Madison life - feature: the vintage diet

Why do we weigh more than previous generations? Katrina Lawrence looks back to a time when food was a whole lot simpler.

My nanna has been the same weight all her life. Even her wartime wedding dress still fits her. She credits this phenomenon to her girdle (“you can only eat so much in one of those things”) and to raising nine kids (“my sole exercise”). But I have long suspected her slender figure is also a result of her diet. Not that she has ever followed one. Nanna believes in the “little bit of everything” style of eating. However, her “everything” doesn’t involve anything processed. Rarely does she eat from a wrapper or can. Her food, in other words, actually looks like food.
In The End of Overeating, Dr David Kessler, the former head of the American Food and Drug Administration, blames modern food industry techniques, such as processing, for throwing our generation’s relationship with food out of whack. “For thousands of years human body weight stayed remarkably stable,” he writes. “Then, in the 1980s, something changed.” The population began getting heavier.
Nutritionist Rosemary Stanton, author of Healthy Eating for Australian Families, concurs. “By the 1980s, the number of [Australian] adults who were overweight had gone up dramatically. That continued into the mid-1990s, and since then there has been a huge increase in the number who were overweight but who are now obese. In other words, fat people are getting fatter.”
It’s little surprise, says Stanton, that women gained weight at the same time they began gaining careers. “Overwhelmingly, women are still responsible for the household food, and if they have to work outside the home, they don’t have time to do much cooking from scratch, so they eat more processed food, more takeaway, and they dine out more… It would have been nice if men moved into the kitchen at the same rate as women have moved into the workforce!”
Dr Kessler agrees that food became more readily available in the 1970s and ’80s, creating a culture of easy eating, but his concern is that in a world where we are so spoilt for choice, we have increasingly gone for the unhealthy options. “Having food available doesn’t mean we have to eat it,” Dr Kessler notes. “What has been driving us to overeat?”
Dr Kessler’s conclusion is that certain foods make us want to eat more. Specifically, they’re foods that contain some combination of sugar, fat and salt. Scientists call these foods “palatable”. “They are referring primarily to [food’s] capacity to stimulate the appetite and prompt us to eat more,” says Dr Kessler. Think how you can never eat just one scoop of cinema popcorn. Or consider the jingle for Pringles: “Once you pop, you can’t stop.” There is truth in advertising: you literally can’t stop because your appetite has been stimulated to keep craving.
The battle between appetite and hunger is nothing new. Dietitians have long urged us to tune into the latter. “One of the tricks I use to get clients back in touch with their hunger is to give them a really light meal for dinner so that they wake up hungry,” says dietitian Susie Burrell. “It’s often a strange sensation – some people haven’t felt hunger for years.”
Dr Kessler argues that modern food doesn’t allow hunger to play a part in our eating processes. It’s all about stimulating the appetite to want, rather than waiting for the stomach to need. His contacts – high-level US food industry execs – even admit to concocting highly palatable food for appetite-enhancing purposes.
Closer to home, you can bet that the tasty stir-fry at your local Thai is so delicious because it has generous doses of sugar, salt and fat. Ever wondered why your own stir-fries never taste quite the same? It’s because you wouldn’t dare put so much sugar, salt and fat in yourself.
The trend towards eating out means that restaurants and food stores are fighting harder for our attention. And appetites. Enter what Dr Kessler calls “tricked-out foods”. Once upon a time a latte was fancy; we can now order white chocolate mocha frappuccinos, which Dr Kessler calls “coffee diluted with a mix of sugar, fat and salt”.
Modern food techniques not only allow for chemical flavours to infiltrate our food and stimulate us to eat more; processing, which refines food into an easy-to-digest texture, means we eat faster, consuming more kilojoules. Think of the difference between a fishcake and a tuna steak. “Because this kind of food [processed] disappears down our throats so quickly after the first bite, it readily overrides the body’s signals that should tell us ‘I’m full’, ” explains Dr Kessler.
With the food industry devising so many ways to trick our tastebuds and blow out our waistbands, what’s a modern girl (especially one who wants to fit into her favourite dresses for many years) to do? My nanna would have a few tips for you: avoid the supermarket (or at least those “naughty” aisles) and grow and prepare as much of your own food as possible.
Okay, a vegie patch may not quite fit on an apartment balcony, but there’s always room on the kitchen bench for herbs, which are a super-satiating and non-fattening way to add flavour to meals. As for the rest of your food, experts say to buy as much unprocessed produce as possible. In short, eat lots of wholefoods.
“The more crunchy and chewable foods are, the better,” says Burrell. Think raw vegetables, brown rice and super-grainy bread. “We should be chewing each mouthful 20 times. Concentrate on spending your money on fresh fruit, vegetables and meat.”
The resurgence of farmers’ markets may be a sign that we want to return to good old-fashioned food habits. “There’s a nostalgia for the days before we had so many packaged foods,” says Stanton.
“You know, we’ve only had supermarkets since the 1960s. Before this, people made a list and went to the shops and bought what they needed. They didn’t wander around buying on impulse, assisted by marketing efforts.”
Which brings us to those dreaded snack aisles. “It’s easy to become addicted to sweet and fatty foods,” says Burrell. “The brain is primed to look for those sensations in the mouth all the time.”
The solution? Snack on  wholefoods, such as apples and nuts. Or don’t snack at all. “Women didn’t snack in the past,” notes Burrell. Sure, there’s talk these days of “grazing” – but that message, she says, has been taken to the extreme. “When health professionals started speaking about grazing, they meant having morning tea and afternoon tea, but it has been transferred into a concept of eating all the time. The body gets used to eating more very quickly, so basically you’re reprogramming how much you eat.”
“I prefer the three-meals-a-day approach to eating – it means that you’re actually quite hungry for the next feed,” says Stanton. “It’s also most satisfying to sit and eat at the table, with a knife and fork… or even chopsticks!” she laughs. “Because we can adapt some things that we take from the ‘olden days’. ”
Stanton adds that structured mealtimes also have an important social function. “It brings the family together,” she says. My nanna knew that all too well, since she had nine mouths to feed three times a day.
Sharing food with so many others may sound like one way to keep overeating in check, but nanna insists that opting for good, wholesome food is her top health secret. Along with, of course, that other old-fashioned body-slimming wonder: the girdle. But that’s another story altogether.