I wish I could track down the useful info that you folks seem to be able to find so easily :roll:
I find it hard to believe that we eat less than the Victorians did, not calling you a fibber Hana but it just seems so odd! When we talk about "we" who are "we" exactly? The conscientious folks who eat three good meals a day, don't snack at all in between meals and go for lots of regular exercise?
I don't know, maybe my thinking is just too simplistic. I'm not thinking back to Victorian times but to the times more recent (because let's remember that food rationing was around not just during the war but a long time afterwards), there was less food. After that time there was the good old staples of meat and two veg, pies, spuds, gravy, pastry-in other words, stodge.
Now like I said, I don't have the details but was this not a time of fewer heart attacks, less heart disease and diabetes? Obviously I could well be wrong with this, please correct me if I am!
Fewer cars around too so more walking, not seen as exercise but just a means of getting from A to B.
I don't think snacks of any sort were part and parcel of life then, it wasn't expected that they were to be included as part of an everyday diet or maybe I am mistaken?
That's something else I have noticed. (I'm on a roll tonight!). Snacks. Did we actually use that term until relatively recently? A snack implies something to quell hunger, that the main meals of the day are not enough to sustain us, to keep us from feeling hungry.
A treat was (for me in the early 70's) something like an ice-cream at the park, maybe a couple squares of choc watching tv in the evening. It was something nice cos it tasted nice, I didn't have it often because I had eaten my meals! Am I the only one that recalls this..maybe I'm looking back through rose-tinted glasses!!
So..more exercise, "proper" meals, not much, if anything, in between meals and the absence of junk food. Yup, I too believe that fast food has a lot to answer for in the health of young people but only because parents have bought into the myth too.
Food is available everywhere, shops stay open all day and sometimes all night but I remember trying to get to the door of the local shop before the doors closed. If the shop was shut, well, you did without until the next morning.
There are so many factors to be taken into account but I honestly think the availability of food to be partaken of at our whim, the varieties both "good" and "bad" that can be bought whenever we feel like it and the sedentary lifestyle has got to be behind it.
I think.. :think:
