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Back when food was made from scratch from real ingredients (even desserts), there was high fat and carb contents, but it was "real", not processed, fats and carbs that constituted the majority of the food, and Americans had occupations and homemaker responsibilities that required a lot more physical activity. Plus, about the middle of the 20th century, a homemade meal, for example, consisted of:

Pot Roast

Mashed Potatoes

Carrots and Peas

Made-from-Scratch Biscuits

Homemade Apple Pie (o.k., now I'm hungry :))

Since then, we have gradually programmed kids and adults to think that fast food, Doritos, Hostess Cakes, and corn-sweetened beverages are far superior to the good foods of the past, and that eating at fast food places is a mark of societal achievment, with the help from Madison Avenue marketers telling us "We deserve a Break Today". This attitude has even permeated into the lower-income population of the U.S., because 50+ years ago poor people in this country had to buy the bare nutritional essentials to survive, and they had to make everything from scratch. The lower income population now have more access to processed 'glop', and they believe that eating processed fast foods is cheaper than eating healthier foods. Also, they may have seen that eating at fast food places and dining on high sugar and fatty foods was being done by the middle and upper income populations, so they decided to emulate this behavior, not realizing that being poor is hard, but being poor plus overweight and unhealthy is even harder.

a homemade meal, for example, consisted of: Pot Roast Mashed Potatoes Carrots and Peas Made-from-Scratch Biscuits Homemade Apple Pie

It would be interesting to run comparison of the sugar and fat content of this meal to a Big Mac, fries and coke.

I'm sure the Big Mac is worse, but I suspect not as much worse as a lot of people today think. The "old-style" diets, as in your post, were largely meat and potatoes. Not exactly what we think of today as a healthy diet.