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Often the criticism of vintage ads focuses on their inherent sexism, racism, or other displays of social prejudices, which we find laughable today, despite their continued presence. But what about ads that steered consumers into dangerous territory, espousing outmoded scientific evidence or misleading half-truths to convince people that appallingly toxic products, or even deadly ones, were actually good for them?
While some faulty campaigns were merely the victims of evolving scientific knowledge, many blatantly ignored facts in their race for the dollar, using so-called experts to promote products terrible for public health, like cigarettes. Revered professionals like doctors and scientists routinely told us precisely the wrong things to do, as they are likely still doing today.
“Diet Hint: Sugar might just be the willpower you need to curb your appetite.”
We may take comfort in feeling we’re far beyond the bad old days of deceptive advertising, but our current obesity epidemic suggests exactly the opposite: We’ve simply traded effects like lung cancer and emphysema for diabetes and heart disease.
So here’s a look back at 10 colossally painful advertisements, which make you wonder: What modern “health” products – vitamin water, granola bars, acai berry supplements – might look a little more evil in the future?
1. Junk Food, Now Fortified with Vitamins and Minerals
Disguising empty calories with healthful nutritional values has been a trope of the processed food world ever since vitamins were first discovered in the 1910s. This 1942 poster for “Vitamin Donuts” may be a little hard to swallow today, but Ovaltine’s reputation as a health drink is still being disputed, a powerful testament to simple brand positioning. But let’s be real, we’re talking about powdered chocolate milk made by Nestlé, the company who brought us such healthy foods as Butterfinger candy bars and Häagen-Dazs ice cream.
The Ovaltine ad from 1947 still boggles the mind with its display of so many nutritional perks packed into two glasses of powdered milk, and seems eerily similar to the many supposed benefits contained in drinks like Vitamin Water or Gatorade. In reality, even the benefits of ordinary vitamin supplements are now being questioned, despite the fact that around half of American adults take them regularly.
2. Let Them Eat Lead
The most heartbreaking part of this 1923 brochure is its emphasis on kids having fun with the whole “Lead Family” of products, whose presence in everything from their nursery walls to their windup toys made young children particularly susceptible to its dangers. Combined with lead paint’s seductively sweet flavor, putting kids in environments literally covered with the stuff was a recipe for disaster.
In fact, the effects of lead poisoning (brain damage, seizures, hypertension, etc.) were known long before the Consumer Product Safety Commission finally banned them in 1977; the industry had simply refused to acknowledge them. An article by Jack Lewis published in the EPA Journal in 1985 covers lead’s history as an additive and poison, and how we’ve consistently downplayed its adverse effects. Lewis writes:
“The Romans were aware that lead could cause serious health problems, even madness and death. However, they were so fond of its diverse uses that they minimized the hazards it posed. Romans of yesteryear, like Americans of today, equated limited exposure to lead with limited risk.”
3. 7-Up is for Babies
Not only were sugary soft-drinks great for adults, but sodas like 7-Up used to help babies grow up strong and fit, or so these ads from 1955 and 1953 would have you believe. That’s pretty disturbing, considering that childhood obesity, linked arm-in-arm with massive soda intake, is shortening our youngest generation’s lifespan. The high amount of refined sugar in soda has also been shown to be particularly harmful for children.
Today it seems crazy to show a baby drinking a soda, as the tide finally turns against the sugary drinks: School districts across the nation have removed soda machines from their schools and New York City’s Board of Health has proposed a ban on over-sized sodas. However, many adults today opt to serve kids “healthy” fruit juice, which may be just as bad, despite its deceptive nutritional marketing.
4. Cigarettes: Just What the Doctor Ordered
Camel’s campaign featuring doctor endorsements is probably the most familiar instance of false advertising, seen here in an ad from 1948. Yet almost every cigarette company twisted science to support its products, including Chesterfield’s 1953 ads, which rephrased expert findings to show that smoking had “no adverse effect.” Long after 1950, when Morton Levin published his definitive study linking smoking to lung cancer, experts continued to imply that there were other factors causing cancer and lung disease.
