Where did all the repugnancy about trans fats and gluten, etc come from?

Overpopulation wasn’t the problem it is now either. Better information about the causes of death and aging leads to these warnings.

I don’t think there is some sinister agenda going on underground to control our food, but there is just so much more research and better understanding about how these substances affect our body. And with obesity getting exponentially worse over the last few decades, more attention is being drawn to foods containing these things.

Sure a very small amount of trans fats and corn syrup is not killer, but people are eating so much more of it, and exercising even less than ever before, so all these factors add up to more attention being paid to them.

We used to play in the streets and not wear seat belts either. Ignorance to the ingredients that inflate our diets to off the charts unhealthy is why there are so many obese and diabetics in our country. Data crunching and statistical analysis has proven that our ignorance to the sugars, carbohydrates and mountains of salt that is in prepacked meals people assume are part of a balanced diet when in fact it is contributing greatly to a unhealthy unfit population.

The bigger issue as I see it is we used to play in the streets and were outside goofing off. Kids and even families are more socked in sitting at their big screens and gaming systems. People just don’t move anymore and I expect our sedentary lifestyles will come back to haunt a lot of people! A good diet will mean very little if people don’t get exercise as well.

More scientific research. Also, 35 years ago those things weren’t in the food we eat (except gluten which is really only a problem for those that have an allergy).

I would also point out that there is a big difference between restrictions that are actually supported by mountains of scientific evidence (like trans fats) and restrictions that are simply the latest fad, unsupported by science (like gluten for people who do not have celiac disease or other gluten intolerances.)

Just media hype. That’s all. Labeling the fats and getting rid of certain ones certainly hasn’t made a bit of difference, has it. In fact, just the opposite. Obesity and diabetes are out of control.
Yeah, I remember dem days too, Hippie Central….really, nobody seemed to care if we kids lived or died! Remember those old metal skates we used to tighten up on our shoes (“I got a brand new pair of roller skates, you got a brand new key!”) Yeah…remember how you’d just be flying along the cracked, broken side walk and the damn things would come flying off your shoes! Crash and BURN, man! Bumps, bruises, stitches, McDonalds fries, fried in lard, transfats (which we burned off in the process of getting bumps, bruises and stitches)...it was all part of life.

Something just occured to me….someone may respond, “People are living longer now, because of the awareness.” However….those people in their 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s…the ones that are living longer, were flat RAISED on fats, sugars and salts! Obviously their childhood diets didn’t hurt them much! Or, at least, it wasn’t something that couldn’t be overcome. :)

@Dutchess_III I might add that people are living longer also because of Statins, stents, Cholesterol meds and incredible medical procedures that 30 years ago without these things people simply died.

@Cruiser O, of course. Absolutely! But, my main point is, their diets for most of their lives were what we, today, would call horrific! By the same token, the people who are on supposedly “healthy” diets today will develop all of the same problems at 60, 70+ that today’s seniors have, and will live longer for the same reason…medical breakthroughs. Or…maybe not. Today’s aging population is overweight and has diabetes. So, the diets make no difference, in the end. Hard work and physicality does. Which, to me, is another bit of proof that none of the transfat brouhaha really means anything. A tempest in a teapot. A mountian out of a mole hill. I go to work now. Catch ya’ll later!

I think it’s down to all of the preservatives that’s going into food nowadays. It’s not healthy.

@Cruiser We used to play in the streets and not wear seat belts either. There was a lot of things I did as a kid that today people would panic over. I never worried about if I had a helmet when riding a bike, Me and most of the kids in my neighborhood would go off exploring abandoned buildings, deserted cars, the wet lands by the river and then some and no one freaked, so long as we were in hear shot of our mothers when the sun set all was cool.

The bigger issue as I see it is we used to play in the streets and were outside goofing off. Kids and even families are more socked in sitting at their big screens and gaming systems. There were times my mother (with love) threw me out of the house, she said ”It is a nice day out, you are not going to spend it all cooped up in here watching cartoons”. I wonder if technology ever allowed us to live vicariously through a mechanical surrogate how many will take up the offer then they won’t even have to hardly move from their chaise lounge.

