July 1972: Rolling Stones Visit New York City; Everyone Skinny

I was watching a documentary about the Rolling Stones yesterday and it contained footage from the band's famous July 1972 visit to New York City and Madison Square Garden. I've seen the film clips before, but something immediately struck me yesterday that I had never noticed before: everyone was skinny.

Yes, the sex, drugs and rock n' roll kept Mick, Keith, Mick, Bill and Charlie thin, but I'm talking about everyone, even the innocent bystanders in the street scenes who represented nothing more than historical background.

The New York City policemen were uniformly thin as a rail, a fact I'll attribute to a lack of bullet-proof vests and a lot less food laden with bleached white flour, high fructose corn syrup, antibiotics, hormones, pesticides and genetically-engineered ingredients. (Click here to read a post I wrote two years ago about overweight policemen.)

I started watching more carefully and, for the next 20 minutes, counted only one person who was not thin. He was noticeably bigger than everyone else, but would be a dime a dozen in 2012, just 40 years later.

I am sure there are many factors to explain our collective weight gain, but I am convinced that our food supply and what we eat are prime players in the transformation.