The global prevalence of obesity is alarmingly high, impacting both developed and underdeveloped countries across all demographics. Simultaneously, there's a surge in global interest in dieting, with many people drawn to fad diets as a quick solution for long-term weight management. While these diets promise rapid results, their lack of scientific backing raises concerns. Let's take a closer look at some of the dieting trends from the 1950s.
The Rise of Fad Diets
A fad diet is a popular dietary pattern known to be a quick fix for obesity. These diets are quite appealing due to the proposed claims, but the lack of scientific evidence is a big question mark. Such diets are often marketed with specific claims that defy the basic principles of biochemistry and nutritional adequacy. While some fad diets may have protective effects against obesity and certain chronic diseases like cardiovascular diseases, metabolic syndrome, and certain cancers, limited evidence exists to support these claims. In fact, some studies suggest negative health consequences from long-term adherence to such dietary patterns.
Post-War American Diet and Lifestyle
After World War II, the United States entered a new modern age of technological innovation that profoundly changed the way that America cooked and ate. Through popular media, especially women’s magazines and the new medium of television, advertisers encouraged women to use Atomic Age technology to create the ideal home. Appliance manufacturers, trade associations, and food product companies published dozens of cooking booklets in the post-World War II period to promote their products. They shared a common goal to market a modern, aspirational lifestyle in which the kitchen was a woman’s domain.
The Convenience of Canned Foods
Canned food as a commercial product dates to the 19th century. Van Camp, one of the earliest manufacturers still in operation, started in 1861 and supplied canned beans to the Union Army under a military contract. Returning veterans brought back a taste for the products along with an appreciation of the convenience. By the 20th century, canned food was common but it mostly supplemented diets rather than predominating at the table. This was in part because processed food was more expensive than fresh food. During World War II when nearly full employment brought canned goods and packaged foods within economic reach for more, rationing of canned goods limited their use in American kitchens.
Women bought canned goods from the supermarket. Supermarkets anchored a new post-war housing model. After World War II, planned communities sprang up across the country. Levittown on Long Island, in 1947, was the first of many. Marketed towards veterans eligible for low-interest, government backed mortgages, tens of thousands of families moved into the suburbs.
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The Modern 1950s Kitchen
The modern 1950s kitchen included an electric range, refrigerator-freezer, dishwasher, washer and dryer, and an assortment of small appliances like skillets, blenders, and mixers. Consumers could even buy a Radarange microwave oven in the 1950s-though few did due to the exorbitant cost. A housewife born in 1925 and living in a suburban tract house in 1950 did not grow up surrounded by electric technology. Her mother may have had a refrigerator, but it did not have a freezer with a separate door. And it didn’t come in a rainbow of colors.
The Rise of Processed Foods
Post-war economic prosperity encouraged conspicuous consumption. Processed foods, easily and quickly assembled into meals using electric appliances, became standard fare. Grocery bills went up as women happily purchased more and more convenience foods. Food company marketing materials assured women that their products were both high quality and healthy.
The Ideal of the Housewife
Push button technology took the drudgery, if not the boredom, out of housework. It also made it an incredibly isolating experience. At the beginning of the century, when women were cooking meals from scratch, sewing their own clothes, washing sheets and towels by hand, and buying fresh food from the market almost every day, it took a team of women to run a house. Lifestyle marketing recognized that many women found being a housewife somewhat less than fulfilling. There was a gradual transition from characterizing the womanly ideal from Housewife to Hostess. Some women took advantage of their increased free time by enrolling their children in activities like sports and scouts and ferrying back and forth to activities. Many women joined clubs and organizations. And there was an increase of the number of married women taking jobs, albeit mostly part time.
The Modern American Diet
A 2016 study found that nearly 60% of the calories consumed in the modern, American diet come from processed foods. While the flavors and packaging have evolved with contemporary tastes, processed and packaged foods remain household staples. Just like in the 1950s, technology has given women many more choices in how and where to spend their time. And no longer does the kitchen represent the aspirational ideal of womanhood. Contemporary women spend less time on household chores, including cooking, than their mid-century counterparts.
