The Sixties, When Nobody Was Obese

Health was normal before we made it abnormal.

Somewhere between 1960 and now something fundamental shifted. In the sixties obesity was rare in the West. This wasn’t because people wore fitness trackers. It wasn’t because everyone went to the gym. It wasn’t because they followed diets or counted calories.

It was because what they ate was fundamentally different. Ultraprocessed food didn’t exist at scale. Soda was a drink, not sugar. Bread was baked fresh daily. Meat was meat, not a mixture. Vegetables were seasonal. This made choices much simpler.

You couldn’t eat average processed food because it didn’t exist widely. You couldn’t snack in your car because cars weren’t designed for snacking. You couldn’t constantly eat because snacks didn’t fit in your pocket and you were home for meals.

But that’s not why it ended. It ended because nutrition was reinvented as industry. Sugar became cheap. Oil was subsidized. Food became available everywhere. And most importantly: food was designed. Not made, designed. Designed for maximum palatability, maximum edibility, minimum chance you’d say no.

This is what you call food engineering. Combining fats, sugars and salt into something your body asks for more of. This isn’t accident. This is science in service of profit.

My father saw this happen. He wrote about it, spoke about it. But the momentum was unstoppable. Because if everyone eats the same food, being overweight becomes normal. Then it’s not about what you do. It’s about what the system does.

This doesn’t mean responsibility disappears. But responsibility without context is blame. Blame says: you’re fat because you’re lazy. Context says: you’re fat because you’re surrounded by food designed to make you fat.

This is why fitness trackers don’t help. They give you measurements, not nutrition. They say: you need ten thousand steps. But they don’t say what you’re eating. You can take ten thousand steps and then go home and eat ultraprocessed food and average net backward.

The sixties were not better because people were better. They were better because food was better. This is restoring through nutrition, not discipline.

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Sources: WHO nutritional data 1960-2020, food system industrialization