Why can’t I eat what my grandparents ate 100 years ago? According to SMTM, this would have been 3 large hearty meals full of bread, potatoes, meat, dairy, too much sugar and not enough vegetables. If I ate like that, not only would I get obese and diabetic, I would get severely sick from the gluten. Perhaps the gluten issues are specific to me, but I see a lot of people having food problems that go beyond metabolic.
One factor is that bread is made sweeter now, dairy is more readily available in skim which is higher sugar content per calorie, and I’m less sure of potatoes but “in the late 1800s, the modern-day russet potato was born” (<https://www.littlepotatoes.com/blog/origin-of-potatoes/>) and I wonder if there’s been genetic engineering/selective breeding since then to change them as well.
Food allergies and intolerances are on the rise, I think even controlling for increased recognition (edit: I’m less confident about this than in the original draft of this comment. What would controlling for increased recognition look like?) I don’t know what’s up with that.
I only have anecdotal evidence that a few decades ago, people from Eastern Europe who visited USA complained that it was impossible to buy a non-sweet bread in an ordinary supermarket (if you really wanted some, you had to visit some ethnic food shop), but recently I have heard that ordinary supermarkets now also contain non-sweet bread.
(Low N. Maybe only applies to some parts of USA. Also, it is possible that both are true: supermarkets may have introduced a non-sweet bread as a special option, while increasing the amount of sugar in the average bread.)
Here in New York City, it is trivially easy to buy all sorts of non-sweet bread in pretty much any supermarket or grocery store. (Not necessarily in bodegas, though.)
In Germany, with the exception of things like raisin bread, which is more like a cake, really, sugar simply does not go in bread, period. (And I personally make my raisin bread without, after all, it already has raisins in it.) Maybe a third of a teaspoon to start the yeast, which then gets eaten up entirely, but that is that. It isn’t that it is possible to avoid it, it is that is seems ludicrous to find it. I remember the first time I had American bread and being deeply weirded out because it tasted sweet at all. It was as odd as being told that, I don’t know, Americans add vanilla or cinnamon to all of their bread. It is just weird and does not belong there.
And not just bread, there are so many dishes where Americans add sugar and it is just weird to me. Pickles should not contain sugar; they should taste sour from the natural fermentation, not sweet. Ketchup does not need added sugar; the tomatoes are already sweet. Juice does not need added sugar, it is incredibly sweet and should be diluted heavily with water before drinking. Balsamico vinegar does not need added sugar, it already contains grape must. Bitter chocolate should not contain sugar; it is supposed to be bitter, and for the sweetness, you have cocoa butter and vanilla.
And even in dishes where I would add sugar (or rather, sweetener) myself, the sheer quantity in American dishes is baffling to me. Be it lemonade or cake or cookies, I find American dishes almost sickly sweet. I once got an American baking book, and eventually realised I loved all the recipes if I literally halved the sugar, but found them inedible beforehand. Not just a health concern either, there are protein bars or protein shakes or meal replacement shakes or diet candy things which use calorie free sugar replacements, and I still find them ghastly sweet.
Horribly, these changes are beginning to drift over to Europe, and people are getting used to them. Glad we are countering it with a sugar tax, highlighting it in the nutrient index, and forcing people to declare added sugars.
Juice, as far as I know, does not tend to have sugar added to it. Where have you seen this?
The history of American ketchup, and the chain of events that led to it ending up with the ingredients that it has—including its sugar content—is fascinating, in fact. (As usual, it’s as much a story of technology, economics, and regulatory politics as it is of culinary art.)
As for chocolate: cocoa butter and vanilla are not sweet. (And chocolate-containing foods definitely need not include vanilla!)
Furthermore, chocolate tends to be labeled “bittersweet” (and not just “bitter”), as well as “semi-sweet” for a reason. There are also different grades of it. “Unsweetened” chocolate exists as well, and is available here along with the other sorts.
All of these forms of chocolate have their distinct culinary uses; they are not seamlessly replaceable with one another. You can do substitutions, but only to an extent; and recipe adjustments are needed in such cases.
