They put butter on their bread and sugar on their oatmeal and — shock horror — at 80 they’re still skinny!
Our grandparents also used to make their own butter, cook with lard, drink full cream milk and put away plenty of potatoes.
Meanwhile we — who cut carbs, remove fat, cook less, eat more and spend most of our time sitting — are fatter than ever.
So how do our grandparents remain so healthy while living so heartily?
For starters, they ate less.
Grandfather-of-12 John Golding, who runs a family farm outside Grafton in northern New South Wales in Australia, says food was scarce when he was growing up.
“We ate less for sure because the food had to go around a big family. There were seven or nine kids in every family so you didn’t eat much at all. There were no ‘seconds,'” he said.
“We didn’t overeat and you’d restrict your bread intake because otherwise you’d run out.
“It was all healthy food. We always had a huge vegetable garden so we had cauliflowers growing in the winter time. We ate a lot of cabbage but only boiled cabbage.”
In Unhappy Meals, a piece for The New York Times Magazine, best-selling author Michael Pollan says we can all cut back.
“The scientific case for eating a lot less than we currently do is compelling. ‘Calorie restriction’ has repeatedly been shown to slow ageing in animals, and many researchers (including Walter Willett, the Harvard epidemiologist) believe it offers the single strongest link between diet and cancer prevention,” he said.
“Once one of the longest-lived people on earth, the Okinawans practiced a principle they called ‘Hara Hachi Bu’: eat until you are 80 per cent full.”
Golding says they only ate actual foods.
“Boiled potatoes or fried eggs were what we’d have for breakfast when mum was rearing us on the farm,” he said.
“We did have a bit of steak and onion gravy – just a little bit of that now and again and I still love that for breakfast. Now I have toast with vegemite and avocado.
“I also eat a lot of bananas. I average five or six a day. When [my wife] Ollie’s dad was growing them I’d eat five or six before breakfast and could eat up to a dozen a day.
“Don’t forget I also have a watermelon every day, all year round.”
Golding says he and his wife Ollie, who does most of the cooking, rarely ate processed food.
“We didn’t have any packaged stuff at all,” he said. “When Dad bought this farm after the war, we’d milk two or three cows so you’d make your butter and custards.
“We were reared also on fried scones. We loved fried scones. Instead of baking the scones, we’d fry ’em. They were beautiful just with butter.
“The leftover corn beef would be minced up with a hand mincer and we’d make a potato pie. You’d put potatoes over the top and bake it like a cottage pie.
“With all the old meat you made curries. I also love honey carrots. There wasn’t one thing wasted.”
In Six Rules For Eating Wisely, a piece for TIME magazine, Pollan says we shouldn’t eat anything our great-great-great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
“Imagine how baffled your ancestors would be in a modern supermarket … (most items) aren’t foods – quite – they’re food products,” he said.
“History suggests you might want to wait a few decades or so before adding such novelties to your diet, the substitution of margarine for butter being the classic case in point.
“My mother used to predict ‘they’ would eventually discover that butter was better for you. She was right: the trans-fatty margarine is killing us. Eat food, not food products.”
Golding, 79, eats everything but grew up on staples of rice, rolled oats and potatoes.
“When mum was rearing the five of us while dad was at the war she fed us on a lot of rice because that was cheap. I loved boiled rice with a bit of sugar on it, but now I don’t have sugar,” he said.
“We always had corned beef and spuds. They always boiled it and left it in the big pot until it got cold. It was pretty salty.
“I was reared on rolled oats. I love rolled oats made on full cream milk with a bit of salt and honey in it. You’d put a little bit of salt in it but that was just to cook things.”
Pollan says the western diet has shifted radically from whole to refined foods, complex to simple carbohydrates, leaves to seeds and from food culture to food science.
“The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its 17,000 new food products introduced every year, and the marketing muscle used to sell these products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition,” he said.
“Nutritionism, which arose to help us better deal with the problems of the Western diet, has largely been co-opted by it, used by the industry to sell more food and to undermine the authority of traditional ways of eating.
“You would not have read this far into this article if your food culture were intact and healthy; you would simply eat the way your parents and grandparents and great-grandparents taught you to eat.”
