres more going on here than just junk food, much of which dates to the 50s or 70s. And the healthfood and low fat crazes most recently see their origins in the 70s.
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Thank you, but how was it played? I’ve never heard of such a thing. Sorry for going off-topic but I’m intrigued.
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That stood out to me, too. I don’t have data in my pocket, but I can’t believe kids are as active now as they were when I was one of them.
I certainly parked myself in front of the TV, but I also played organized sports, and all us neighborhood kids were always running around doing something. Kick the can, basketball, ghosts in the graveyard. Or just roaming the neighborhood and goofing off.
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In the USA we have “olive bars” in supermarkets, it’s like a salad bar only there will be as many as 30 different types of olives laid out. You fill a tray and pay by the pound.
I’ve spent embarrassing amounts of money at olive bars.
Oh, sorry! As I recall, there was a mcguffin object, usually a football of either sort, and everyone who didn’t have the ball fought to get it. So you’d run like a maniac shrieking hysterical laughter as twenty other kids chased you down, tackled you, and wrestled the ball away (with elbows and fists flying but no biting or kicking) then whoever managed to get the ball would dash off in turn, until everyone was too bruised and exhausted to continue.
A rough but very fun game, and in practice not as rough as touch football by any means.
Back to the main topic, I have had to recently increase my caloric intake massively, because I keep unintentionally losing weight. But I don’t eat anything that tastes sweet except raw whole fruits and occasionally a little honey or organic chocolate, and I eat very little ground grain.
My daughter turned 18 last year and started controlling her own diet, and inflated like a balloon instantly. Just as you say, it was a switch from relatively unprocessed, traditionally prepared foods to fashionable modern commercial foods with huge ingredient lists studded with unpronounceable chemical names.
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There are surprising amounts of sugar added to not obviously sweet processed foods. Once you star looking at ingredients you’ll find it EVERYWHERE. Sometimes they’ll divide it up into several different kinds of sugar so that if falls further down in the list of ingreedients. And as has been pointed out serving sizes (ESPECIALLY OF SODAS) have been getting bigger.
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I’ve heard (but would be hardpressed to present the anthropological evidence) that there’s a correlation between our cultural tendency to have fewer kids and our cultural tendency to be more protective of the kids we have. Not sure how the timing of the reproduction curves works on that assertion, though.
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Hamburger buns, for example.
Really? The buns?? Yeah. The Buns.
In McD’s defense, it looks like they no longer put HFCS into the buns, just regular sugar.
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i’d argue that while we didn’t completely understand it, it most definitely DID mean homosexual. to be tagged “the queer” was a horrifying experience, especially if you WERE a young gay person cough
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Oh totally, even when trying to eat ‘healthy’. Take a look at the amount of sugar in something like yogurt, or a smoothie, or yes, hamburger buns. Even the fries at McD’s are lightly sprayed with a sugar solution to help with browning.
I’ll second this. When we played it in the late 70s and early 80s it was totally understood that ‘the queer’ meant ‘the gay kid you were supposed to attack’, because gay meant bad/wrong/sick/weird. It was… awkward to say the least.
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(also off-topic, but what the heck) As an odd and strange child, I despised that game. It’s no wonder I grew up hating kids until I had a couple of my own. And then I pretty much only liked my kids. Who are no longer kids.
Exactly. I didn’t know what type of person I was sexually at that time, but I knew I fell outside the norm… and the other kids knew it too, it seemed.
Also, this was in the mid-’70s, and “queer” was taken to mean “gay” more than odd or strange as I recall.
Lord I hated that game. I’d all but forgotten about it.
(on topic) I’m getting fatter right now!
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Well, child culture is regional, but around here we fought as hard as we could to be the queer - that was the whole point of the game. You wanted the ball. You wanted to be the focus of the game.
And thus, the reason the name of the game changed when we realized that “queer” had come to mean something other than “unusual”. Our parents raised us to be homophobic, after all.
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Because we were always running from THE MAN!
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Yeah, the buns, I noticed that specific thing. Even the healthy looking rough brown-bread ones from the grocery store bakery are good for an instant blood-sugar spike. So I looked, the sugar’s right there on the label. I basically quit eating buns and bun-like breads.
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