akmom said:
But I think today's children eat much healthier, with more vegetables, whole grains and lower-sodium meals in general. People are just more aware of these things than they were when my generation grew up. So... it really is a mystery that *my* generation grew up with mostly healthy weight, and our healthier-fed children are heavy! Well, my own children are not, but they are too young for me to write off the possibility yet.
I agree with that for a portion of children. Food availability is much better now than it was when I was a kid. You can walk into the supermarket and you see the most amazing array of fruits and veggies, when I was growing up in the 70's, it just wasn't like that. Our local greengrocer had the staples. Potatoes, carrots, broccoli, iceberg lettuce, one variety of tomato, apples, bananas, oranges. Then every now and then something "amazing" and "seasonal" would come in and everyone would wow. Or you would go to a friend's house whose parents were European migrants and they had something "exotic" growing in their gardens like zucchini or eggplant.
I grew up with the pretty stock standard stodge meals. Monday was sausages and mash, tuesday was pasta with meat sauce, wednesday was chicken drumsticks, mash and peas and so on. My mother cooked most of her food in lard, white bread was a status symbol and if you could afford it, then dammit, cake was an everyday food.
You would be hard pressed to find many kids who still eat like that now, I've got a 5yr old whose favourite foods include okonomiyaki and quinoa. He had a friend over recently who gobbled up pretty much all of our blueberries and asked us if we had any coconut water.
On the flip side, there are families who are relying on convenience foods more than ever. Cost of living is higher now than it was when we were kids and people are working much longer hours, so things that can be made in a flash, or just purchased as take-away are increasingly popular. We really didn't eat take-away when I was growing up, towards the mid-late 80's we started getting fish n chips, but even then, that was a once every two months kinds of thing. I didn't step foot in a McDonalds until the 90's, when I was in my 20's. So I do believe that there are families out there that are eating worse (especially in terms of salt and sugar intake) than we did when we were younger. For all the faults in what we ate, we didn't eat anywhere near as much salt as people do now.
However, what I think is the biggest contributing factor is exercise. Growing up there was nothing to do in the house, you were always outside, up a tree, on a bike, building a clubhouse, running around with no purpose, burning up energy. I remember the parents HATING it when it rained, because I would be indoors being a royally bored pain in the backside, they couldn't wait to send me back outside. You fell over? So what? Just don't get any blood on the good couch. Now, we have video games, we have so many "indoor" toys, we worry more, we worry when our kids sustain normal injuries, we're more education obsessed (which isn't always a bad thing, but does little Johnny really need to see a tutor for 2 hours after he has been sitting down all day at school, then go home only to sit down for the rest of the evening doing his homework?) we have less physical activity in schools, games are being banned because they are "too dangerous" (skipping ropes are banned at my younger ones school during recess and lunch, in case anyone "gets hit or trips over") So what do they do instead? They sit.