kiz, I am not sure home cooked meals are necessarily any better or worse than prepared stuff. Fat is fat where ever you find it and healthy is healthy. You can not cook and eat very healthy. I used to have a girlfriend who loved to cook and we both put on quite some weight because she cooked delicious stuff. Although I can cook pretty good, I am too lazy to cook when I am alone so I hardly ever do. This means I eat much healthier because I eat a lot of cereals, fruits, and things like that.
She, like many people, wanted to find the magic trick which would allow her to eat all she wanted and be thin. I would put a bowl of cereal in front of her and she’d complain it tasted like cardboard. There’s the trick: eat stuff which tastes like cardboard and you are much less prone to overeat.
I think the gist of how the changing times have affected this issue is much wider in scope. Earlier generations grew up in harder times. There was much more discipline and kids learnt self-discipline very early. Self discipline is essential for success in anything. People with self discipline are the ones that still succeed. If you have self discipline you can use it to succeed in many things and this is one of them.
We have grown in a world that taught us we are the center and reason of the universe. That the others should adapt to us. That we deserve things without earning them. A person who grew up in the depression had it easier to do what he felt he should do over what he felt like doing, because he had grown with that self imposed discipline. We do not have that so we feel we have the right to be satisfied and not satisfying our desires makes us very unhappy. This is true when it comes to food, marriage or whatever. We are a spoiled lot.