This doesn't correlate with my lived experience. I remember almost everything except yogurt and milk coming in glass containers. My family and friends strongly preferred soda from bottles than cans, and we were lower middle class and we didn't use plastic 2 liters very often. (And several families drank raw milk - I know, the horror).
Nearly the entire condiments aisle is now filled with soybean oil where it nearly didn't exist before. And it was a really big deal when McDonald's went away from using animal fat to cook fries in. Now pretty much nothing is cooked in oil from animal fat. This is certainly a change from pretty much the entire history of human food.
Various researchers are pointing out that glyphosate covers nearly the entire surface of the Earth and is found in nearly everything, including clothing and linens. It was not nearly as widespread in the '70s and '80s.
Exposure to various radio and now microwave (5G) frequencies was practically zero compared to what we began being exposed to in the '90s and is now pretty much everywhere.
Personally, I draw the major distinctions in video game technologies with the PlayStation and another later with Xbox Live! (the latter was really most popular with the Xbox 360). Previous technologies we would fairly quickly hit a point where it just got boring so we would go outside and play, most especially pre-NES. While more of a behavior factor, it is very important on pretty much every level except diet that we engaged in physical activity, social interaction, and sunlight.
As a side note, when I've tried to research it I've found that Gen X is experiencing a higher mortality rate than previous generations in pretty much every category. This correlates with my lived experience.
Glyphosate is far less harmful than any herbicide that was in use before it. That’s why researchers have such a hard time linking it to diseases except in farmers who spray literal metric tons of the stuff. But glyphosate is a red herring - the real nasty shit that is harmful are not herbicides, but pesticides. And what was in use in 70s and 80s is nightmare fuel.
That "nasty shit" wasn't in my sheets and underwear and didn't coat the surface of the Earth. The issues related to claims can be equally attributed to the massive funding of even journals, themselves, plus a nearly unlimited budget to fight everything in courts and out-of-court settlements with gag orders - nearly every dirty trick a corporation can do has been done to protect the producers of glyphosate.
Something that has become clear to me over the years is that when we go one by one through all of the things that were not present in my youth, it is impossible that any of these things could be a cause of anything bad because the scientifically literate people tell me so.
Yet, here we are, with each generation following the Baby Boomers seeing higher mortality (and many other negative medical condition) rates than the previous generations. I guess it's just something else that we can't detect.
What? We’re fat, stressed, eating terribly and not able to afford our doctors enough.
FTFA: “Nearly half of newly diagnosed cancers in the U.S.—42 percent, according to ACS researchers—are avoidable with a combination of prevention measures, such as eating a healthy diet and maintaining a healthy body weight.”
It’s unfortunately more acceptable to let a family member ramble in the corner about glyphosphate than to tell them to get on a treadmill and/or take Ozempic. (Which may be the right answer. Perhaps the damage, physically and educationally, is already done. I don’t know.)
> with each generation following the Baby Boomers seeing higher mortality
Not true among the educated [1]. (An effect that persists even after adjusting for income.)
The entire decline you cite is among people who don’t have a college degree.
