AHC: Majority of US Eats Vegan/Healthier Post-WWII

TickTock The Witch's Dead

Your challenge is to get Americans to focus on healthier and vegan diets after WWII and try to diminish the obesity epidemic as possible.

Would they still see obesity as bad as OTL present? And how to make so?

EDIT: The "vegan" part wasn't supposed to be applied for everyone but was meant as more people eating vegan.
 
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Armot

I think religion is the only way to get it, and post-WW2 it would be quite difficult to change the American religious panorama.
 

mkemp

RandomWriterGuy said:
Your challenge is to get Americans o focus on healthier and vegan diets after WWII and try to diminish the obesity epidemic as possible.

Would they still see obesity as bad as OTL present? And how to make so?
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Never happen - it'd be too much like wartime rationing for the people to put up with after the war was over.
 

Kevin C. Smith

Set up an Ameriscrew were we lose the war and lose it badly. Meat is the diet of the rich and we were filthy, stinkin' rich (thank you UK and France). Or at least some "Germany gets nukes" TL where the American midwest is turned into an irradiated wasteland.
 

M79

We did not understand how heart disease worked as we do now until the 1980s, so you could get a lot of quasi or outright quackery. Eliminating margarine would be a good start, but as preservatives and other chemical additives get in there it will take the Counterculture to start a return to local markets. Keeping the mega-chain stores from eliminating local grocers would also help.
 

Zheng He

RandomWriterGuy said:
Your challenge is to get Americans o focus on healthier and vegan diets after WWII and try to diminish the obesity epidemic as possible.

Would they still see obesity as bad as OTL present? And how to make so?
Click to expand...

Do something to limit the introduction of High Fructose Corn Syrup into well pretty much everything including foods advertised as healthy (like some cereals for example).
 

GeographyDude

Gone Fishin'
As I understand it, it's the ratio of 'good' cholesterol (HDL) to 'bad' cholesterol (LDL), as well as the ratio of polyunsaturated fats to saturated fats. Although apparently, this advice is still very much being debated and investigated.
http://www.m.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/features/truth-about-saturated-fats

And much more speculatively, I think there are at least a few studies on whether hard-to-detect bacteria in the blood vessels may also play a role, say by inflaming and 'roughing' the surface of vessels where stuff can be deposited. Speculatively.

In general, I tend to think medicine is way behind other sciences. So, maybe much of this information could come out in 1944? One of the early fast food chains promotes tasty vegetarian fair in part to save on cost, and someone writes a big-selling book promoting a demi-vegetarian diet perhaps even calling it 'the chimpanzee diet'?

Some PODs interact and some lines cross.
 

hx87

Healthier and vegan? That's quite the challenge. If you got the country to eat vegan but kept everything else the same, sometime in the 1950s Ancel Keys will come along with his anti-fat theory of heart disease and obesity and screw things up even more than OTL. Without meat, dairy and eggs, and relatively few vegetable sources of oil available then you'd get people eating even more Crisco and starchy foods, which would be a disaster. When you eat meat and potatoes it isn't the meat that kills you.
 

hx87

RandomWriterGuy said:
Or you can persuade the people that healthy eating is needed for reduced heart disease because at the time there was a heart disease mania,
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We did--Americans eat less red meat, more white meat, and more starchy foods and sugars than in the 1940s. It hasn't helped much.
 

Zheng He

This is going to sound really strange but the Nazis were in to health and nutrition big time and they even did some of the first studies linking cigarette smoking to cancer.

Have some of the Nazi doctors and nutritionists surrender to American soldiers and somebody somewhere on Eisenhower's staff is intrigued by their research so they are sent back to the US. They are then employed in much the same way as Von Braun and his ilk and this leads the way to a health and nutrition revolution in the US just as the rocket scientists helped with the US space program.

I know nutrition isn't quite as sexy as say putting men on the moon but the same basic principles apply.
 

GeographyDude

Gone Fishin'
That's kind of the amazing thing, between low-fat and low-carbs, this very fundamental question is still being vigorously debated!

Some of it might be that people's biochem is different, or that their gut bacteria can be different. But I think a lot of it is that it's just not known and/or communicated extremely poorly.
 

TickTock The Witch's Dead

RandomWriterGuy said:
Your challenge is to get Americans to focus on healthier and vegan diets after WWII and try to diminish the obesity epidemic as possible.

Would they still see obesity as bad as OTL present? And how to make so?

EDIT: The "vegan" part wasn't supposed to be applied for everyone but was meant as more people eating vegan.
Click to expand...

hx87 said:
Healthier and vegan? That's quite the challenge. If you got the country to eat vegan but kept everything else the same, sometime in the 1950s Ancel Keys will come along with his anti-fat theory of heart disease and obesity and screw things up even more than OTL. Without meat, dairy and eggs, and relatively few vegetable sources of oil available then you'd get people eating even more Crisco and starchy foods, which would be a disaster. When you eat meat and potatoes it isn't the meat that kills you.
Click to expand...

hx87 said:
We did--Americans eat less red meat, more white meat, and more starchy foods and sugars than in the 1940s. It hasn't helped much.
Click to expand...

You don't have to require the people to be BOTH of that just make more people eat began healthily.
 

hx87

GeographyDude said:
That's kind of the amazing thing, between low-fat and low-carbs, this very fundamental question is still being vigorously debated!

Some of it might be that people's biochem is different, or that their gut bacteria can be different. But I think a lot of it is that it's just not known and/or communicated extremely poorly.
Click to expand...

That, and a long term controlled study of nutrition has never been conducted. It's difficult to get people to eat a controlled diet for 15+ years, although I'm sure if the monetary compensation (and penalties for withdrawal) were high enough it would be possible.

IMO, the OP should be separated into two questions: we're not even sure if vegan diets are healthier, all other things being held equal.
 
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