Though the industry has been seriously weakened over the past 20 years, primarily by government regulation, Big Tobacco is still issuing misleading health information in an attempt to reap a profit.
5. Feminine Hygiene: The Original Home Wrecker
Long before Lysol was reinvented as the caustic household cleaner we know today, the same substance was basically promoted for use as a feminine hygiene product. These Lysol ads from 1948 tout the internal use of poisonous Lysol as a marriage saver. To sum up the message: if you weren’t so dirty down there, he would love you more.
In a time when speaking about sex was even more frowned upon than today, a whole spectrum of sexual products, including vibrators and contraceptives, was marketed with campaigns focusing on their dubious health benefits for women.
6. Plastics, Plastics, Everywhere
Suffocating babies in Cellophane! A bunch of infants tied up in clear cellophane packaging is pretty frightening to modern viewers, but at the time, these ads were just plain cute. When these Du Pont Cellophane ads came out in 1954, things like plastic grocery bags weren’t a ubiquitous part of American culture. Only after plastic bags became widespread during the 1970s did their strangulating qualities become frighteningly clear.
7. The Meat Mystery
In post-World War II America, eating more red meat seemed like a great way to keep yourself “in trim,” at least according to these two ads, from 1956 and 1946. Like other food fads, this campaign was orchestrated by the American Meat Institute, a lobbying group that is still working to improve public and political opinion toward its products. Maybe that’s why almost nobody in America knows that nutritionists generally recommend only 2-3 servings of red meat per week. And don’t get the experts started on sodium nitrite in processed meat.
We now know that eating too much meat increases the risk of heart disease and cancer. Yet industry trade groups are still creating food trends to spur sales or combat negative public stereotypes: Think of modern wonder-foods like agave nectar or chia seeds that seemed to appear from the heavens, as well as the bitterly argued corn syrup campaign.
8. Dieting? Try Sugar
In a time before the current widespread obesity epidemic, sugar companies wanted shoppers to believe that a sweet treat would somehow inspire you to eat less. These ads from 1969 coach readers to “have a soft drink before your main meal” or “snack on some candy an hour before lunch.” Their strange logic isn’t even backed by a company name, though the campaign does include a helpful mailing address for “Sugar Information.” Talk about creepy.
Now refined sugar is presented as the dieter’s enemy, and is thought to make you want to eat more rather than less.
9. Shock Your Way to Physical Perfection
In 1922, “Violet Rays” were said to cure pretty much anything that ailed you. This Vi-Rex device plugged into a light socket so users could give themselves home shock-treatments, which would supposedly make you “vital, compelling, and magnetic.” Various recalls and lawsuits erupted throughout the U.S., forcing the FDA to finally prohibit their manufacture. The last batch of Violet Ray products was seized in 1951.
Just Google “light therapy” to find a range of new infrared devices whose claims to prevent everything from aging to anxiety sound pretty darn familiar.
10. DDT For You and Me
This ad for “Penn Salt Chemicals” from 1947 shows a range of dangerous applications for now-illegal DDT, from agricultural sprays to household pesticides. Particularly disturbing is the image of a mother and infant, above the caption stating that DDT “helps make healthier, more comfortable homes.” Not quite.
While effective in eliminating dangerous mosquitoes that carry malaria, DDT also has a variety of hazardous effects: Especially among young children, the chemical has been shown to damage the nervous, immune, endocrine, and neurological systems, not to mention its devastating influence on the natural environment. The spread of DDT across mid-century America is mirrored today by the success of Monsanto (one of the companies that originally manufactured DDT) in placing its genetically modified products on store shelves before researchers have a full understanding of their scientific impact.
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The Lysol ads are actually not really about cleanliness – because of the Comstock Act having made advertising for contraceptives illegal, they’re actually veiled language about using it for birth control. Notice the language “uncertainty,” removing “germs” and “mucous matter” (semen), “another you full of doubts, misgivings, inhibitions” (worries about getting pregnant).
Re: DDT When I was growing up in Memphis, the city and county routinely sprayed with DDT to kill mosquitoes to prevent Malaria and Yellow-fever. I’m still alive and relatively healthy at 72, so evidently neither DDT nor mosquito-borne disease have killed me. DDT powder was also used routinely to kill body lice by application directly on the body.