One thing that few people realize (and this applies to much more than just chocolate) is that sugar plays a greater role in baking chemistry than merely providing the gustatory experience of sweetness; it also affects texture, rise, moistness, etc. In the case of almost all baked goods, you cannot simply adjust the amount of chocolate without changing more than just how sweet the final product is. (Even baking times may be affected by sugar content!)
And even in dishes where I would add sugar (or rather, sweetener) myself, the sheer quantity in American dishes is baffling to me. Be it lemonade or cake or cookies, I find American dishes almost sickly sweet.
This is very true.
I once got an American baking book, and eventually realised I loved all the recipes if I literally halved the sugar, but found them inedible beforehand.
This varies considerably between cookbook authors. (I have noted in particular that, e.g., Stella Parks tends to overload her recipes with sugar—indeed, often ending up with double what I’d find reasonable—while Christopher Kimball’s recipes have sugar amounts that tend to be almost exactly what I’d find ideal. I suspect this has something to do with their backgrounds—Parks is from Kentucky, while Kimball is from New York / Vermont—and hints at a general pattern of regional variation, within the United States, in how much sugar tends to be added to foods of all sorts.)
I will note that making your own bread at home is not hugely difficult if that’s your priority; it does take several hours per loaf, but much of that time is spent doing other things while you wait for it to rise, and if you knead the dough by hand you don’t need any expensive equipment. (The ingredients can generally be found in any grocery store, though you may need to go further afield if you’re trying to precisely replicate a grandparent’s recipe).
I do wonder if this is true when controlling for increased recognition. Don’t find it per se implausible (there are plausible environmental causes, and one could also imagine genetic selection), but haven’t seen evidence yet.
E.g. celiac absolutely existed historically, even though we did not know what was causing it. Those poor kids simply got fed wheat daily anyway, as that was simply what one ate, and died. The study that finally trialed various food plans including one without wheat and had the kids in that group recover is famous for the fact that they stopped it and switched all the kids to that food plan when they were only part-way through, because it became so clear that they could finally, finally stop the deaths.
With a lot of peanut and soy allergies; your average European would simply not have had the exposure.
And as for other severe allergies… again, we are talking a society with no epipens, no allergy declarations. Avoiding a food, especially traces for it, when the average product you buy does not even have an ingredient list, let alone safe handling… Where the allergies were severe, those children died, and often, the parents could not even piece together why. Some thought their kids had been exchanged by fairies, because they were always crying, vomiting, choking, having diarrhoea, having skin discolouration, not wanting to eat, shying away. Doctors noticed that they “failed to thrive”, which essentially meant they were thin and sickly and small and constantly ill until pneumonia got them.
Because they did not actually eat that much, and they moved a lot more, and lived in colder buildings, meaning they burned more calories.
Your metabolism is fine.
Seriously. If you put humans in a controlled context and actually weigh their food, the metabolic differences between them are minor, and easily outdieted. Their weight gain and loss is predictable. There are literally no adult humans that can eat only 500 calories a day and gain fat (toddlers already need more); practically no humans that can eat 1000 calories a day and gain weight (this can happen, but you would have a severe, apparent medical condition causing significant other issues); and only few adult humans that do not lose weight at 1500 (that one you can pull of as a small, sedentary, older female). They cannot magically acquire energy out of thin air.
Underweight people overreport their food intake. Overweight people underreport it. Any study working on self-reports is absolute garbage. Any historical comparison based on self-reports is garbage.
Where people measured, the results became very consistent. There are horrid examples of this. Germans tracked how much food they gave Jewish prisoners, and when they would stop working, and when they would starve to death, to get optimum value out of the horror they inflicted. The results were horrific, but not at all surprising or strange, but rather, very consistent. The jews were starved; they became normal weight, while their metabolism barely slowed; then under weight, and their metabolism slowed significantly, with visible massive health consequences, yet still unable to outweigh the dieting; then they died.
On the other hand, you can take your skinny fit European, and put them in a US community where they can’t walk, can’t cycle, and keep being offered giant portions of highly caloric food, and the same person with the same genes and same willpower and same baseline metabolism will gain weight, at the speed you would expect for the extra calories they consume and the reduction in calories they burn.
Well-being and health wise:
If you have a population whose diet is obviously nutrient deprived and high glycemic index, check their body height, their average age of death, their teeth, and their cognition. You will find that they do not do optimally. I think some people just lack a frame of reference for how they would feel if they ate well.
