Who knows what additives were in our grandparents' foods.
The change in American diet was not subtle; it was huge. It was due to what's cheaper / more profitable for a huge industry to produce.
It's similar to what's going on right now with the software industry -- cloud services with mobile clients is great economically and great for collecting data, but not necessarily in the short-term or long-term interests of the users.
If you believe in capitalism, you would have to explain how optimizing for cheap and superficially appealing food would NOT happen.
There's a reason every country has an equivalent to the FDA that has to approve food additives. These agencies were not formed in advance - they were formed as a reaction to dangerous unregulated food additives, supplements, medicines, and so on. The FDA was formed in 1906. Michael Pollan saying that our grandparents only ate real food is an example of the golden age fallacy.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/06/12/look-...
e.g.
The average American woman weighs 166.2 pounds, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. As reddit recently pointed out, that's almost exactly as much as the average American man weighed in the early 1960s.
Men, you're not looking too hot in this scenario either. Over the same time period you gained nearly 30 pounds, from 166.3 in the 60s to 195.5 today. Doing the same comparison as above, today's American man weighs almost as much as 1.5 American women from the 1960s.
This is NOT a subtle change! And it has severe consequences.
I think it's clearly due to diet and the "hidden" choices in the food supply, but if anyone has contrary information I'm interested. It's a tremendous change that needs an explanation.
At least I grew up on the east coast and my parents cooked. Anecdotally, I'm shocked by what my acquaintances from the midwest eat, and the consequences really start to show up when people reach their 30's (although there are signs earlier)
I read Michael Pollan's books (Omnivore's Dilemma, etc.) 10-15 years ago and they opened my eyes to how broken this country is in terms of food.
https://michaelpollan.com/books/
It's funny he is considered "liberal" here but it's just common sense in the rest of the world. The thesis is actually "conservative": eat things that your grandmother would consider food. If your grandmother wouldn't recognize it, don't eat it. Did your grandmother (or great grandmother) cook with high-fructose corn syrup? Or processed oils / margarine?