I don’t dispute the environmental hazards of DDT nor the fact that the ban on its use is proper; however I note thet thousands of people in the “third-world” countries are dying yearly from Malaria due to the lack of an effective pesticide.
The author has obviously no idea about DDT which has saved millions of lifes. The benefit and risk analysis for DDT is very complex and there are no simple answers. The author then goes on and links the DDT boogieman to genetic engineering about which the author has probably even less of a clue.
So he should not complain about the abuse of Science by the tobacco industry if he is obviosuly quite keen to push his own agendas the same way.
“made by Nestlé, the company who brought us such healthy foods as Butterfinger candy bars and Häagen-Dazs ice cream.” In all fairness, Nestlé also makes a lot of baby formula, which is fairly similar to Ovaltine and rather healthy. It’s not like they just powdered some Butterfinger leftovers and put them in a can in an effort to make kids fat. I’m not trying to say that Ovaltine should me marketed like it was/is, but it’s not like Nestlé is, say, Hershey’s and totally incapable of making nutritious products.
@Allen Helt,
Mosquitoes quickly build up resistance to DDT. It’s not effective in killing mosquitoes anyway – and this is the reason most “third-world” countries no longer use it.
@ Allen Helt
Pesticides will never be more than a small part of the solution to the malaria epidemic. The parasite and their mosquito hosts are too broadly distributed; vast rural areas would need to be covered at great expense. That’s assuming you could come up with a pesticide that was cheap and mosquito specific, and to which resistance would not develop quickly.
Judiciously applied, pesticides can help manage mosquito populations, but behavioural adaptation, awareness and access to health care are the real keys to reducing the toll taken by malaria. Money spent developing a pesticide would be far better spent on these issues or vaccine development.
People are NOT dying in the developing world for lack of DDT, or other pesticides. Its a myth spread by right-wing thinktanks that DDT was banned by environmentalists. The truth is that DDT has *never* been banned for use in disease vector control (although there have been some laws restricting its use in agriculture)
The reason DDT isn’t used much, is because mosquitos developed resistance to it. Nothing to do with hippies wanting people to die of Malaria. Agriculture use of DDT accelerates the rate at which the mosquitos become resistant, so banning its use in agriculture actually *helps* fight malaria.
The scientist who first raised awareness of DDT, Rachel Carson, never advocated banning it – and indeed pointed out that restricting it to disease vector control would make it more effective due to the resistance problem. Of course, you will never hear this from the likes of the Cato Institute…
As I show in my book, “Sweet Stuff,” The Sugar lobby has long fought the artificial, non-nutritive sweetener manufacturers, and the ads shown here are part of that campaign.
Here’s a one you missed, a 1962 ad for Humble Oil (now ExxonMobil) boasting: “Each day Humble supplies enough oil to melt 7 million tons of glacier!”
http://grist.org/article/2009-11-18-oil-enough-energy-to-melt-glaciers/
Chip Endales above: Google Nestlé’s history of pushing their ‘healthy’ baby formula in Africa. It’s really one of the most disgusting things of the last century.
to what Chip Endales says about Nestlé. I believe they also have bottled water.
didn’t anyone ever do anything right? How wise we are when it is not our own actions being questioned.
Arthur Godfrey stopped plugging cigarettes when his physicians convinced him that they probably caused his lung cancer. He lost a lung in 1959, and took radiation treatments to cure the cancer that had metastisized to his aorta. Eventually, he died from emphysema, another cigarette-related disease (although some claimed the emphysema came from the radiation treatments).
By the way, malaria is way down. At peak DDT use in 1959 and 1960, 500 million people got malaria world wide, and 4 million died from it. Today, infections have been cut in half, to 250 million, and deaths are under 1 million a reduction of 75% — mostly without DDT.
Except that light therapy has valid uses. Not violet rays, whatever that was meant to be, but light that simulates daylight can help people who are depressed or insomniac and sun lamps are regularly used in latitudes where the sun sets for Winter and doesn’t come back until Spring to ward off depression and to keep people from becoming vitamin D deficient.