Why can’t I eat what my grandparents ate 100 years ago? According to SMTM, this would have been 3 large hearty meals full of bread, potatoes, meat, dairy, too much sugar and not enough vegetables. If I ate like that, not only would I get obese and diabetic, I would get severely sick from the gluten. Perhaps the gluten issues are specific to me, but I see a lot of people having food problems that go beyond metabolic.
What’s the best evidence we have of that, in your opinion?
Are you also proposing long days of highly physical labor like the typical person eating that diet then?
One factor is that bread is made sweeter now, dairy is more readily available in skim which is higher sugar content per calorie, and I’m less sure of potatoes but “in the late 1800s, the modern-day russet potato was born” (<https://www.littlepotatoes.com/blog/origin-of-potatoes/>) and I wonder if there’s been genetic engineering/selective breeding since then to change them as well.
Food allergies and intolerances are on the rise, I think even controlling for increased recognition (edit: I’m less confident about this than in the original draft of this comment. What would controlling for increased recognition look like?) I don’t know what’s up with that.
Isn’t this reverting in recent decades?
I only have anecdotal evidence that a few decades ago, people from Eastern Europe who visited USA complained that it was impossible to buy a non-sweet bread in an ordinary supermarket (if you really wanted some, you had to visit some ethnic food shop), but recently I have heard that ordinary supermarkets now also contain non-sweet bread.
(Low N. Maybe only applies to some parts of USA. Also, it is possible that both are true: supermarkets may have introduced a non-sweet bread as a special option, while increasing the amount of sugar in the average bread.)
Here in New York City, it is trivially easy to buy all sorts of non-sweet bread in pretty much any supermarket or grocery store. (Not necessarily in bodegas, though.)
In Germany, with the exception of things like raisin bread, which is more like a cake, really, sugar simply does not go in bread, period. (And I personally make my raisin bread without, after all, it already has raisins in it.) Maybe a third of a teaspoon to start the yeast, which then gets eaten up entirely, but that is that. It isn’t that it is possible to avoid it, it is that is seems ludicrous to find it. I remember the first time I had American bread and being deeply weirded out because it tasted sweet at all. It was as odd as being told that, I don’t know, Americans add vanilla or cinnamon to all of their bread. It is just weird and does not belong there.
And not just bread, there are so many dishes where Americans add sugar and it is just weird to me. Pickles should not contain sugar; they should taste sour from the natural fermentation, not sweet. Ketchup does not need added sugar; the tomatoes are already sweet. Juice does not need added sugar, it is incredibly sweet and should be diluted heavily with water before drinking. Balsamico vinegar does not need added sugar, it already contains grape must. Bitter chocolate should not contain sugar; it is supposed to be bitter, and for the sweetness, you have cocoa butter and vanilla.
And even in dishes where I would add sugar (or rather, sweetener) myself, the sheer quantity in American dishes is baffling to me. Be it lemonade or cake or cookies, I find American dishes almost sickly sweet. I once got an American baking book, and eventually realised I loved all the recipes if I literally halved the sugar, but found them inedible beforehand. Not just a health concern either, there are protein bars or protein shakes or meal replacement shakes or diet candy things which use calorie free sugar replacements, and I still find them ghastly sweet.
Horribly, these changes are beginning to drift over to Europe, and people are getting used to them. Glad we are countering it with a sugar tax, highlighting it in the nutrient index, and forcing people to declare added sugars.
Juice, as far as I know, does not tend to have sugar added to it. Where have you seen this?
The history of American ketchup, and the chain of events that led to it ending up with the ingredients that it has—including its sugar content—is fascinating, in fact. (As usual, it’s as much a story of technology, economics, and regulatory politics as it is of culinary art.)
As for chocolate: cocoa butter and vanilla are not sweet. (And chocolate-containing foods definitely need not include vanilla!)
Furthermore, chocolate tends to be labeled “bittersweet” (and not just “bitter”), as well as “semi-sweet” for a reason. There are also different grades of it. “Unsweetened” chocolate exists as well, and is available here along with the other sorts.
All of these forms of chocolate have their distinct culinary uses; they are not seamlessly replaceable with one another. You can do substitutions, but only to an extent; and recipe adjustments are needed in such cases.
