Do we really have enough information about their daily habits, food availability, ability to survive, etc. from those times? Once you go before easy refrigeration and distribution, you get people dying from famine in bad years. It's going be to be hard to make any actionable lessons from those times that still apply now.

Or choose a country with a low obesity rate today and analyze that.

They didn't have that much food available.

So, eras of food scarcity?

I didn’t bring up the 1950s, you did. (???)

It is a useful and topical period to discuss in a thread about ubiquitous weight loss drug usage.