Diet Trends Through the Decades
While social media may make it seem like wellness hacks are more prominent than ever, researchers, celebrities, and publishers have been formulating and advertising diet trends for decades. The speed at which information spreads has increased significantly in the last hundred years, leading to a proliferation of health and weight loss trends, but the allure of new weight loss strategies has been a mainstay over that period. You may remember the cabbage soup diet of the 1950s or the grapefruit diet of the 1930s, but how effective are some of these old-school weight loss plans, and what can history teach us about which diets really stick, and which don’t?
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The Cabbage Soup Diet
The cabbage soup diet, popularized in the 1950s, is a weight-loss plan centered around unlimited vegetable-based cabbage soup consumption and strict restrictions on other foods. It re-emerged between 1980 and 2000, but it fell out of favor as the low-fat movement lost popularity. The aim of the diet is for participants to restrict calories by filling up on the fiber-rich soup. With the cabbage soup diet, you’re getting water and a little bit of fiber, and not anything else. You can call it a fasting-style diet. If you do it for a short period of time it’s not going to hurt you, but for a long period of time you could become malnourished. A lot of people fast perfectly fine, but when they eat again they overeat what they couldn’t eat during the fasting period.
Wine and Eggs Diet
Helen Gurley Brown, in her 1962 novel “Sex and the Single Girl,” popularized a diet composed mostly of wine and eggs. Breakfast consisted of one egg with one glass of white wine, lunch added another egg and another glass of white wine, and dinner consisted of one steak and the instructions to drink some more wine. Vogue printed the diet in a 1977 issue of the magazine as well, bringing it to the masses. Gurley Brown’s recommendations may seem jaw-dropping today as more Americans limit alcohol consumption and prioritize fiber, but it underscores the ways in which far-fetch fads can become reality. This diet is what we call a ‘N-of-1’ study; just because something worked for someone else doesn’t mean it’s going to work for you. Getting your medical information from popular culture or social media is not the best idea. Get your medical advice from the person who’s gone to medical school. Diets like this are alluring because they make a claim that no one’s ever told you before, and then you think they’re on to something. It’s tempting to want to find the cheat code to get through anything, but at the end of the day diet needs to be comprehensive.
The Atkins Diet
The Atkins® Diet, developed by cardiologist Robert Atkins, recommends restricting carbs while prioritizing protein and fats. It’s credited with beginning the low-carb diet trend. Atkins released a revised version of his book in 2002, reinvigorating the trend. Researchers, however, have found that low-carb diets can put some people at risk for cardiovascular disease and premature death. That’s because people who avoid carbs typically reduce their consumption of fiber and increase their intake of animal protein, cholesterol, and saturated fat.
The current ketogenic diet movement is really based on Atkins®. The idea is that when you don’t eat carbohydrates, your appetite decreases. I do think this is a diet that works. That being said, it’s extremely hard in the world we live in to not eat carbs. As soon as you eat carbs, your appetite will come roaring back.
Weight-Loss Diets in the 1950s and 1960s
Weight-loss diets in the 1950s and 1960s were not too dissimilar from today’s diets. In the 1950s the focus was on minimising carbohydrates, and in the 1960s it was on low-fat, low-calorie meals. Diets peddled by today’s women’s press are more often than not repackaged versions of meal plans published 50 years ago. Post-Christmas diets, steak diets, beach-body diets … they’ve all been around for much longer than people realise. While the rise of the weight-loss industry is often seen as a recent phenomenon of modern consumer societies, characterised by the abundance and affordability of foodstuffs, research shows that slimming diets were circulated even during times of austerity. Early post-war articles, when rationing was still in place, advised cutting down on bread, potatoes and carrots.
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The End of Rationing and the Slimming Culture
The end of food rationing marked the beginning of a modern slimming culture, which has since permeated all aspects of women’s lives. Magazines pursued this emerging slimming mantra with vigour, and by the mid-1960s had elevated dieting to centre stage of its weekly beauty advice. Not unlike modern counterparts, the magazine published countless diet and exercise articles promoting female slimness as an ideal of post-war femininity. Clearly, long before fat was identified to be a feminist issue, it had already developed into a capitalist one.
