I personally think it's all about raising the bar and basically making the "perfect" physique a harder and harder (and specifically more and more expensive) goal to maintain.

As for who is more in shape, that all depends on how you look at it. If you take the entire male population back then and the entire male population today, they are more in shape. Obeisity and other disorders related to inactivity has been on the rise since the invention of fast food. However, if we were to limit it to the population of men who lead an active lifestyle in both time periods, I'd still say the men of then. Men today really aren't as healthy as we might think. To achieve todays standards of "perfection", one of the key aspects of for men to drop their body fat percentage to an extremely low amount. Futhermore, a lot of the nutritional suppliments that are frequently used will eventually kill your liver. No matter how you look on the outside, the guy with the liver always wins over the guy without. And as for being mentally stronger, I'm not sure what ewallace meant by that.

If we were to limit the population further to martial artists, I might think that men today are more in shape then men then. A significant amount of people who study martial arts over a long period of time are not the type of people to buckle under some absurd societal pressure to look "good". Of course, there are a lot of people out there who use martial arts to make themselves look better (like in the "coolness" sense) *cough cough* TKD *cough cough*, and it's more on the rise now than back in the 50s and 60s, but I'm mainly talking about serious martial artists.

Anywhos, I've babbled for long enough...