So much has changed since the prime of the boomer generation, it’s hard to rank the most confounding misconceptions it once laboured under – but there’s one small but telling standout, and it’s not as trivial as it might sound.
That is, the optimal size of the female posterior. For decades the object of cruel jokes, the naturally well-rounded bum is now not only fashionable but is expanding its realm. The new idyll is to cultivate one even bigger than one’s natural physiology would ordinarily supply.
Anyone who scoffed at the trend to get cheek implants and do gym exercises to maximise the gluteus maximus rather than reduce it must now concede defeat.
Last month, department store Marks & Spencers introduced its own brand of bottom-plumping padded undergarments – as definitive a signal as you can get that a niche preoccupation has gone ballistically mainstream.
It would be churlish not to thank reality TV’s Kardashian family for restoring the hourglass figure to respectability after decades of persecution. When the extremely slender profile became vogueish in the 1920s, comparatively few people had the wherewithal to follow fashion, so little harm was done.
But curves became a faux pas with the more prosperous 50s and their wasp waists and “reducing” diets, and the 60s and 70s waif and hippy chic. The more athletic, beachy 80s supermodels were allowed a discernible bustline but no model with a real-life-sized bottom would have made it into so much as a knitting pattern leaflet for the next few decades.
Today’s embracing of curves is a belated fillip to a simple fact of human evolution, which gave women a variously curved template for survival and reproduction. Alas, based on aesthetics rather than health, the current butt-bigging era mightn’t last – more bittersweetness for generations who endured decades of over-upholstered shame.
But now, an even more devastating betrayal is emerging, based on science rather than the optimal contouring of one’s leggings. Low-fat milk is not necessarily better for us than full-fat.
Again, retail tells the story. British supermarkets are having to progressively increase their orders for full-fat milk and yoghurt. Much of the new demand derives from a recent TikTok craze but scientists are for once not telling its followers to stop being so silly.
There have been inklings of dietary fat’s reprieve for many years, particularly as scientists realised gut bacteria’s importance to health. Now, the nutritional findings flowing out of the British-based Zoe programme, the widest continual nutritional trial in history, seem every month to contradict much of what experts have told people since the 1980s low-fat era.
Obesity experts then gave us two unequivocal messages they have never resiled from: fat was the prime enemy and calories were an infallible guide to whether we would lose or gain weight.
Zoe now tells us that full-fat dairy is better for the gut biome and can help retard rather than hasten fat storage in the body. As it is more satiating, it may lead to less weight gain than low-fat, which is typically more highly sugared and additive-thickened.
Zoe and other reputable studies also rebut the “calories in, calories out” dogma. How much fat the body stores and uses is governed by factors such as hormones, activity, stress, sleep and dietary content.
Yet again, the only wisdom left standing is our nanas’: moderation in all things but a little bit of what you fancy does you good. Our grans were also sceptical of “bought” rather than cooked-from-scratch food, meaning they innately knew to spurn ultra-processed food.
Plus, appalled we hadn’t better things to think about, they tersely refused to humour our fat-bottom anxieties.
