Yeah, I know. For a few years now, though, I've liked looking for photographs from the 19th century and it's something that I'd been noticing in several different pics. And I was wondering how much of it was poverty related that I was seeing, quality of the film back then, etc. But then again, when you look at photos of the time period with much older women, the cameras were able to discern the ones that were built like a refrigerator! So, cameras really weren't that kind for years and years!
And it's stuff that I've been noticing from the much older movies as well, a few silent films, and some with the earliest attempts at movies with audio. What I'm wanting to research further is if the beauty expectations of today would have existed back then, if a size zero was the standard back then. It was closer to a 12 in the 1950s and I've seen examples of slightly thinner women from some movies that may have been made in the 20s.
I'm just wondering what was considered beautiful in the late 1800s because that could also prejudice the choices in photographs, like anybody a hundred years from now having access to a couple dozen magazines from today might assume we were all anorexic! I'm aware of historical factors and preferences of time periods and of researchers that can skew the data. But there is data like with cookbooks that our recipes from today have three and four times the numbers of calories of recipe books from a hundred years ago -- back when lard and rich, rich butter was a bit more of a norm! There's a lot of things to look at like that, where some of the folk tales are supposedly that everybody's grandparents and great grandparents would eat 12,000 calories a day and burn off 95% of it working the land or whatever. The cookbooks and various other things, like old family recipes, really aren't baring that out when you crunch the numbers on total number of calories.
Plus, as I'd previously observed, the food additives issue. Canada is supposed to have banned a certain type of plastic this week that was used as the liner for cans, for certain types of baby bottles, etc. because they concluded it was DANGEROUS.
That's not the only material currently in use that people have lobbied against for years. Splenda, Saccharine, aspartame, aluminum in antiperspirants and baking mixes, etc. The issue with the plastic included hormonal disruption in the body, fertility issues, and possibly cancers. Whether or not all of that's been a part of this week's news about it, I've been tracking the subject via a number of naturopathic doctors that have been speaking out against it and a couple of documentaries that have been shown about it on our local PBS television station. The local news here claimed that Canada was the first to ban it, but I was under the impression that the EU forbade the importation of it into their countries. Perhaps they allowed a homegrown variety of it, though, if the news report was accurate about Canada being the first to put their foot down about it. This is a very very interesting subject when you look into it.
This subject of the hormonal issues being caused by food additives and even hormone injections into various products and animals is like every other subject where you'll have those that'll blow it off on one extreme with an opposite extreme of chicken littles, but plenty in the so-called middle ground advising caution and further investigation and perhaps limiting one's exposure to inorganic foods.
