Until the 1960s, as this analysis of the increase in disease and overweight in the US explains , Americans were practically unaware of diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

You may think that, as many newspapers have reported, calories have increased dramatically over the years , but unfortunately this is not exactly the case.
An average man from the early 1900s to the 1950s consumed about 3000/3400 calories a day.

This was well documented by Ancel Keys in the 1940s, when he subjected a group of volunteers to a low-calorie diet experiment known as the Minnesota Starvation Experiment .
The mistake of many has been to consider the calories per capita according to the consumption of products purchased per family.

But at the time, most Americans only ate a meal out of the home once a month, and industrial products were much less present than they are now.

Looking at how much the volunteers, all non-overweight men, ate, Keys estimated that a man in the 1940s consumed about 3,200 calories a day . Similar estimates were also obtained from direct sources of those years, for example letters, scientific studies and other documents, for example from hospital menus, soldiers’ menus, university canteens of the time.

But if the calories increased a little, what led Americans and then all Westerners to gain weight and get more and more sick with metabolic syndrome?

Today an American eats more frequently out, making meals that are not exactly healthy, often rather poor, buys more industrial products, rich in additives, eats more chicken, prefers poor quality seed oils to banal butter.
Products sweetened with corn syrup increased, while consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables fell.
We eat in a hurry and are often hungry between meals. There is a large consumption of dietetic products.

This food laziness, with lunches and dinners out more often than then, less time spent cooking the dishes at home, the use of poor quality ingredients, the increase of products with dyes and additives added in the pantries , has undoubtedly contributed to the deterioration of the health of modern man.

Following a 1950s American diet, many people in America have realized that they can lose weight effortlessly.
In short, going back to the past has become the new dietary trend.

On page two we see an example of the 1950s American diet according to the newspapers and books of the time.
You will notice that there is a big difference even according to our current diet.