@Dutchess_III “People are living longer now, because of the awareness.” However….those people in their 60’s, 70’s, 80’s, 90’s…the ones that are living longer, were flat RAISED on fats, sugars and salts! They might try to credit it to medical marvels but still if the childhood diet of Baby Boomers and Flower Children were that bad I don’t think any medical hocus pocus could have reversed that.

Hippie Central huh? I was never a hippie but my brother ad I got into some real good fights because I backed them while he backed the cops, but Hippie Central has a ring to it.

@stardust I think it’s down to all of the preservatives that’s going into food nowadays. It’s not healthy. Because, we as a nation don’t want to have to buy tomatoes, apples, bread etc, every week unless we ate it up. If we ended up not needing to use that tomato we damn sure want it to last near 10 days and be as fresh as when we brought it home.

@Dutchess_III I think it is a combo of habits back then we consider taboo today such as smoking and drinking alcohol through pregnancy was no big deal. But on the other hand we didn’t have phony fats and sugars that lull people into thinking they can eat eat eat as long as it is “low fat” “sugar free” “low salt”. The junk food that is promoted as OK to eat is a huge problem fueling our nations growing obesity problem.

@Hypocrisy_Central That’s what I meant: If the baby boomer’s diet was THAT bad, it couldn’t be reversed in old age by medical miracles.

@Cruiser People didn’t even bother to think twice about what they were eating. If they liked it, they ate it. When they were full, they stopped. But they also didn’t have the unrelenting pressures of advertisements for junk food. They didn’t have the unrelenting preaching about eating healthy. If someone nags you enough about a “problem” you don’t even have, you’re going to develop that problem!

@stardust Seriously….when we buy food we don’t expect it to be rotting in a couple of days. The FDA is pretty strict about those things. I don’t see where it’s hurting us, except in our own imaginations.

@Dutchess_III Not where I came from…my mom made me eat everything on my plate even if I was full and got the starving kids in Africa routine if I objected!! XD

LOL! I didn’t get that, thank goodness!! Well, maybe we did to a certain extent. I remember one of my sisters getting mad and saying, “Well here’s my plate! SHIP it to Africa!!!” I don’t remember hearing much after that…...

@Dutchess_III LOL! XD

Well, and my Dad had a way of making us not want to eat. He loved this stuff that he called SOS. I hated it. It was chipped beef in cheese sauce. Hated it. Hated it even more when, when I was about 12, he told us what SOS stood for. They never made me eat that shit! (pun intended!)

@Dutchess_III

Hah! My dad made that too! But it had a cream sauce rather than cheese. It was made with this chipped beef in a jar stuff- this stuff, except the jar was blue. He served it over buttered toast, which was the “shingle.” My dad was an Army cook, which is where he picked it up.

O, I’ll tell you what I remember from school lunches, which is spot on topic here. They had some sort of hamburger gravy that they served over toast. It was a form of SOS, but it was GOOD stuff, man! Greasy, too. I tried and tried to recreate it as an adult. The closest I got was using the cheapest hamburger I could find, and powdered milk instead of whole milk. Schools would probably be sued if they tried to serve that stuff today! It was good.

If you are of a certain age who didn’t get the “Starving Kids In Africa” bit? My mother was born about the time of the depression and her mother (my grand mother) I am sure suffered through it. Food was not as available as today so I am sure they wanted us to appreciate what we had because we were not guaranteed it. Now that I have the Net and able to actually chat with people all over the world I really see how good we have it here. The food we waste is appalling. If we had to wait twice a week for the UN truck to bring the food (when the roads were not washed out or the fighting would let them) we would gladly take whatever, haggis, SOS, steamed cabbage, liver, you name it.

That’s right @Hypocrisy_Central! Totally. If we were poor, we wouldn’t be worrying about the trans fats present in the food we were digging out of the trash. We are all so freaking spoiled over here. It’s not enough that we have plenty to eat. We’re spoiled we can lay down the rules about what foods we will and won’t eat. Cabbage stinks, btw…so does SOS