How can anyone say people ate healthier in the 1940's, 1950's and 1960's?

I read your question and comments and don't understand where you're coming from. If you compare then to now people lived just as long, so why is there even a right and wrong way to eat. Did you ever think that foods and diets are suggested today to go along with what food the government allows to be sold in the USA or even if there is a glut of one product over another, or maybe the USA just contracted with some overseas producer that they want us to take advantage of the different food in our diet to promote world peace? People in the 1950's had their own gardens and also canned the fruits and vegetables they had on their land, so I'd say they were at least part a vegetarian. My dad up thru the 1980's (up thru age 70 or more) used to broil steaks and then dunk his bread into the fat gravy that came from that steak until it was all gone, yet he lived till 84 when he had a heart attack. Today people are living shorter lives because of stress and not because of the food we eat. When we were kids our meals at school used to be very small and consisted of things like a hotdog, beans and milk, or a bowl of rice with cinnamon and sugar and a piece of fruit and milk. Today they eat so much, lots of different foods and the kids are fat. There are lots of things people ate in the 1950's when there were still vitamins in food (not like today), and the sugar we ate gave us the energy (rather than having to buy metabolism boosters like people do today) to do hard physical work and we wore off the sugar. So I wouldn't call eating sugar an "addiction" at all. If a person isn't doing all that hard physical work anymore then they don't need all that sugar and need simply a change of attitude.