The Role of Women's Magazines
As rationing ended - and shortages subsided and gave way to increasing affluence in the late 1950s - the economical nature of slimming advice also changed. Readers were now encouraged to prepare more elaborate diet meals and significantly limit portion sizes and calorie content. Carbohydrates, however, remained largely absent from weight-loss advice and only began to appear on slimmers’ menus when the magazine changed its overall nutritional emphasis in the mid to late 1960s. This shift saw the magazine increase its promotion of slim figures by offering a range of methods, from the “No-diet Diet”, to the “Three-day-pounds-off-liquid Diet”. The magazine encouraged its readers to try whatever weight-loss regime was necessary to achieve the desired shape.
Exercise and Household Chores
Exercise was not always considered to be beneficial for weight loss. Indeed, in the 1950s it was understood to be, at best, less effective than dieting and, at worst, considered to be counterproductive to weight loss. While slimming diets were to lower body weight, most exercise advice was aimed at reducing so-called trouble spots or problem zones. These were defined as a woman’s tummy, buttocks, waist, hips, bust, arms, ankles and wrists. Losing weight in these areas was best achieved by blending household chores with exercise and combining workouts with activities such as “picking up and carrying around the baby, washing and ironing its clothes”.
The Duty for Beauty
Losing weight after giving birth was of particular concern. The readers were advised that “as soon as baby is born, begin your daily exercises, so that you will regain your figure in the shortest possible time”. Further evidence for the magazine’s stance on a wife’s and mother’s “duty for beauty” is provided by another article in which the author reminded the readers that, above all, women must not “let themselves go” after pregnancy. The author instructed mothers to remember that “you’re still a wife as well as a mother - so you want to stay attractive”. The argument that a woman’s worth was reflected in her husband’s judgement, was repeated time and again. The magazine described how men would become naturally disgruntled if their wives “let themselves go” after a few years of marriage and motherhood. The link between body weight and a woman’s reproductive life was repeated in the early 1960s, when it was pointed out that women were to groom themselves and keep trim figures during the menopause. The emphasis was most often placed on a woman’s duty to keep her youthfulness through a slender physique, suggesting that a slender figure was needed to look pretty in the latest fashions.
The Male Perspective
Even when the inclusion of men in weight-loss articles increased in the late 1960s, it was made clear that women are the weaker sex: male slenderness was depicted as vital for a man’s health and portrayed as an outward sign of his financial success and sexual prowess. The description of the male slimmer, whose slender body was a tool for professional success and fatherhood was in stark contrast to that of female dieters. A woman’s journey to a slim body was usually described as being hampered by her uncontrollable food cravings and moods, as governed by the stages of her reproductive life cycle.
The Shift Towards Self-Help
Overall, the late 1960s saw magazines continue to promote a slim figure as a woman’s “must have” accessory. But what had markedly changed was not just the nutritional content of its diets, but its undertones. A slender figure was no longer just promoted as a necessary means for women to fulfil their roles as wives and mothers, it was coupled with general messages of health, beauty and “vitality”, and increasingly promoted weight loss as a form of “self-help” - by now, often achieved within a slimming group.
The Rise of the Weight-Loss Industry
The magazine’s increased focus on dieting during the 1960s was partly driven by concerns over an impending obesity crisis, as it was then that evidence for the detrimental effects of over-consumption became more widely known. Although the prevalence of obesity was comparatively small in the 1960s, research on associated conditions such as heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes, began to make headlines. In the age of post-war affluence and rising body weights, commercial forces recognised early on that the propagation of a slim ideal would prove lucrative.
The Enduring Slim Beauty Ideal
The location of a slim beauty ideal within the context of a woman’s traditional post-war role and reproductive life cycle typified slimming advice during the 1950s and 1960s. A slender female body was meant to please, although not necessarily women themselves. And external recognition, granted merely on the merit of physical beauty, was supposed to lead to women’s self-fulfilment in their traditional roles as wives and mothers. What is startling, however, is how little the core message on slimming has changed since. The “rationale” for a slender body given by today’s women’s press has also remained strikingly similar: a slender body is still overwhelmingly associated with beauty, desirability and self-fulfilment. The different stages of her reproductive life still loom large in today’s weight-loss advice, with magazines continuing to praise or scold the ability to control post-partum or menopausal weight gain.