Please Help Me!, :D:D Options

[hello_cello]

Hey there, i need some help with my biology work, if you can fill out the following questionnaire i will be very gratefull!

i need no personal details. If you were in your teens in the 50's-60's please answer these questions, it will be really appreciated (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Thankyou very much! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

1)How would you say the diet of teenagers today varies compared to teenagers in the mid 20th century?


2)How were you taught about the importance of a healty diet, if atall?


3)How much exercise on average a week would you say teenagers did in the mid 20th century?

Thankyou to anyone who answers, thankyou sooo much!

[petrat]

When I was a teen we had to walk a mile each way to the village shop if we wanted sweets so we did not do it often, perhaps once a fortnight. We used to grow a lot of our own fruit and vegetables and we did not have a fridge until I was ten years old. Milk was delivered and kept on the cold shelf in the pantry along with the butter and cheese. We did not use margarine except for cooking and there were no butter substitutes to be had as there are today. We did most of our own baking, including bread from stone ground flour from the mill which we bought in by the sack as it was needed. We did not have a school shop but some of us took snacks to eat during break. We had no frozen food but my parents used to bottle a lot of the food that we grew. (Tomatoes, apples, beans, blackberries etc) Most of the food that we had was fresh or tinned. We did not use packet foods much although i remember that we all liked the new packet curries when they came out. We did not have crisps or bought cakes except for Battenberg cake as a treat if we had visitors to stay. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)
Breakfast would be porridge or cereal, lunch was usually something on toast; cheese or scrambled eggs or beans, and then we had afternoon tea when we got home from school. This would be a smallish meal of sandwiches and a slice of apple tart or egg custard. Later in the evening we would have supper. This might be veg soup and toast with cheese or a home made savoury pie of some sort or chops. I was always a vegetarian but the rest of the family ate meat.

My father was a GP and my mother had trained in home economics before becoming a nurse during the war so they knew about proper nutrition. I suppose that we ate a very healthy diet then. At school we learnt a little about healthy eating but not in much detail.

We all too a lot more exercise then. Most homes in my area had only one car so we walked far more. Most children walked to school unless they lived over two miles away. Then they would be offered a school bus pass. I used to cycle to school, just over a mile away and home again at lunch time because the school meals were very nasty! We used to go to the town swimming pool at least twice a week and I had a pony too which took up a lot of my time, especially at weekends. If we wanted to go to any clubs or to the cinema we had to walk there. It was rare to have a lift to school by car but we did sometimes if it was very wet. We had no TV until I was ten either so most of my play time was spent being active either in or out of doors.

Writing this has made me realise how poor our diets have become now compared with what they were over forty years ago.

[hello_cello]

thanks, i really appreciate your help =)

[Robodoc]

1)How would you say the diet of teenagers today varies compared to teenagers in the mid 20th century?

Mid 20th centruy would be 1950 or, at a pinch, 1940-1960 but still before my time as a teenager. Still, they were austere times, bearing in mind that wartime rationing continued into the 50's. So my answer would be that the mid 20th century teenager would probably have eaten less refined foods & junk food in general BUT a lot more saturated fat (fish & chips) and pastry, as well as general "stodge" than todays teenagers. Overall obesity was rare, so they probably ate less, mostly between meals rather than at mealtimes. The concept of a high fibre diet wasn't really propagated until the work of Dennis Burkitt in the 70's so overall a generally lower fibre diet would probably have been the norm (though in todays junk food world there are a significant minority of spectacular exceptions).

2)How were you taught about the importance of a healty diet, if atall?

Like I said, I wasn't a teenager in the mid 20th century, not until 1973 in fact. However, I was taught cookery at school: In fact all the boys in our school did a term of cookery and a term of needlework. The needlework was useless - in a whole term we learned nothing useful (such as how to sew on a button or iron a shirt) but I did get to make my own orange paisley pattern neck-tie! However, the stated purpose of the cookery classes was to teach us enough recipes of suitable variety so that if we left home to fend for ourselves with no other cooking skills we would not die of malnutrition. In consequence of this ideal we were intensively schooled on 'the four food groups" (no, not stodge, starch, fat and burnt crunchy bits - the other four!) as well as a crash course in vitamins. Overall we did pretty well . . . but that was at least 20 years too late for you.

3)How much exercise on average a week would you say teenagers did in the mid 20th century?

