I wonder what all we ate in the 60s.

Consider what it took to establish safe food and drug laws during Teddy Roosevelt’s time. It was a fight then, and has been a fight since.

My son was born in 1978, and I nursed him for a bit over a year. He only started having gut problems when he was completely weaned to solids, and then it was a continual battle to figure out what was giving him chronic severe diarrhea. Finally the word came back that I should make sure he got no wheat or rye, and I proceeded to read the labels on everything.

Be clear: I don’t think wheat is a poison. As I worked with hard-to-find substitutions in 1980, I realized why wheat is and has always been the Queen of All Baking. But do we really need its lab-produced derivatives in such a wide variety of foods? And what (I asked myself in the coming decades) have we done to it in the modern era? What with making sterile seeds (so farmers have to buy seed-grain from Monsanto instead of putting some of their own crop by for next year) and inserting insecticide into the seeds, I mean, what beside the profit-motive.

The next time I decided to read labels was over the HFCS flap. The kids were grown and gone, but I was curious. My eyes were a lot older by then and the tiny print wasn’t so easy to scan without a magnifying glass, but I read enough to realize that it was in nearly everything — and that was a change from 1980. Oddly, I think I would have remembered on some level because it’s an odd sounding thing, but wasn’t my main focus then because I was looking for wheat.

I asked myself — why? It’s a sweetener; what’s it doing in everything? Well, it’s way cheaper than cane sugar, being lab-produced and subsidized by the US government because they subsidize everything to do with corn, so there’s that. And if what I’ve read is accurate, HFCS is all-but-addictive, meaning when you crave that snack food, you really crave. But also, my children’s grade school classes may be the last generation where slenderness was the norm. By their high school years, I think plumpness was the norm, and now — well, 2 of my 3 grandsons are well overweight; the oldest 20 and youngest still only six.

So back to the 50s-1960s when I was a kid. The class photos showed slenderness was the norm, and I only knew one child with diabetes — a cousin who was a Type 1 diabetic, unrelated to diet or weight. The only other diabetics in my extended family developed Type 2 in their late 60s and 70s. Fast forward to my older cousins turning 45 — a lot of Type 2 diabetes, and lagging in time because we were younger, my sis, bro, and I as well.

I think we simply had, on average, a better diet in the 1960s. People like to make jokes about school lunches back then like they make jokes about nuns if they went to parochial school (I was a public school kid). School lunches where I lived were not bad, and they aimed to provide at least 1/3 of the nutritional needs of a growing kid. There was an actual kitchen on the campus where the food was prepped and cooked, and there was a rota for us all to take a turn helping for a full day.

When I sent my kids off to elementary school I was appalled to discover that food-like items were trucked in and microwaved on-site. In my life, fish sticks, hamburgers, and hot dogs were a treat, not a regular substitute for the protein portion.

Sorry to be rambling on like this. Nutrition has always been important to me, and I think the national level of health is declining. My K thru 12 education included units on nutrition and even in grade school the units covered nutritional diseases that used to be common in the USA: rickets, pellagra, goiter, anemia, and scurvy. These were almost completely wiped out with the addition of specific vitamins and minerals to our common foods. Now our nutritional diseases are things like obesity and diabetes, and some think (and I tend to agree) that some neurological problems are related not just to dietary deficiencies but to chemical additives that provide nothing but, say, color or sweetness.

and informative. I gree with you about many problems going back to chemicals and nutrition or the lack of it.

Looking back, it took a surprisingly long time to identify Red Dye #2 as the cause.

I remember the newsreader of that time on SNL saying "No, Ronnie. Ketchup is a condiment. Nancy is a vegetable."

The instant I heard it, I knew I'd remember it forever.

She's 13 now and sweet as sugar but when in early grade school, whew!

In school she was constantly being punished for bad behavior, and she had absolutely no friends. Now she has so many friendship bracelets she needs longer arms!

So glad that her life was turned around, let alone so dramatically!

Why is there such a long waiting-time on some things? I don't get it.

those FD&C colors are in foods - including in the raw ingredients used to process many foods.

They are going to need time to come up with alternate menus - at least for kids - that have foods that exclude artificial colors and find vendors that can supply these in a cost-effective way.

Many adults already do this consciously but to successively do it at the "institutional quantity" level for schools, will be a challenge.

(ETA, municipalities and/or their school districts normally have contracts for food suppliers and those contracts will have to be modified and/or new contracts will need to be generated to do this, and that can take many months, including drafting solicitations, and allowing time for a bidding process, etc).