practices followed by your grandparents to preserve their surroundings, which are now forgotten?
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Answer:
They ate real food, prepared daily: Vegetables, fish, meat, fruit, bread from a baker or made at home. And they walked. A lot. Up and down stairs, to public transportation, to school, to shop for groceries. The overwhelming majority of them didn’t have cars. They didn’t buy frozen foods and pre-made meals (which didn’t exist); if they lived in apartment buildings, only the richest people had elevators: Everyone else took the stairs. The rise of car culture opened up certain lifestyle options, but it was terrible for overall health. Cars make it easy not to walk, say, half a mile to a minimart and back carrying maybe five pounds of groceries. That’s not a lot of exercise, but the overall effect is cumulative. And fast food was murderous: Cheap and high in salt, fat and calories, easy to eat on the (metaphorical) run, which encourages eating too much. Farmers and ranchers used to eat huge breakfasts, because they needed the calories to get them through hours of hard, calorie-burning manual labor. Now office workers eat big breakfasts (“most important meal of the day,” our grandparents told us) and then sit behind a desk all day. It’s a perfect storm of not good for us