Quite a lot, probably. Car ownership was unusual (even then you could only use it if you could get the petrol coupons) and bicycles were pretty ubiquitous so that even the non-sporty walked or rode most places where todays teenagers get ferried in cars. Video games were unknown and TV's were pretty uncommon (until the Coronation in 1952 they were positively rare) so entertainment often consisted of going outside and messing about with your mates. In the absence of cars street football, street cricket, games of tag etc were pretty much the norm for boys. Girls, on the other hand, weren't expected to do such 'un-ladylike' things in those unenlightened days. (I may be wrong but I think that the first Olympics that had a women's race of more than 800 metres was Montreal in 1976). Schools were still expected to have extensive sports facilities and the school sports teams were expected to turn out on Saturdays as the staff would be there to supervise.
Overall, I think, a lot more exercise was taken 50 years ago than by todays average couch potato.

Thankyou to anyone who answers, thankyou sooo much!

You're welcome!

[hello_cello]

Thankyou both!

i dont really need anymore replies, but if you want to carry on discussing this feel free to! i think ive already double my 800 word limit on these two responses!

*loves essays and reports*
*HATES biologgy*

[Aquarelle]

Food was very plain in our house – lots of bread and butter, toast, jam, banana sandwiches, the occasional boiled egg for tea. Breakfast was cereal, lunch was meat and two veg and favourites were rabbit stew with dumplings followed by desserts such as baked apple, blackberry and apple pie/ and treacle pudding. Later we had shop cakes – cupcakes and swiss roll. My mother hated cooking so it was all very basic. but it was virtually all homemade until Angel Delight and fish fingers came on the market.

I don’t remember being taught about healthy diet but then we had domestic science once a week at school and I spent most of that time ironing the school aprons because my mum couldn’t afford to pay for the ingredients of the dish the class were learning to cook. I do remember the class learning to make soused herring and thinking I would rather iron.

As far as exercise was concerned we rode bikes for miles – including to school once considered old enough and having passed the cycling proficency test., I walked our various dogs all over Blackheath and Greenwich Park, walked a longish distance to music lessons, Sunday school and Girls Life Brigade meetings where we did a lot of marching and physical jerks. At school we had weekly games afternoon – hockey and netball in winter, rounders and tennis in summer – and we cycled to the games field.

Have seen you don't need any more replies but couldn't resist this bit of nostalgia!!
Hope you get good marks.

[maggiemay]

Ok - I see you don't need more replies - so I'll be brief !

but I agree with Robodoc - I think diets tended to be starchier. No big deal about fruit and veg - but we did get plenty of both and I have a hunch it was fresher when we got it (travelled less far ?) so possibly did us more good. I don't remember being taught about a healthy diet - although we did have cookery lessons at high school. There were no supermarkets - I think I was at college when they started coming in. Mums tended to shop most days at local shops.

I don't think I ever went to school by car. Two buses when I was at high school, although I did walk all the way home once or twice, and I got a bike when I was in the fifth or sixth form (year 11 or 12 to you !). People did tend to walk quite a lot - it was not unusual for us to walk home from the town centre or over to see relatives some way away.

I remember the first Chinese restaurant opening in our town - I must have been about 12 or 13 - and we used to enjoy going there now and then.

Petrat - yours sounds fairly idyllic!

[hello_cello]

yeh, year 12 is 6th form
I suppose a chinese restaurent would have been wierd to see then, but for us now it would be strange not to have one in a town.
[that isnt meant to be racist]

[maggiemay]

I know, it seems odd now that there was just one and we thought Chinese food was such a novelty !

[petrat]

Petrat - yours sounds fairly idyllic!

In some ways it was but my father was in practice single handed so we didn't see much of him apart from early mornings and late at night in the week. At weekends he was always busy in the grounds of with his woodwork that the only way to spend time with him was by joining in with the gardening. Harvest time was hard work, as was bottling with the jars in pans on the aga. It sounds fun and much of the time it was it certainly wasn't an easy life for my parents.
GPs have it so much easier now.

[BerkshireMum]

One aspect that hasn't been covered yet is home heating. Lots of homes did not have central heating - we moved house when I was 9 (1962) into a newly built home which had central heating, but most of my friends, and both my grandmothers, only had coal fires right up to my going to university. I grew up in South Yorkshire, where there was plenty of coal in those days - if you worked down the pit (which about 60% of men did) you got a coal allowance as part of your wages.

What has this to do with eating? I hear you ask. Well, I think people needed to eat more in winter just to keep warm. There would usually be just the one fire in the living room, and the bedrooms were icy, so you had to burn more calories to stay warm. This is why so much starchy food was eaten in winter, and why hot meals and hot drinks were so necessary. We still like the stodgy food, but don't really need it today as winter is as warm as summer once you're indoors.

I was ill a lot as a young child, and used to sleep on a camp bed set up in the living room so that I'd stay warm. If I was really ill and needed quiet, a fire would be lit in my bedroom - if that happened I knew I was thought to be very poorly.