One thing that few people realize (and this applies to much more than just chocolate) is that sugar plays a greater role in baking chemistry than merely providing the gustatory experience of sweetness; it also affects texture, rise, moistness, etc. In the case of almost all baked goods, you cannot simply adjust the amount of chocolate without changing more than just how sweet the final product is. (Even baking times may be affected by sugar content!)
This is very true.
This varies considerably between cookbook authors. (I have noted in particular that, e.g., Stella Parks tends to overload her recipes with sugar—indeed, often ending up with double what I’d find reasonable—while Christopher Kimball’s recipes have sugar amounts that tend to be almost exactly what I’d find ideal. I suspect this has something to do with their backgrounds—Parks is from Kentucky, while Kimball is from New York / Vermont—and hints at a general pattern of regional variation, within the United States, in how much sugar tends to be added to foods of all sorts.)
I will note that making your own bread at home is not hugely difficult if that’s your priority; it does take several hours per loaf, but much of that time is spent doing other things while you wait for it to rise, and if you knead the dough by hand you don’t need any expensive equipment. (The ingredients can generally be found in any grocery store, though you may need to go further afield if you’re trying to precisely replicate a grandparent’s recipe).
I do wonder if this is true when controlling for increased recognition. Don’t find it per se implausible (there are plausible environmental causes, and one could also imagine genetic selection), but haven’t seen evidence yet.
E.g. celiac absolutely existed historically, even though we did not know what was causing it. Those poor kids simply got fed wheat daily anyway, as that was simply what one ate, and died. The study that finally trialed various food plans including one without wheat and had the kids in that group recover is famous for the fact that they stopped it and switched all the kids to that food plan when they were only part-way through, because it became so clear that they could finally, finally stop the deaths.
With a lot of peanut and soy allergies; your average European would simply not have had the exposure.
And as for other severe allergies… again, we are talking a society with no epipens, no allergy declarations. Avoiding a food, especially traces for it, when the average product you buy does not even have an ingredient list, let alone safe handling… Where the allergies were severe, those children died, and often, the parents could not even piece together why. Some thought their kids had been exchanged by fairies, because they were always crying, vomiting, choking, having diarrhoea, having skin discolouration, not wanting to eat, shying away. Doctors noticed that they “failed to thrive”, which essentially meant they were thin and sickly and small and constantly ill until pneumonia got them.
Weight wise:
Because they did not actually eat that much, and they moved a lot more, and lived in colder buildings, meaning they burned more calories.
Your metabolism is fine.
Seriously. If you put humans in a controlled context and actually weigh their food, the metabolic differences between them are minor, and easily outdieted. Their weight gain and loss is predictable. There are literally no adult humans that can eat only 500 calories a day and gain fat (toddlers already need more); practically no humans that can eat 1000 calories a day and gain weight (this can happen, but you would have a severe, apparent medical condition causing significant other issues); and only few adult humans that do not lose weight at 1500 (that one you can pull of as a small, sedentary, older female). They cannot magically acquire energy out of thin air.
Underweight people overreport their food intake. Overweight people underreport it. Any study working on self-reports is absolute garbage. Any historical comparison based on self-reports is garbage.
Where people measured, the results became very consistent. There are horrid examples of this. Germans tracked how much food they gave Jewish prisoners, and when they would stop working, and when they would starve to death, to get optimum value out of the horror they inflicted. The results were horrific, but not at all surprising or strange, but rather, very consistent. The jews were starved; they became normal weight, while their metabolism barely slowed; then under weight, and their metabolism slowed significantly, with visible massive health consequences, yet still unable to outweigh the dieting; then they died.
On the other hand, you can take your skinny fit European, and put them in a US community where they can’t walk, can’t cycle, and keep being offered giant portions of highly caloric food, and the same person with the same genes and same willpower and same baseline metabolism will gain weight, at the speed you would expect for the extra calories they consume and the reduction in calories they burn.
Well-being and health wise:
If you have a population whose diet is obviously nutrient deprived and high glycemic index, check their body height, their average age of death, their teeth, and their cognition. You will find that they do not do optimally. I think some people just lack a frame of reference for how they would feel if they ate well.