Our grandparents also didn’t spend all day stuck at a desk or hours at night on the couch. They performed manual jobs and rode their horses everywhere at full gallop.
Food intolerances were unheard of back then and no-one, least of all Golding, feared carbs.
“I’ve cut back to three bits of bread and have an open tomato sandwich now. I was thinking I better cut back because I bought a pair of jeans that are pretty tight on me so I better not put on any weight. But I usually have four or five slices with a tomato,” he said.
“I love curried eggs. Mum made a lot of that stuff like curried eggs because it goes a long way. She’d cook a dozen eggs up because we always had hens. So we ate a lot of that.
“For dinner we always have at least four or five vegetables and corned beef. We love corned beef and still have it every day.”
They also didn’t deprive themselves.
“You always had desert. It was only boiled rice and custard because that’s cheap and there was no money,” Golding said.
“Mum would make things out of rice like rice custards. We also grew up with syrup dumplings. Mum never cooked sponge cakes – she always cooked biscuits because they’d go further.
“We were reared on syrup. Mum would make jam but when there was none about we’d have syrup. Golden syrup or treacle. Bachelors would just have Bonox (a beef extract). That’s all they’d eat all the time. Everyone was poor.”
But these days’ added sugar and salt rarely passes Golding’s lips since seeing a documentary about how the Japanese eat.
“From then on I said I’m going to do without it. For eight to 10 weeks nothing tasted any good but I saw it out because I’m a bit determined,” he said.
“Ollie’s had me drinking green tea for the last 12 months or more. It took me eight weeks to like it but I do things if it’s going to be healthy for me.
“I’ve never been a drinker much. I suppose I’ve been drunk about five times in my life. You’re not thinking right after you have a beer. You get up to too much mischief. I wanted more out of life, simple as that.”
Despite becoming a fast food nation, Golding says his diet has improved with age.
“Our diet’s changed a little bit. We don’t eat fat or drippin’,” he said.
“The problem these days is fast food. Bloody McDonald’s.
“If people are getting big and fat, I don’t know why they keep eating. I can stand behind people (in line for meals) on a cruise and know what they’re going to order – greasy fish and chips.
“If you want to give up something, I think it’s easy. Well it’s easy for me – it’s just determination.”
Here’s to that.
Pollan’s nine principles of healthy eating:
1. Eat food… Don’t eat anything your great-great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
2. Avoid even those food products that come bearing health claims. Don’t forget that margarine, one of the first industrial foods to claim that it was healthier than the traditional food it replaced, turned out to give people heart attacks.
3. Especially avoid food products containing ingredients that are a) unfamiliar, b) unpronounceable c) more than five in number – or that contain high-fructose corn syrup. None of these characteristics are necessarily harmful in and of themselves, but all of them are reliable markers for foods that have been highly processed.
4. Get out of the supermarket whenever possible. You won’t find any high-fructose corn syrup at the farmer’s market; you also won’t find food harvested long ago and far away. What you will find are fresh whole foods picked at the peak of nutritional quality. Precisely the kind of food your great-great-grandmother would have recognized as food.
5. Pay more, eat less. There’s no escaping the fact that better food – measured by taste or nutritional quality (which often correspond) – costs more, because it has been grown or raised less intensively and with more care.
6. Eat mostly plants, especially leaves … By eating a plant-based diet, you’ll be consuming far fewer calories, since plant foods (except seeds) are typically less” energy dense” than the other things you might eat.
7. Eat more like the French. Or the Japanese. Or the Italians. Or the Greeks. Confounding factors aside, people who eat according to the rules of a traditional food culture are generally healthier than we are. Any traditional diet will do: if it weren’t a healthy diet, the people who follow it wouldn’t still be around.
8. Cook. And if you can, plant a garden. The culture of the kitchen, as embodied in those enduring traditions we call cuisines, contains more wisdom about diet and health than you are apt to find in any nutrition journal. Plus, the food you grow yourself contributes to your health long before you sit down to eat it.
9. Eat like an omnivore. Try to add new species, not just new foods, to your diet. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases.
This story originally appeared on News.com.au.