We were so slim in the Seventies...
Food and lifestyles have changed enormously in 35 years. But, as obesity threatens the nation's health, Judith Woods says we should take a step backwards
Anyone tuning into the first part of the BBC's fascinating history of travel and holiday programmes this week would have been carried aloft on a glorious wave of nostalgia. The Way We Travelled gave us snapshots of times past, Alan Whicker hacking through jungles in his double-breasted blazer, and footage of Britons abroad spanning the past five decades.
It was the Seventies beach scenes that struck me in particular. The people looked so different, although I couldn't quite put my finger on what it was that so consigned them to an earlier age. On closer analysis I realised it had nothing to do with the vintage swimwear, or the mullet hairstyles and perms it was their body shape.
The women's curves were more toned and the men's middle-aged spread was modest. There was no sign of the huge beached sunbathers that are part and parcel of any seaside scene today. No folds of dimpled flesh hanging over trunks or bikini bottoms, no acres of cellulite or pitifully fat children waddling down to the sea.
How can this be when studies suggest that the British consumed on average 20 per cent more calories in 1977 than they did in 1997? Thirty years ago, stodgy cooked breakfasts were the norm and the consumption of red meat was twice as high as it is today.
Now though, according to official figures, almost a quarter of adults are obese. More alarming is the fact that, as the influential Public Accounts Committee made clear this week, one in seven primary school children is at risk of serious health problems due to obesity. A generation of telly tubbies, reared on a diet of fizzy drinks and processed food, is in danger of developing high blood pressure, heart disease and diabetes by their late teens.
And, in a terrible twist of nature, scientists are predicting that high numbers of children will die before their own parents, paying the ultimate price for overeating and sedentary lifestyles.
When the majority of these children's parents were growing up, in the Seventies, obesity was considered to be a rare affliction. So why are so many of us, and children in particular, becoming grossly overweight?
"One of the key problems is a lack of exercise, coupled with the fact that high-calorie food is so freely available to children," according to Tom Saunders, professor of dietetics at Kings College University, London. "I remember coming home from primary school and scouring the larder for something to eat once I drank vinegar because I was so hungry. These days, children just go to the fridge, take out a ready meal and pop it in the microwave.
"Some parents are very weak about letting their kids eat what they want when they want it. You have to negotiate with children, you can't give them a free rein to snack all day and drink three cans of fizzy drinks. The responsibility rests with the parents, who should be sitting down with them and eating at the table. Ensuring your child isn't greedy is an important part of social control."
So the reason we are getting larger, although we are consuming fewer calories than in the Seventies, is simply because we are expending much less energy than is healthy or desirable. We fluff up the duvet with a flick of a wrist rather than making the bed; when we go shopping we take it for granted that an escalator will carry us up to the next floor, and at work we take lifts rather than the stairs. We drive to the station or take the bus rather than walk. We spend more on taxis. Our children are driven to school and spend their free time watching television, playing computer games or MSN-ing each other, instead of running around outside.
Genetics play a role but only in conjunction with lifestyle. The so-called obesity gene GAD2 has been shown to be more common in a particular form in obese people than the non-obese. People who carry GAD2 are more susceptible to overeating, especially when factors such as depression, stress and social and economic deprivation are at play.
Of course, the sort of food we eat has changed enormously since the Seventies. Although new-fangled food technology was beginning to gain wide appeal then, with Smash, boil-in-the-bag rice and Findus Crispy Pancakes seen as the height of culinary daring, meat and two veg was the standard evening meal. It was nutritious and satisfying.
In 2007, the national diet veers towards convenience foods: sandwiches, and fast food, Indian takeaways and Chinese ready meals a gastronomic legacy of all those travel programmes. Between 1980 and 1999, the average preparation time for a meal fell from an hour to 20 minutes. The figure for today doesn't bear thinking about.
The highly processed foods we eat now are packed with sugar, which is used as a flavour enhancer. Fizzy drinks are calorie-laden but they don't sate the appetite, so it's easy to overconsume them. The picture is similar for foods containing sweeteners, which are added as flavour enhancers, and ingredients such as corn syrup, which also bulks up food and enhances texture.
"People who eat more fruit and vegetables tend to eat less food, because these things are quite filling," says Kath Dalmeny, deputy co-ordinator of the food pressure group Sustain. "Sugary foods have a high glycaemic index, which means they cause a rapid rise in blood-sugar levels, followed by a drop. This sharp rise and fall causes cravings for more food, and creates a tendency to over-eat. Vegetables tend to have a low glycaemic index so they cause a slow steady rise in blood sugar levels."
Much effort has been made to find a single scapegoat for obesity, other than the obvious cause that we eat too much and do too little, albeit for a variety of individual reasons. "We're all looking for something that can be blamed, but this whole issue is more complicated than that," says Dr Toni Steer at the Human Nutrition Research Centre in Cambridge. "Diet, lifestyle, activity and social pressures all impact on what we eat."
There have been claims from American academics that products containing high-fructose corn syrup, an intense sweetener used widely in the United States and increasingly in this country, contribute to excess weight gain. Last year, a best-selling book, Fat Land, suggested that its consumption was to blame for the US's obesity epidemic, because of the way the body metabolises the fructose.
There is evidence that when this syrup, which is present in large amounts in foods ranging from cornflakes to ice-cream, soup and yogurt to soft drinks, is absorbed, it fails to trigger the release of the hormones that help to regulate both appetite and fat storage, thereby increasing hunger and storing the calories as fat.
But, according to Richard Faulks, at the Institute of Food Research in Norwich, the jury is out on whether corn syrup is a major culprit in the piling on of pounds. "It may well be a contributory factor somewhere at the edges, but the main reason for obesity is the dramatic reduction in physical exercise."
Figures from 2003 show there are more than 24.2 million obese or overweight people in Britain, due to rise 14 per cent to 27.6 million by the end of the decade. We are getting fatter, our children are getting fatter.
It's bad for our health and, squeezed into a bikini or bathing trunks, it's not a pretty sight. I wouldn't ever wish to return to tiny, snug Speedos or feather-cuts, but as we haul ourselves on to cheap flights and down to the beaches of Europe this summer, wouldn't it be nice if we could travel as light as we did in the Seventies?
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