If very few Americans got fat in the 1950s, shouldn't we all just eat like it is 1950?

If very few Americans got fat in the 1950s, shouldn't we all just eat like it is 1950?

In a way, yeah. Wouldn’t be the worst idea.

Paradoxically, one reason why so few Americans were obese in 1950 is because — get a load of this — they ate fattier foods.

Sometime around 1960, Americans started listening to bogus nutritionists, who spread the erroneous paranoia that “fat in your food will kill you.” That’s also around the time that food scientists started to re-engineer food. One thing they did was to take some of the fat out.

When you take too much fat out, it’s like taking the alcohol out of beer. It tastes bad. So you sweeten it up — often with high fructose corn syrup. Then you have to eat more to get full, and sugar is mildly addicting.

The need for corn syrup is one reason why when you drive through Midwestern farm country, it’s full of corn instead of vegetables.

Connect the dots.

The “experts” were dead wrong. That had some devastating consequences for public health (though I’m not part of the snide camp on Quora who treat fat people, especially fat Americans, as bad people. They’re actually victims in a way, but the arrogant critics just point to them like they’re bad people we need to avoid.)

Trust me. If you want to lose weight, there are other things you can do besides join a gym — though that’s not a bad idea, either.

Eat something my grandparents ate all the time. Eat braunschweiger. A quintessential 1950s food, in a way. It’s old-fashioned pork liver paté, also called liverwurst in Europe. Chock full of fat, but tasty as hell. After a few slices, you really don’t want anymore. And there’s no sugar in it.

I’m not suggesting that braunschweiger should be the entire basis of someone’s diet, and you probably shouldn’t eat a bunch of liverwurst every single day. But one thing the ’50s had going for it was fattier foods. Roast beef and potatoes is a classic example. Too much roast beef isn’t good for you, but the flipside is that if you have a plate with fattier food on it, you probably won’t eat the sheer amount of food you’d eat if it was conventional modern food.

Start eating full-fat yogurt — not the low-fat or sweetened Dannon varieties — and you’ll be less tempted to pig out on potato chips, Coca Cola and ice cream. (Americans in the ’50s had these things, and they’re not bad in themselves, but we had a healthier relationship with chips and soda drinks back then. This stuff should be an occasional treat, not the basis of your diet.)

Seventy years ago, people also just lived more physically active lives. Even pharmaceutical companies a hundred years ago knew that exercise did you a lot of good. At least they were honest and said that if you wanted “grandfather’s cure for constipation,” you should just go take a saw to the woodpile. If you wanted to exercise your bowels without working, take Cascarets:

Same with not getting fat. My grandparents and great-grandparents were farmers, coal miners and mailmen. They didn’t sit on their butt in front of a laptop or staring at an iPhone. More Americans worked standing or walking on their feet and moving around in factories. Humans didn’t evolve to be sedentary creatures in offices, doing whatever people in offices do (which is usually nothing.)

Nutritionists and food scientists failed us catastrophically. So ignore them. Skeptics already joke that what the experts consider healthy this year will kill you next year. So, find the foods people were eating in the 1950s and eat more of that. What were people eating in some traditional societies?

Also, this is controversial and maybe circumstantial, but: cigarettes. Unlike Europeans, Americans started to give up smoking en masse in the 1970s. Despite allegedly being healthier (not entirely true), Europeans still smoke vastly more cigarettes than Americans. Somehow nicotine curbs appetites, and about 75% of regular smokers gain weight after quitting smoking.

That’s not really an advertisement for cigarette smoking. [Because some folks with low reading comprehension skills in the comments section here think that I’m advocating smoking as a weight-loss treatment, uh, I’m not.] But lower cigarette consumption is probably one reason among others why more Americans are obese today than we were in 1950.

I smoke. I deliberately eat fatty foods. And I have a second job waiting tables, so I get guaranteed exercise four nights a week. I’m also 6 feet tall and weigh 148 pounds. And I’m not a health-food fanatic.