What happened when I ate a 1960s diet for a week

It’s one of the hottest days of the year so far, but my oven is on and blasting. Inside is a joint of beef and a tray of roast potatoes sizzling in beef dripping. Ready to go is my Yorkshire pudding; bubbling away on the stove is a pan of rice pudding, next to a couple of tins of peas and carrots, ready to be heated up. 

It’s a bit counter cultural, given the soaring temperatures, but then so has been my last week. I have just spent seven days eating as if I was in the 1960s – roast beef, tinned veg and all – in a bid to see what the health benefits might be. And while there are some things I definitely won’t be continuing in my 21st century life (a dearth of fresh veg and toast at almost every meal), there are other habits I definitely will. 

They were obviously doing something right. In the 1960s only 1 per cent of men and 2 per cent of women in England were classed as obese compared to today’s 25.2 per cent of men and 26 per cent of women. 

At the end of the 1950s, the average man weighed just over 10 stone (65kg) and the average woman weighed 8 stone 6lbs (55kg). By 2021, the average man and woman reported weighing 13 stone 4lbs (85.1kg)  and 11 stone 3lbs (71.8kg), respectively. 

Though there was still quite a divide between rich and poor households, the 1960s were, as the social historian Prof John Burnett pointed out in his seminal work Plenty & Want: A Social History of Food in England from 1815 to the Present Day, the “affluent years” – postwar rationing was becoming a distant memory and the recession of the 1970s had yet to bite. 

In the main, the majority of working people ate reasonably well: Britons in the 1960s drank more milk per week – an average of 4.84 pints per person – spread more butter on their toast, ate more eggs, consumed way more sugar and ate more meat than their counterparts in either 1950 or 1974. Their fresh fruit and green veg consumption was also higher, although they ate fewer fresh vegetables overall. This was, after all, the beginning of convenience foods and the age of the tin can. 

Meat and two veg and family mealtimes

As a middle-class professional household, in which my husband would have gone out to work every day and I was at home looking after the house, my family would have been eating three main meals a day: breakfast, lunch and dinner, plus a light snack at 11am and again at 4pm. Some households would also have eaten ‘supper’ before going to bed – again, a light evening bite. “Snacking didn’t happen in the way it did now, but you can legitimately sit down mid-morning, especially as a 1960s woman,” says food historian Dr Annie Gray, the author of The Call the Midwife Cookbook, which revolves around 1960s recipes. For my husband in an office, meanwhile, “this is still the era where the tea trolley would come round twice a day.” 

Perhaps the biggest difference between then and now, though, was first, the type of food people ate, and second, how much of it. Although sugar consumption then was far higher than it is today (an average of 17.76 oz, or 503g a week per person, compared to the 1.8kg consumed per person per year now) there were few processed foods. Tins, yes, UPFs, definitely not. And though this was the decade that saw breakfast cereals soar in popularity (Coco Pops launched in 1961 and Ready Brek in 1957), more adventurous crisp flavours emerge to tickle the palate (Golden Wonder launched Ready Salted in 1960 and Cheese & Onion in 1962) and the invention of Angel Delight, in 1967, the reality is that these were occasional and exotic treats.

Today we get a shocking 57 per cent of our calories from ultra-processed foods, while in the 1960s our intake was negligible.

Bread and butter, potatoes and suet pudding 

Most food was pretty plain, of the meat and two veg variety, and cooked from scratch. Starchy carbs – potatoes, bread, suet pudding – which filled you up cheaply, were a staple on any menu; meat was mostly red (chicken was an expensive luxury) or processed (sausages, ham and Spam) and leftovers weren’t called that, they were simply the next meal; not least because few British households, certainly at the beginning of the 1960s, had fridges. 

Even by 1968, only 50 per cent of households had one. Vegetables either came in tins or were what you grew or could get at the greengrocer: peas, carrots, cabbage, marrows (not courgettes). “Broccoli wasn’t invented” said my 77-year-old father. There was always pudding – usually of the something and custard variety – but it came at the end of a main meal; my mother remembers being allowed to eat plain cake at teatime during the week, but only after a slice of bread and butter. 

Portion sizes, though, were smaller; the average plate size was 23 centimetres and bowls were a modest 7 inches in diameter. The average size of many of our foods today, by contrast,has grown by as much as 138 per cent according to data from the American Journal of Public Health, the journal Nutrition and the Journal of the American Medical Association. A serving of meat would have been about 100g, and the lion’s share would have gone to the man of the house, leaving a wife like me with even less – my 1.5kg cut of beef turned into three meals for our family of four. 

