Our grandparents – or great-grandparents – generally knew their stuff when it came to healthy eating.
They learnt to cook everything from scratch, chose no-nonsense ingredients and saved the sweets for special occasions (hey, that sounds just like our approach on the I Quit Sugar: 8-Week Program).
Today’s average diet could definitely afford to look back at those golden years. Take a gander at these ”healthy” eating trends we now take for granted – Nan and Pop would have a field day!
1. Low-fat everything.
So, you kids mean to say that instead of eating perfectly natural butter, you prefer something that’s highly processed, deodorised, bleached, coloured, and to top it off, tastes awful?
Well, to be fair, the low-fat craze got kickstarted by dodgy research in the 1960s, but current science has proven that fats (even egg yolks) are not the devil we once thought. Plus, they fill you up more and taste delicious!
2. Dessert every damn day.
With low-fat yoghurt hiding as much as six teaspoons of sugar per single-serve tub and barbecue sauce containing up to 54 per cent sugar, you could argue that we’re eating dessert at every meal.
While our grandparents saved the sweets for special occasions (remember how they’d give you a boiled sweet if you were good?), today’s kids eat up to 38 teaspoons of sugar A DAY.
3. Not-so-super foods.
You can bet that your Great Aunt Eunice wasn’t scouting the supermarket for goji berries. Instead, she would have used cheap, available produce like carrots, parsnips and good ol’ peas.
And she was onto a winner. According to the U.S. Government, the healthiest vegetables include daggy cabbage, silverbeet, beet greens, spinach and lettuce.
4. A raw deal.
It might be every Instagramers dream, but a diet of exclusively raw foods isn’t as healthy as the bright colours would have you think. Many plants require cooking to break down cellulose and indigestible molecules so we can absorb those nutrients efficiently.
Past generations knew that a slow cooker not only made cooking a breeze, but slow-cooked food was often easier on your gut to digest. Plus, crockpots last forever – we bet your Gran has one from the 1950s still lying around!
5. Broccoli bribes.
When we heard that health experts were suggesting parents pay their kids to eat their greens, we almost fell off our stools. “Any reward you might offer them to eat their vegetables must be something of value,” said a member of the UK’s National Obesity Forum, Tam Fry.
We’re pretty sure Nan and Pop would never put eating a nutritious, home-cooked meal in the same camp as taking out the bins or changing the kitty litter. It’s completely missing the real value of nourishment.
What current diet trends would your grandparents gasp at?
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