Why The Greatest Generation...

Why The Greatest Generation Also The Unhealthiest Generation and The Price We Are All Still Paying.

There isn't much that can reasonably said on the negative side about the Greatest Generation.

You are likely aware that this is the name coined to describe our parents and grandparents, and now for many of us our great grandparents, who carried the ball during the large sacrifices of both the Great Depression and World War II. We owe them a monster debt of thanks. Further they have earned every accolade we have sent their way.

Their legacy of positive accomplishments in the form infrastructure, economic opportunity, and productive offspring is unmatched. At the same time, this generation ushered in and created a culture of some of the most unhealthy lifestyles in our nation's history. Unfortunately, those habits and especially our general lack of awareness about what constitutes healthy eating are also lasting gifts from this generation. This reality ultimately goes to why changing the way we eat as a population is so hard and why we are generally still so overweight.

The Lifestyle Of The Greatest Generation

Well let me say first that most all of this bad eating and lack of quality exercise was not their fault. You have to first understand the general flow of how the world has changed since like 1850. How we make money has always greatly influenced our lifestyle. We went generally from a rural society to an urban society over the course of 50 or so years. People moved to the cities and began to live there too. This meant more indoor work than when we had previously worked in the fields and farms.

This trend continued through and after World War II, only worse. Instead of living in the cities, we started living further out in the suburbs. Instead of working in the factories where we would move around, we started sitting more at desks. So the sum total is less fresh air, less walking and moving around. We saw a growth of the management culture where people worked long hours, with more eating out and eating big.

What's Worse Is The Eating and That Smoking

If you are a fan of the TV hit "Mad Men", you get a very real sense of how unhealthy that era of time was. To start with, smoking was widespread from World War II on through the 1980s and with about half that time no prominent health warnings.

Think also about food and what we eat. Well unhealthy processed foods came to be generally eaten and accepted because the Greatest Generation bought them from the growing corporate food culture and fed them to the baby boomers (the kids of the greatest generation). Concoctions like Spam and TV dinners became hugely popular but worse, generally accepted nutritionally. No differentiation was made between natural and factory-processed foods. The counting calorie method of weight control which is now falling out of favor (slowly), dominated our idea of healthy eating. Unfortunately to this day we are still in the nascent stages of evolving away from these mindsets.