This blog has been making the rounds on Facebook lately.  Unfortunately, the author makes sweeping generalizations that are not reflective of the whole story.

Why Your Grandparents Didn't Have Food Allergies But You Do

Author's claim 1) They ate seasonal real food.

Well, partially true. However, this neat little list shows that preserving food for the masses has already been popularized by the 1800's.  Our ancestors knew that salting/brining meats made them last much longer than their typical shelf life.  

One of the first large canned food factories, of the Weiss brothers in Csepel-Budapest (1885)

Author's claim 2) They didn’t diet, and play restrictive games with their body and metabolism. They ate food when food was available.

The blog's author would have you believe that "our grandparents did not fall victim to fad diets, food marketing...and other detrimental dieting habits that are popular today... because the marketing infrastructure didn't exist yet."

Totally.

I'm not sure where the author learned about advertising, but the above magazine advert from 1910 shows that unhealthy fad diets were certainly being marketed.

From painful corsets that squished you into the "ideal" shape to tapeworms to laxatives, crazy diets and the need to be "fashionable" have been around as long as the time of Caesar.

Author's claim 3) They cooked food at home, using traditional preparation methods from scratch.

Again, not totally true. Rural groups really had no choice, but for those living in the city, and most likely in the immigrant slums of the early 1900s, the factory lifestyle required that some foods were supplemented by commercially-made goods.  That is, if they could afford it.  Malnutrition was extremely common among the working/poor classes.

Author's claim 4) They didn’t eat GMO’s, food additives, stabilizers and thickeners.

Technically, we've been eating GMO's for hundreds of years.  Our ancestors long ago figured out that crossing one variety of apple with another led to a more robust harvest.  We all remember Mendel's peas, right? He was working on that in the 1850's.

Also, food safety became social health issue in the cities during early 1900's when it was discovered that butchers had been using things like sawdust and dyes to make sausage out of rancid meat. Sawdust was the stabilizer.  And our grandparents ate it.

Author's claim 5) They ate the whole animal that included mineral rich bone broths and organ meats.

I can't argue with this. Watching my grandfather's eyes light up when some calf's liver was placed in front of him is something I'll never forget. Neither will I ever recover from my Polish grandmother telling me what Czernina is.  <shudder>

Author's claim 6) They didn’t go to the doctor when they felt sick or take prescription medications. Doctor visits were saved for accidental injuries and life threatening illness.

Nope. They went to the doctor all the time. Penicillin wasn't even discovered until 1928 and keep in mind the late 19th Century is the beginning of the Snake Oil Salesman and Quack doctor era.  While something can be said for "farmer's medicine" and home remedies, it wasn't uncommon to get a doctor's opinion on everything from a baby's teething pain to a general feeling of malaise.

More often than not, women and children bore the brunt of misdiagnoses, quack treatments, and detrimental care.  It's pretty horrifying, actually.  Opium and cocaine were regularly introduced as treatments for croup, insomnia, depression, etc.

ad from the late 1800's

Women who displayed faintness, nervousness, sexual desire (too much or too little), insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in the abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, "a tendency to cause trouble" and almost 175 other symptoms were diagnosed with Female Hysteria.  The treatment included not only the ice-water douche to coax the "wandering womb" back into place but also to visit a doctor skilled in "genital manipulation."  Yep, you'd pay some dude to fingerbang you to orgasm in order to clear the "female semen" which had been causing you to disobey your husband. In extreme cases the woman would be forced into the asylum and undergo surgical hysterectomy.  Lysol was advertised as vaginal "fresher upper" for years.

Author's claim 7) They spent lots of time outside.

Some of our grandparents worked on farms from sunrise to sunset.  Some lived in filthy cities, worked in dangerous factories, and tried to sleep in rat-infested tenement apartments.  The focus on hyper-cleanliness wasn't there and thus they had the ability to build up natural immunities better than us.  Bathing more than once a week was wasteful, but swimming in the polluted river or lake was acceptable.  When I was a kid, I remember a cold going around the classroom maybe twice a year, but my friends' kids now seem to have at least once a month.  Asthma is on the rise in children but our grandparents weren't kept in hermetically sealed environments when they were kids - they breathed air filled with particulates constantly.

I'm not saying our grandparents had more or less food allergies than we do now.

What I am saying is that if you want to take a holistic approach to health, you also have to take a look at the WHOLE history.  It's possible that our grandparents also had food allergies, but with World Wars going on, the Depression, and all the other social issues of the early half of the 20th Century, but maybe they simply didn't have the time to pay attention to them.  Medicine has changed greatly over the last 150 years, and what we can now identify as a result of inflammation may once have been identified as something else.  Do the research and check your facts before you jump on someone's bandwagon.  Anyone remember how quick we were to use margarine because it was "better" for you than butter in the 80's?