What did the Western world look like before the obesity epidemic? Like this.
The picture is from a popular outdoor pool in the 70’s in Sweden. Not a single obese individual is to be seen.
Me thinks you need to meet Razwell - you have SO much in common
The photo is of a cruise; the caption says, according to Google translator, "No RCCL cruise is complete without a magplasktävling . The winner was not the man in the picture , or any of the other wide boys who attended without a perfectly normal plant youngster on a 70-80 kilos."
:-)
But, people did eat processed wheat/carbs and sugar back then and it was was absolutely common (I rembemer kids eating bread with butter and pure cane sugar on top - not uncommon either)
The main differences I see from back then compared to now are:
People cooked all their meals from scratch, pretty much no exceptions
People ate 3 times a day, maybe one snack that actually was a snack and not a full meal as snacks are these days
No food on the go or fast food restaurants- ready to eat foods/meals weren't available at every corner
No sugary drinks except for regular fruit juices
As much as I am a believer in low carb/no wheat/no sugar - bad carbs are not the problem, we simply eat too much and too often.
What I do wonder about is whether people have *always* been svelte in the past. It seems to me that 18th century gentlemen could be pretty large. I'm going here by old paintings and comments in novels and so on: I've no statistical data on this, and I doubt there is any. But take a look at some of the portraits around from this time, bellies bulging in the flowered waistcoats. David Hume would be a good example. He looks pretty porky. And how about Dr. Johnson? Banting himself would be a case in point, although he comes from a slightly later period.
I have seen sarcastic references in 19th century writings to tables that had had parts cut out of them to accomodate the gut of their 18th-century owner. And the Victorian novelist Robert Smith Surtees has a whale of a time in his novel _Mr. Facey Romford's Hounds_ making fun of 18th-century foxhunting people - Simon Heavyside (who rides at 18 stone) and the Heavyside Hunt. The point of the joke is that modern Masters of Foxhounds, like Romford, ride lighter and go faster.
http://www.rssurtees.com/products-page/r-s-surtees/mr-facey-romfords-...
I don't know for sure, and don't know how one could establish it, but my sense is that some 18th century people could be pretty large, and we only returned to slimness as a norm in the 19th and early 20th century, getting derailed in the second half of the twentieth by "healthy" eating and government "health education" advice. If this be true, it would be interesting to look at how the diet changed in the earlier period. I have a feeling that although it's often the poor who are obsese - a point made by Gary Taubes in refutation of the overeating hypothesis - in the 18th century it was mainly the rich, and specifically rich males at that. Interesting to know what wealthy males of the period were scarfing down - lots of bread and cakes and a heck of a lot of wine, including sweet and/or fortified wines like maderia, sherry and port, I suspect.
IIRC, Paul Johnson has a little on changing eating habits among the wealthy in _The Birth of the Modern_:
http://www.amazon.com/Birth-Modern-World-Society-1815-30/dp/0297812076/
It would be interesting to look deeper into the matter, though. I think we just don't know as much about the past as we sometimes think we do.
http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/highlights/highlight_objects/pd/...
Well worth a look as revealing contemporary attitudes: what people thought about the Prince's figure and perhaps what they thought caused it - namely, being a "voluptuary".
Wikipedia has a listing of 18th century Swedish people, but I didn't try to find pictures and check them all out. Swedenborg looks fairly slim in the picture I found. But Linnaeus does look on the heavy side in at least some paintings - a hint of a double-chin and a rather bulging waistcoated stomach.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/world/on-the-open-road-signs-of-a-c...
Interesting that despite the fact that there are almost no working cars there, so people have to walk a lot, and average income is $20 a month, so they're obviously not pigging out on expensive snack foods, there are still overweight people. See photo 10.
They may be drinking a lot of sodas. And probably eating a lot of rice and very little meat.
I have a picture of the swiming pool on the River Sava in my living town Zagreb.from the year 1958.
There is o a lot of people but no one is obese. No one!!
But now all of them are obese, with glasses and witout hair!
Very interesting!!
When I go to a Cuban restaurant, they look at me as if I'm crazy when I ask for an order of pork, onions and a salad.
It has to be the environment, with the finger firmly pointing at sugar as the main culprit. We ate a lot of carbohydrate, mainly potato and white flour (no pasta and rice consumed as a pudding) coupled with a lot of natural saturated fat, yet diabetes(type 1) was something to be pitied as a bad luck thing, and type 2 something I never heard mentioned. Soft drink if you wanted it was delivered by the Corona lorry once a week - something we didn't subscribe to - and sweets were severely limited. We never, never snacked.
Though I now largely follow a LCHF lifestyle I would guess I would do just fine by returning to the diet I enjoyed as a child.
However they are another spices and are adopted to that, our problem is that we are adopted to hunt and forage all day long.. and have a very limited storage facility for carbs.
And a very low capasity for denovo lipogenes!
North european bear lives almoste of berrys and ants at autumn and eats about 9000 Kcal a day and much is converted to fat and then it lives on that in hibernation the whole winter!
There are several lectures and blogs to peruse. I wish you the best and keep at it. I've been there.
Never give up folks, you can get to the weight you want to be, I know it can be very hard, but never give up. Never let anyone tell you what you can't do.
Good luck and health to all.
Eddie
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So occasional binging on sugar with a healthy metabolism is a stress, but is only an insulin pulse. So long as insulin zeros out after the pulse, the metabolism can begin looking to fat cells for energy. So long as insulin is elevated, fat is locked in fat cells.
The problem has been the misguided, politically and ideologically driven fat phobia and food pyramid which advocated reduction of fat and increased carbs. This pushed more and more people to a state where the rate of insulin clearance was slowed to the point where insulin remains continually elevated. This results in loss of energy because sugar gets used up but insulin lags and remains elevated, so store body fat is not available for energy as blood sugar falls. Thus to get energy the person has to snack. They are advised to avoid fat, so they have carbs, which elevates insulin. Thus insulin never zeros out, except after a long sleep. (Note the studies linking long sleep to better weight management.) Chronically elevated insulin appears to be the cause of type 2 diabetes, and most every other chronic disease epidemic we have these days.
So it cannot be inferred from the past practices of occasional carb bingeing that carbs are not the issue. As you observe, three of the meals in a day were typically prepared from scratch, so with traditional levels of fat consumption the rate of carb overloading was not high, insulin typically zeros out and there was little genuine hunger or energy low between meals. These things always have to be examined carefully in context of dietary and cultural practices. Traditional Japanese, for example, eat rice, but the portions are small and much of it is cold rice as in sushi. Cold rice is a resistant starch that has much less effect on blood sugar (and therefore insulin), so it is metabolically much different than bread starch. Comparing across time and culture is always a difficult interpretive endeavour.