I suppose a lot of that is that these photos are from public places, and most of these people ate out rarely, mostly eating healthier from their lunch boxes and at their dinner tables.
That "plenty of food" was not 24/7 bombarded into the population with ads, not was it 90% of a supermarket, portions at restaurants were much smaller, and the sugar content was less. Plus most people, and for decades more, cooked and ate at home.
If you look at high school yearbook photos from the 1980s, almost all the people were thin. These are young persons that should have high metabolisms and high rates of activity, so you'd expect that. That thinness changed noticeably and rapidly through the 1990s. I went to high school in the 1990s and could see that shift very plainly during the decade.
All childhood age range obesity was typically about 5% until the early 1980s. Now the combined average is around 15%
From 1960 to 1980 adult obesity was typically 12% to 15%. Today that would nearly qualify as the thinnest country in the developed world (only Japan, South Korea and Singapore beat it now). From 1980 to 1990 it went up five or six points. By 2000 it had doubled (since the early 1980s) to ~30%. So approximately a doubling of the obesity rate in 15-20 years. Contrast 1980 US at ~15% obesity, with present day Denmark, Italy, Netherlands, Austria and Switzerland which are all considered fairly thin at ~20% obesity rates.
Most people don't know how to answer questions outside their limited domain expertise without relying on authority figures. Telling them their authority figures are unreliable on such an important topic seriously complicates their lives.
There's a lot of different theories, and a lot of controversy as to why but the idea that wide scale obesity is a fairly recent problem is not controversial.
I'd guess that the reason why the top comment here was downvoted, if it was downvoted, is that many people feel it's an obvious problem; calories in and calories out and the falling costs of calories in and the increasing cost of calories out explains the whole thing for me. You take an organism that has lived essentially on the edge of starvation for hundreds of thousands of years, and you put it in an environment where calories in are almost free and where for most of them, calories out are not? and yeah, those organisms are going to overeat. (Just my opinion, but it's a common one)
(the complaints about downvotes were downvoted because they are complaints about downvotes; those are obligatory downvotes.)
Note that the percentage of overweight but not obese individuals has remained a constant at roughly 30% of the population (both in 1960 and now). So there were some problems with weight issues back then too. But not so extreme.
What's also noteworthy is that extreme obesity (BMI >= 40) has shot up from barely existing in 1960 (0.9%) to 6% of the population. The health risks of obesity are much more problematic at BMI >= 40.
US soda consumption roughly doubled from 1975 to 2000. And of course as you mentioned, the US switched from sugar to high fructose. The US Government poured gasoline on the fire, with its industry collusion re sugar and its wildly screwed up food pyramids encouraging the over-consumption of carbs.
US sugar consumption also oddly skyrocketed from roughly 1980 to 2000. It went from ~80 pounds to ~110 pounds annually per capita in just under 20 years (after being relatively stable in a 20lb range the prior 60 years minus WW2).
The era of sugar cereal, sugar breakfast, large containers of soda everywhere, a large junk food boom, a big pizza & carb boom (rapid growth of pizza chains everywhere), continued explosion of low quality fast food chains. And last but not least, a huge increase in sedentary lifestyles.
I suspect there are many reasons for increased obesity including more fast food, more (large) soda consumption, less physical play activity, etc. Simply blaming advertising, farm subsidies, or whatever may make people feel that they've identified an external bogeyman but it's not as simple as that.
Plenty of sugar beet here in Michigan. plugs nose
For reference, corn syrup is not in fact cheaper than cane sugar. But the US imposes a tariff on imported sugar that keeps the price at roughly 300% of what it would otherwise be.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Professionalism/Diane_Vaughan_...?
Once society passed some critical threshold of obesity prevalence, people started to see it as normal and then the problem accelerated.
In winter, indoors was colder, not much, but you expended energy keeping warm. Wanted to send a message to you colleague 10ft away? No email, so you'd get up and walk over. Your whisk would probably be a hand whisk, your hedge trimmer would probably have been shears. Even driving would have been without power steering. Everything was just slightly less automated, and required just a little bit more energy. It really starts adding up very quickly.
This never fails to annoy my passengers:
"Why'd ya park here? The entrance is over there."
"Wut, ya legs broke?"
I'm sorry to say, I finally gave up on using a bellows to clean the driveway, and succumbed to the lure of a leafblower.
Those nickel sodas in the old days were only 6.5 oz
A can of coke is 12 oz today, nearly double, and the 20 oz bottle is probably more common. And the fast food restaurants serve 16 oz as a 'small'...
Maybe that is part of the problem?
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/drinking-diet-sod... "People who drink diet soda may be more likely to overeat in other areas, he told Reuters Health."
Yes to 'eat out rarely' definitely was like that (even in the 60's). But more importantly food wasn't prepared at home to make you want to eat more of it than you needed to (the average person). Things were done by mom and not enhanced in a way to make you overeat. Very important and often overlooked.
Now the Savemart-Kroger duopoly means fast food and groceries have reached esentialy the same price point.
- most likely didn't own a car : transit + walking - no TV, internet etc - working in a factory
And since the advent of HFCS in the 70s it would is now found in everything named above coke, ice cream, hotdog/burger buns (and condiments) and fries. And the amount of sugar in food stuffs has increased substantially.
We have thousands of years of agriculture showing us forcefeeding corn to animals leads to fattening them up and in particular fatty livers (fois gras). Since the advent of HFCS in the 70’s we have seen the first cases of childhood t2 diabeties and non alcoholic fatty liver disease in the US in the 80’s. Once HFCS made its way into the UK we saw childhood diabeties there too with the first cases in the 90’s and you can follow the spread of western diseases to every country where western HFCS foodstuffs were introduced, for example Okinawa, which once had the best life expectancy in the world and now has western foods and an explosion of these chronic diseases.
I was surprised that so many of you all were grasping at physical activity nuances. A factor but it doesnt exist in a vacuum