This Is What Diet Recipes Were Like In The 1970s (2024)

FAQs

What was the diet like in the 70s? ›

1970s. The 1970s marked the start of a reduction in our intake of vegetables. The average person ate a pound of red meat each week, compared to just over half of that today. Fruit juice arrived in the shops but only one in ten people consumed it regularly.

The period of low-fat everything had a strong focus on consuming single foods, with exotic-sounding names like the sexy pineapple diet, the grapefruit diet, the wine and eggs diet (yes, it really was a thing!), and even the cabbage soup diet, AKA the Dolly Parton diet.

1970: Orville Redenbacher's Gourmet Popping Corn is introduced. Agronomist Redenbacher has found a yellow corn that expands nearly twice as much as other brands. In five years, it will be the country's largest-selling brand. 1970: Hamburger Helper is introduced.

1950s Dinners

There was no such thing as the keto diet in the 1950s—meat and potatoes reigned supreme. You'd find hearty main dishes like Salisbury steak, beef stroganoff and meat loaf on a '50s dinner menu, plus scrumptious sides. Casseroles were also popular, particularly those featuring seafood or ham.

The cuisine that the counterculture took to in the late 1960s, and then helped introduce to the mainstream in the 1970s, embraced whole grains and legumes; organic, fresh vegetables; soy foods like tofu and tempeh; nutrition-boosters like wheat germ and sprouted grains; and flavors from Eastern European, Asian, and ...

People ate eggs, toast, bacon, sausage, cereal, milk, and juice. Breakfast bars and breakfast burritos weren't a thing then.

Americans have gone from eat- ing an estimated 2,075 calories a day in 1970 to scarfing down 2,535 calories in 2010. (From 2000 to 2007 we were as high as 2,600 calo- ries a day.) Most of the increase has come from eating more flour, more cheese, and more fats, with an extra shot of sugar thrown in.

The three-day military diet is an organized regimen that claims to help people lose up to 10 pounds in one week. It's a highly particular, low-calorie diet that is followed for three days, followed by a less restrictive diet for the next four days.

As of April 1973, the lab had identified three likely sources for making plant-based, meatless protein: canola (then known in Canada as rapeseed), sunflower seeds, and soybeans. "It is quite possible now to produce meat substitutes which smell and taste exactly like meat," De Man added. But Trueman seemed skeptical.

Snack foods have changed a lot in the past several decades. We take a trip down memory lane to the 1970s, where products like Space Dust, Marathon Bars, Tie-Bits cracker and Aspen Soda reigned supreme.

What desserts were popular in the 1970s? ›

“And when I think about a '70s dinner party, I think about excess.” She decided to revive two of the decade's most popular desserts: the soufflé and the showstopping Black Forest cake.

Initially, the dinners sold for the princely sum of 89 cents each, a bit of a splurge in 1954 (at that price, today each dinner would cost just over eight dollars). Despite that, TV dinners were a clear success – in the year after they came on the market, Swanson sold 25 million of them.

Peanut M&Ms, Atomic Fireballs, Certs Mints, Hot Tamales, PEZ candy, Pixy Stix, Smarties Candy Necklaces and Marshmallow Peeps were all candies developed during this decade.

Of course, no retro co*cktail hour menu would be complete without some old-school appetizers like a cheese ball, fondue, and deviled eggs. Those beet dyed eggs were even topped with some fried Spam because meat in a can was all the rage. Canned fish was a staple in the 60s too.

Generally, a person's weight is the highest around age 60, with decreases of less than half a pound every year after age 70. This means gradual weight loss is expected, but you shouldn't disregard a significant, noticeable drop in weight as part of the natural aging process.

Fruit, meat, and pastry consumption was high in the United States; cereal and alcoholic drink consumption was high in Italy; and bread consumption high in Yugoslavians except for those in Belgrade.

These foods are nothing out of the ordinary for my kids. Breakfast was porridge, cornflakes, Typical lunches were Heinz's soup, cheese on toast and sandwiches dinners were pies, Shepard's pie, roast, bolognaise, chicken and chips, lamb chops.

In the 1970s, an average dinner plate measured 22cm (8½in) in diameter – now it's more like 28cm (11in).