[Mad Tom]

3)How much exercise on average a week would you say teenagers did in the mid 20th century?

Quite a lot, probably.

Now there is an understatement.

How much exercise? A HUGE amount.

The huge majority walked or cycled to school. Affordable school buses brought a minority in from outlying villages. A mere handful were driven.

A typical school day for me circa late 1960's early 1970's would include:

Morning and evening paper rounds (done on my bike) about 40 minutes each round
At least an hour of swimming training.
Walk (more like run) or cycle to and from school (2 miles each way)
2x15 minutes of footy at morning and afternoon breaks, and another half hour at lunchtime (except on the two lunchtimes each week I was allowed to use the school's Bechstein Grand).

On top of that there were one or two full soccer matches a week, 2x45 minute gymn lessons, a 45min athletics or cross-country session.

It was EXPECTED of any boy that by the time you reached the 5th form you'd be able to do a hand-stand, a couple of vaults, a handspring, 25 press-ups without whingeing, run 100m in 13.5s or less, and a lap of the track in 75s, long-jump nearly 5 metres and high jump well over 1m, throw a javelin, catch a cricket ball, climb a rope hands-only, punch a sand bag hard enough to knock it out if it was conscious, and run at a fair pace non-stop for half an hour over rough ground.

Then there was 2-3 hours of mad "dancing" on Saturday night at the local night-spot, long bike rides on Sunday afternoons for the fun of it, and then an hour kicking a ball about when you got somewhere, and every five or six weeks a week-end day away on a school trip hill walking (typically 20 or more miles covered in a day) ... but we walked or cycled everywhere anyway.

I was not atypical. More than half the boys were football mad (whether they had much skill or not) and many did another sport as well. Almost everyone was serious about some sport or other. And many, like me, had part-time jobs - usually involving physical effort, like helping with milk deliveries, delivering groceries, waitressing in cafes, or packing and unpacking market stalls at weekend and after school on market days.

Only a handful of boys and girls in the whole school could by any stretch of the imagination be called overweight or fat, and then hardly so by today's standards.

We were FIT!

[Mad Tom]

Hey there, i need some help with my biology work, if you can fill out the following questionnaire i will be
grateful

I became a teenager in 1968 and stopped being one in 1975

1)How would you say the diet of teenagers today varies compared to teenagers in the mid 20th century?

We ate less overall. On balance I'd say a healthier diet, despite being a bit light on fruit. Fewer convenience foods - more meals cooked from the basic ingredients. A lot of locally grown veg and locally produced meats. Sweets, ice creams, chocolates, fizzy drinks - a rare treat.

2)How were you taught about the importance of a healthy diet, if at all?

We were taught the basics of nutrition in Biology classses about Protein, Carbohydrate, Fats, Vitamins, and Minerals - what they are and what they do. We weren't indoctrinated with any particular ideas on what constituted healthy and unhealthy diets. We were left to figure that out for ourselves. But we had the thinking skills to do it.

3)How much exercise on average a week would you say teenagers did in the mid 20th century?

By today's standards, enormous amounts. Lots of walking and cycling, lots of sports, and a fair amount amount of physical work.

One aspect that hasn't been covered yet is home heating. ..... There would usually be just the one fire in the living room, and the bedrooms were icy ....

Who remembers ice on the inside of the windows in the morning, and built in metal cupboards that you dare not touch with bare hands?

[ad_libitum]

We still like the stodgy food, but don't really need it today as winter is as warm as summer once you're indoors.

Not in our house (IMG:style_emoticons/default/winter_brr.gif)

We're quite hardy here! We tend not to use the heating very much at all, mainly for financial reasons (actually, make that entirely lol!)

There's no pre set for the morning so first one up puts in on. We have it set so that it switches off automatically after an hour.

Before the pupils arrive I light the fire in the living room and keep it well stoked up during the afternoon. When I'm moving about other parts of the house - well, you don't feel the cold when you're on the move so you don't notice it.

I used to stay over at a friend's house who had the heating on all day long. I nearly always woke up with a headache, and sometimes even a migraine. I'm convinced that was the source of it, and it can't be good for you!

Just like you Berkshiremum, my gran had an open fire in her bedroom and I only remember it being lit once when I was sick and staying at her house!!

I don't count for this survey though as I'm too young, but I think that there still are parents today who encourage playing outdoors etc... We would never have been driven to school and the tv was only on for certain programmes then switched off. It never just stayed on in the background the way lots of people seem to do now. Even when no one's watching it they seem to still have it on nyway - like some sort of comfort blanket (IMG:style_emoticons/default/laugh.gif)