> eat what your great grandma did “mostly greens, not too much”
My great grandma is from eastern-ish europe and grew up on a farm. Her diet mainly consisted of potatoes, bread, corn, milk, sausage, lard, butter, fermented cabbage or turnip, various preserved fruits (jams and compotes), and copious amounts of extra salty preserved meats. Fresh food was a luxury reserved for the summer (fruits, veggies) or slaughter weeks (fresh meat). No refrigeration, remember?
If I ate like her I'd die of a heart attack before I turned 40. And I'd be pretty obese, too. Many of those farmers got pretty chunky in their 30's despite working on the farm all day.
Oh and I almost forgot: liters of wine per day per person. Liters!
Farmers do an intense amount of work. The only other profession that works out as much in the modern economy are professional athletes and maybe elite soldiers. Also, farmers get tons of sun, which has beneficial effects on health as well as the deleterious effects people endlessly repeat: although it does raise the risk of skin cancer, it decreases the risk of other cancers so much that total cancer risk is lowered.
> If I ate like her I'd die of a heart attack before I turned 40. And I'd be pretty obese, too.
No you wouldn’t. Obesity rates back then were near zero. For the general population, not just for farm laborers. Heart disease killed far fewer people per capita per year. If you remove the infectious diseases that we have practically cured, mortality per capita per year in 1900 and 2020 is pretty similar.
Mind you, those infectious diseases were 90% eliminated by sanitation and understanding and 10% modern medicine; tuberculosis deaths were down by 90% from the 1860s to 1947, which is when streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against TB, was used.
For some time I ate similar diets to the one you describe - a poor farmer’s diet high in potatoes and bread, with some vegetables, meats and dairy - and I know people who eat that diet today. None of them are fat. It’s because potatoes and bread aren’t very calorie-dense. It is difficult to eat a caloric surplus every day when the majority of the food in front of you is greyish brown, vaguely mushy and of a sufficiently insufficient density that you must take your time to eat it. Modern processed foods, even the fairly simple ones, take the labor out of eating and make the regular things around us infinitely snackable. Modern foods have just the right amount of sweetness and salt and crunch with the right color and appealing packaging and advertising and so on. A standard potato in a standard kitchen will never have that. There’s a reason why obesity rates precisely track consumption of processed foods.
> No you wouldn’t. Obesity rates back then were near zero.
Define back then. My great grandma lived from 1910’s to 1990’s. I believe she got indoor plumbing and electricity sometime in the 1950’s or 60’s.
Because everyone grew their own food, supermarkets were mostly for sugar, salt, and such. Vegetable oils and margarine started becoming popular in the 70’s as a healthy alternative to lard.
From what I remember visiting those farms as a kid, the farm guys all had big bellies. Maybe from the alcohol? They weren’t american fat, true, more like power lifter fat.
PS: sausages are extremely calorie dense. A good blutwurst will pack about 1000 calories in 1 portion.
edit to add: Heavily processed american style food started entering our market in the late 90’s early 2000’s. It never got quite as popular or common as it is here (I moved to USA in 2015)
Alright, to the core argument here: you say if we all ate a diet of potatoes, bread, corn, milk, etc we would all die young of a heart attack and be obese. I say the opposite, which is that modern processed foods are what is giving us heart attacks and making us obese. So, about the article we're all commenting on. Pollan wrote this in 2007, and I quote:
>Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. (Sorry, but at this point Moms are as confused as the rest of us, which is why we have to go back a couple of generations, to a time before the advent of modern food products.)
Generation length varies significantly across human history, geographical location, population groups etc. but the average across the last quarter million years is twenty seven years [5].
The average American is 39 (Pollan was 52 when he wrote this) so let's say roughly speaking we're looking at 39+(4*27) =147 so 2007-147=1860. In the 1860s life expectancy at birth was about 36 and life expectancy at age 15 was about 60. So we're talking roughly the mid-late 1800s to early 1900s. In other words, before the modern use (and quantity) of vegetable oils, food processed on a large scale, most preservatives, modern food advertising, packaging, foods designed for texture, et cetera. These things only started in the early 1900s, but it took time for production to increase, around WW2 - and by the 1960s the average Eastern European was consuming about 6kg of mass-produced vegetable oil a year. Not enough to make everyone obese, but enough to show up as a blip on a chart. Does it? Yes. The heaviest segments of society were already increasing in weight at this time [0].
In the 1960s, texture science and research on the appearance of food started to take off [3] - and yes, even in the USSR this was something people paid attention to. Packaging was now intentionally designed to stimulate appetites. Stabilizers, colorants and flavorings were in use, even in many poorer countries. By the 1970s, soda was in full swing. There were local sodas (Baikal in the USSR, Kofola in Czechoslovakia) but even Pepsi entered the Soviet market in 1971, and it was immediately popular, despite its high price. Now you can see obesity becoming a problem societally; in 1975 it was considered an issue and measured nearly worldwide for the first time [4].
Defending my claim that "obesity rates back then were near zero" is a bit tricky because it was so rare it wasn't considered a societal problem in the early 1900s. But we do have some data points. For example, the heaviest 1% of 18-26yo men in Denmark had a BMI of 28 in 1939 [0], and this did not cross 30 (obese) until 1951. The heaviest 5% of 18-26yo men had a BMI of under 25 in 1939; today, the Danish national average is 25.3.
As for heart issues, in 1900 there were 137.4 deaths of heart disease per 100k, vs 192.9 deaths per 100k in 2010. That is despite the fact that 92 million US adults are on statins, which often have serious side effects.
Personal anecdotes unfortunately don't hold up to the data, which is crystal clear: in the year 1900, when we ate a pre-modern diet, rates of obesity were near-zero and deaths from heart disease were significantly fewer.
But, like you said, what if someone ate that farmers' diet today? Turns out the Amish have significantly lower rates of obesity than their neighbors. Must be the physical exercise, not the diet, no? Well... the US military is quite physically active compared to your average person, and yet 70% are overweight or obese.
My great grandma is from eastern-ish europe and grew up on a farm. Her diet mainly consisted of potatoes, bread, corn, milk, sausage, lard, butter, fermented cabbage or turnip, various preserved fruits (jams and compotes), and copious amounts of extra salty preserved meats. Fresh food was a luxury reserved for the summer (fruits, veggies) or slaughter weeks (fresh meat). No refrigeration, remember?
If I ate like her I'd die of a heart attack before I turned 40. And I'd be pretty obese, too. Many of those farmers got pretty chunky in their 30's despite working on the farm all day.
Oh and I almost forgot: liters of wine per day per person. Liters!