And people were far less sedentary then: as a housewife I would have been on my feet shopping, cooking or cleaning for most of the day, and travelling on foot or by bus rather than car. In 1967, more than three-quarters (77 per cent) of adults said that they walked for at least half an hour every day compared to only 42 per cent in 2010. 

What happened when I tried a 1960s diet

My week of 1960s eating had its ups and downs. I started on a Sunday with a cooked breakfast, albeit a modest one: a slice of bacon, a piece of fried bread (fried in beef dripping) and a cup of tea. The main event was, of course, the Sunday roast at lunchtime, and despite my relatively modest portion, I really was too full to eat more than a couple of slices of bread and jam for supper, which would have been quite common in the Sixties. 

Monday was leftovers day: a couple of roast potatoes, some of the veg and gravy, plus a slice of bread and butter for lunch; cold roast beef and baked potatoes with salad for supper, enlivened with a tin of peaches and chopped banana topped with condensed milk for pudding; on Tuesday I turned the final bit of beef into some potted beef to have on sandwiches. 

Although in the Sixties I would likely have cooked the main meal at lunchtime with my husband and children coming home for it, practicalities meant I flipped it during my test week: breakfast most days was toast with either a boiled egg or with butter and Marmite. Lunch was whatever was left over from the night before, perhaps with a piece of bread and butter to bulk it out. Supper, which we all ate together around 6pm, was the main event; whether that was spaghetti hoops on toast (Heinz was big in the Sixties) with jam roly poly and custard for afters; potato and onion pie followed by rice pudding or toad in the hole accompanied by leftover tinned peas and some tinned fruit cocktail and custard for dessert. 

There were a couple of treats: a (modestly-sized) coffee and walnut layer cake for my Dad’s birthday (made to a Sixties recipe, minus the Camp Coffee flavouring, where I had to improvise with Nescafé) and fish and chips on Friday, which would have been ubiquitous in most households, but gone was the mid-morning latte from a coffee shop or the glass of wine with dinner.

The experience at first surprised me. I’m not normally a breakfast eater, but found that having some toast or an egg meant I wasn’t so hungry at lunchtime and happy with my smaller portion. I’d never expected three cold roast potatoes and a handful of tinned peas doused in Bisto would count as a satisfying lunch. 

I also found myself less hungry in the afternoons. By early evening I was ready for my dinner, but not starving – and even on a ‘hearty’ day was perfectly happy to eat just the one sausage and a small portion of mash (I dug out a suitably-sized vintage plate to keep my portion sizes appropriate) – and pudding at the end always rounded things off nicely. The scales even seemed to show that I’d dropped a pound and a bit, which seemed extraordinary given the amount of carbs I’d been consuming. 

By day five, however, I’d hit a bit of a wall: I found myself increasingly sluggish in the mornings, with horrible breath, and I was craving salad and lean protein. “My main criticism of the diet is the lack of fresh fruit and vegetables, which are so important for good nutrition and gut health,” says The Telegraph’s expert nutritionist Sam Rice, who cast an eye over my menu for the week. 

“There is very little variety in terms of plant foods and nowhere near the modern recommendation to eat 30 different plant foods a week. There is also little in the way of complex carbohydrates, again from fruit and veg, as well as whole grains, beans, lentils, nuts and seeds.” Rice also points to a lack of omega-3 from oily fish, and that most of the fat I’m eating is saturated animal fat rather than the healthier monosaturated fats found in olive oil, avocado and nuts. 

By the end of the week I would certainly be happy never to see another slice of bread and dripping again, and I’m sick of the sight of jam. The weight I thought I’d lost also turned out to have reappeared, minus a tiny bit. 

But there are some things I’ll take away. Smaller portion sizes for a start – I’ll be sticking with my Sixties-sized dinner plate. Nescafé with milk from a carton is a perfectly respectable (and much cheaper) alternative to a calorie-heavy latte for everyday drinking, and a glass of wine is better as an occasional treat (I won’t be switching to sherry). My children would also be delighted to continue with the daily pudding ritual. 

But I’m very glad that I have a fridge, and access to a wide range of fresh fruit and veg. And Spam will never have a place in my kitchen cupboard.