Quote:
Originally Posted by Earwax /img/forum/go_quote.gif
People ate big portions in the 50s and 60s too.
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No they did not. Here's a vintage soda bottle:
Please notice that it is 10 oz. Common sizes for soda bottles were 6 oz. to 12 oz. or so. Many of the vintage Coke bottles were 8 oz.
This is the "smaller" Big Gulp at 32 oz., though (IIRC) you can get them up to 96 oz. or even the 128 oz. mug like thing.
According to
here there are 97 calories in 8 oz. of Coke Classic.
Let's look at the numbers. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, stopping off for a bottle of Coke meant taking in about 100 calories. On a diet of about 2,000, that's not so bad.
In the 2000s, stopping off for a 64 oz. Big Gulp is close to 800 calories.
On a 2,000 calorie diet, that's
almost half of your daily intake. Even if you have four or five cans of Coke, you're still going to get 500, 600, 700 or more calories a day from the soda. Having a couple of refills of a 30 oz. drink at a fast food place also does this to you.
This is not rocket science. If you up calorie intake, you get fat. Each time you consume 3,500 calories more than you burn, you gain a pound. Considering the calorie inflation since the 1950s and 1960s, the cumulative weight gain makes sense.
Further, we eat more food than we did back then, too. Before I got into audio, I spent a lot of time finding junked furniture and restoring it. I still do now and then - it's good fun. At junk stores, I always browse the book sections for old tube electronics books, literature, cook books, as well as anything interesting. I've got some going back several decades. If you can draw conclusions from 1940s cookbooks, portions were much smaller than they were today. Again, calorie counts were far lower.
Just found it:
Extra calories rather than lack of exercise the culprit in obesity epidemic
This study released last month shows that it's the extra calories that put on the weight.