Per-capita butter consumption in the US peaked in 1911, so we've all gotten slimmer since then /s.

More seriously: correlation is not the same as causation, but one of the obvious correlated changes is the increase in consumption of sugary beverages: soft-drinks, fruit juices &c.

What’s interesting is my parents and their parents before them, had multiple slices of white bread+butter and glasses of whole milk with almost every meal. It was cheap and filling. And they were thinner than we were.

I don't know about your parents, but my parents never had any snacks in the house (I grew up in the 70s). We ate at meals. While my father drank milk at meals (and ate butter out of the dish!), I hated the stuff and drank only water. We didn't have anything else in the house. Things like potato chips, etc, were things we ate at birthday parties.

We ate big meals, but we didn't eat anything else. When I see families now, they stock up with super mega sized snack food at Costco and cram it in their minivan (the 2 reasons for having a minivan being to drive soccer teams around and to take your super mega sized snack food home </snark>) When I was a kid, people didn't buy stuff at that scale. Homes were smaller too, as were refrigerators. You just couldn't do that kind of thing easily.

Of course, my excuse for getting fat these days is because I live in Japan and there is nowhere in Japan that isn't walking distance from a convenience store... That and my wife believes that beer has no calories -- a misunderstanding that I'm loathe to correct.

I've got a working theory that the problem isn't necessarily just in how we've changed eating, but in what we do in our free time.

I don't know about your parents, but when I look at what was done for free time when my grandparents(born ~1930s) and my parents (born in the 1950s) did in their free time vs what my friends and I did I can't help but see a significant difference in the time spent active. I'm not just talking about going out to ride a bike/play basketball with my friends, but later in life. When my grandfather went to work, school, and even to a bar he always walked and my father had a similar relationship with mobility during his early to teen years. Of course that changed when they both were old enough to own a car, but for both of them that wasn't until they're late teens.

Combine that with the only entertainment being other places or outside you have a populace who expends significantly more calories every day than my generation (Millenial).

As time progresses I think you might see parents from the earlier generations feeding their kids at the level they were fed as kids not recognizing that little Billy watches youtube for 3 hours after finishing his homework instead of going and playing basketball with Tuk-Tuk leading to a daily calorie surplus. Over time a daily intake of +200 calories can easily add up to a significant amount of weight.

I don't have any data to support this other than my anecdotal story and how I approached weight loss (by decreasing intake and increasing passive/everyday calory burn rate), but I think it'd be a cool thing to see studied.

You have to do a really pretty extreme amount of exercise to burn off a hamburger.

You're definitely right, but 200 excess calories a day is 74,000 a year which can translate to 21 lbs a year in weight gain. It doesn't take much to get fat over a few years with a calorie surplus like that.

What dish is made by doing that?

Frankly, I don't think I agree with this, because someone who's cooking with fresh ingredients gets to see, for instance, that they are adding a boggling amount of sugar to their food.

Hashbrowns. Mashed potatoes. Fried in butter or oil in the former, butter added to make them taste good for the latter.

Who actually adds a mind-boggling amount of sugar to their food when they cook from basic ingredients? Everyone I know overdoes fats, but sugar?

> Who actually adds a mind-boggling amount of sugar to their food when they cook from basic ingredients?

The sugar contents of some of the staples - bread, sauces, etc. - can be shockingly high. A tablespoon of ketchup has more sugar than a chocolate chip cookie.

Is someone who describes themselves as cooking from fresh ingredients likely dumping loads of ketchup into their food?

I suspect plenty of people who say they cook with "fresh ingredients" still use off-the-shelf bread, condiments, etc. They may pick organic, more "artisan" brands, but plenty will have surprising amounts of lurking sugar.

Ketchup isn't really any less fresh than the butter/oil.

Sure, but home cooked food is fairly likely to include a sauce (e.g. vegetables in a tomato sauce) and thus not require as many condiments.

> A tablespoon of ketchup has more sugar than a chocolate chip cookie.

Ketchup has about 1/3 the calories of a chocolate chip cookie. What does it matter that it has the same amount of sugar?

In addition, out of sauces ketchup is really the odd one out, most normal sauces and dressings are not supposed to contain sugar at all.

There is a big gap between ‘supposed to’ and the real world. Pick up any bottled dressing at a typical grocery store, and sugar or corn syrup will likely be a top ingredient. See the totally unnecessary addition to ranch dressing, for example:

http://www.kraftrecipes.com/products/kraft-16-fo-dressing-li...

Or even if you are making your own, a surprising number have sugar or honey as ingredients.

https://www.tasteofhome.com/recipes/italian-vinaigrette

Who decides what something is "supposed to" contain? Why is it relevant?

While we're on the subject of questionably-relevant comparisons, remember that bacon contains 500% more vitamin C, and 100% less sugar than Coca Cola.

And coke makes you fat and gives you diabetes while bacon doesn’t. So it is actually an interesting comparison. Well, the sugar part.

How is that reasonably relevant? I can cherry-pick nutritional information to make any absurd comparison I want.

Which is what comparing the sugar content of ketchup and a chocolate chip cookie is. There's less sugar in a cookie than Ketchup, but ~3 times more carbs.

I was agreeing with your point.

Who the hell fries hash browns in butter? It's liable to burn.

As to your second paragraph, well, here is my point illustrated. Added sugars are probably our biggest problem. Even when it comes to lipids, I don't think most people cooking at home are making Cheesecake Factory-style meals. But my understanding of the latest research is that trying to remove fats from your diet is no longer necessarily recommended.

You can make delicious hash browns with just potatoes, salt, and butter. Yes, you have to keep it from burning, but it's not that hard, you just use a lower temperature. The result is delicious and crisp.

It's not the only way (Honestly, I prefer duck/goose fat if I'm feeling fancy, beef if not), but it's a perfectly acceptable way of making crispy delicious hash browns.

Great! Now I have to try that this weekend :-(

Probably with cheese sauce for good measure...

> Hashbrowns. Mashed potatoes. Fried in butter or oil in the former, butter added to make them taste good for the latter.

I have never used a full stick of butter in the making of either of these. For hash I use as little as I need to lubricate the potatoes. For mashed I use about 1 tablespoon per 2.5 pounds of potatoes. Since I have never made 20 pounds at once, I have never used a full stick.

people who cook their own food are at least aware of the amounts of oil/butter/whatever culprit you want to claim (salt? sugar?). when you eat fast food, you have no idea how much of these ingredients you're consuming (usually more than you would have used if you had made a similar meal yourself) and they're often labmade replacements with unclear side effects (for example, during the fat-free craze of the early 00s, a commonly used additive (olestra) ended up causing anal leakage and ended up being illegal in several countries). butter won't do that.

I mean, the whole concept of oil that can't be metabolized maybe should have given people pause.

I home cook all my meals and slather them in various fats because that makes them delicious. My BMI is 22.