If very few people got fat in the 1950s, shouldn't we all just eat like it is 1950?

Random thought-- but in a way, yeah. Wouldn’t be the worst idea.

Paradoxically, one reason why so few were obese in 1950 is that — get a load of this — they ate fattier foods.

Sometime around 1960, people started listening to bogus nutritionists, who spread the erroneous paranoia that “fat in your food will kill you.” That’s also around the time that food scientists started to re-engineer food. One thing they did was to take some of the fat out.

When you take too much fat out, it’s like taking the alcohol out of beer. It tastes bad. So you sweeten it up — often with high fructose corn syrup. Then you have to eat more to get full, and sugar is mildly addicting.

The need for corn syrup is one reason why when you drive through Midwestern farm country, it’s full of corn instead of vegetables.

Connect the dots.

If you want to lose weight, there are other things you can do besides join a gym — though that’s not a bad idea, either.

Eat something my grandparents ate all the time. Eat braunschweiger. A quintessential 1950s food, in a way. It’s old-fashioned pork liver paté, also called liverwurst in Europe. Chock full of fat, but tasty as hell. After a few slices, you really don’t want anymore. And there’s no sugar in it.

I’m not suggesting that braunschweiger should be the entire basis of someone’s diet, and you probably shouldn’t eat a bunch of liverwurst every single day. But one thing the ’50s had going for it was fattier foods. Roast beef and potatoes is a classic example. Too much roast beef isn’t good for you, but the flip side is that if you have a plate with fattier food on it, you probably won’t eat the sheer amount of food you’d eat if it was conventional modern food.

Start eating full-fat yogurt — not the low-fat or sweetened Dannon varieties — and you’ll be less tempted to pig out on potato chips, Coca Cola and ice cream.

Seventy years ago, people also just lived more physically active lives. Even pharmaceutical companies a hundred years ago knew that exercise did you a lot of good. At least they were honest and said that if you wanted “grandfather’s cure for constipation,” you should just go take a saw to the woodpile.

Same with not getting fat. My grandparents and great-grandparents were farmers, coal miners, and mailmen. They didn’t sit on their butt in front of a laptop or staring at an iPhone. More people worked standing or walking on their feet and moving around in factories. Humans didn’t evolve to be sedentary creatures in offices, doing whatever people in offices do (which is usually nothing.)

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