In the 40′s and 50′s when I was growing up, we ate meat, fat, eggs, cheese, cream, etc. You know what? Few people were obese. In the 40′s, people would pay to see the fat lady in the sideshow. Today you can see her for free on the street.
We knew than that when you started putting on weight, you cut out the potatoes and bread. The diet plate in a restaurant was a hamburger patty on lettuce with cottage cheese. Neither were low fat because it hadn’t been invented.
Then the government came along and vilified fat and sanctified grains. We got fatter. The government cut fat more and increased the grains. We got fatter and sicker. They told us meat was bad, fat was bad, grains were good. They came up with the idea, seemingly logical, that eating fat causes weight gain. Maybe the meat and dairy people were right all along.
I agree with Jeanne White completely. You here over and over about someone who has a heart attack while jogging but “he ate a no fat, almost vegetarian diet” while pointing out how fair it is that someone else eats eggs and bacon every day for breakfast and is well into their 80′s. Instead of stepping back and going hmmm, maybe there is a relation, people just shrug and say it is a mystery of fate, while eating low fat, but high calorie snacks and gaining weight. All those low fat products make up for the loss of flavour from reducing fat by adding in a ton more sugar.
One of the best lines I’ve heard was someone asking “when did we start valuing food as nutritious based on what wasn’t in it instead of what is?” Candies like licorice and twizzlers are still promoted as a healthy diet food because they are fat free.
Thank god I live in today’s politically correct world. I wouldn’t have any idea of how many things I should feel guilty about.
Great list, but I was expecting also some “Radium is good for you” ads :
http://toxipedia.org/display/toxipedia/Radium
or http://www.dissident-media.org/infonucleaire/rad_water_n5.jpg
What a brilliant post! Love it!
DeDe
vintageandflea.com
FYI, I use to mix tang and milk together when I was kid because I love Creamsicles — however, one time it made me throw up so I stopped
7 Up was used to help calm down upset stomachs as well as a drink. It was probably more healthy then as a product than now, as it was made with real sugar, not high frutose corn syrup like it is now. That is one of the main things making people fat….try a pepsi or coke made with real sugar and taste the difference! and remember 12 oz was a large drink then.
I remember Disney cartoon character wall paper in my bedroom, next to my crib and bed. I used to trace my fingers over their outlines. My parents later told me it was treatedwith DDT…excellent mosquito protection for their child.
Doctors and Nutritionists today are actually considering the idea that there are “Essential Fatty Acid” that people should get a minimum amount of, just like the 4 Essential Amino Acids that we need to be healthy. The idea that saturated fat is bad for you is waning; all starting when Trans-Fats were differentiated from other, possibly healthy saturated fats. Experts suggest that incidence of arthritis and other degenerative joint diseases could be cut in half if we were to increase our levels of saturated and unsaturated fats intake to what they were in the 1940′s. Fat is also a much healthier way to get calories than by carbohydrates, hence the reason your body stores extra calories as fat. I’m not saying go crazy on fats, but maybe we need to delegate the fat-free and low fat versions of food to the deep freezer of history, and just go back to eating natural food in the form that it comes in, fat and all. Leave the 1% and skim milk in the store coolers, and pick up 2% or homogenized milk instead. If nothing else, your taste buds will thank you.
You know, well before the introduction of refined sugar to our diets, human beings used to eat a healthy diet just by eating what tasted good. In general, things that taste good to us are good for us (sugar-based products excepted); maybe we should start shopping for taste again, instead of for “artificially healthy” (or at least healthy, according to what the current diet gurus say is healthy)
Another, later to prove hazardous advert, was the word “ASBESTOS” printed on the theater curtain pulled down by Ruby Keeler and Dick Powell in a closing scene of the 1933 Movie “42nd Street”. Asbestos was widely used as a fire retardant at that time and in the film was possibly meant to indicate ‘Hot Stuff’ going on behind the curtain after it was drawn down… Cheers, Bandicute.
P.S. I’m unable to attach an image of the curtain to this message…
What you revisionist peoples are forgetting is that the real reason DDT was banned was it proved to be an environmental hazard that nearly killed off the bald eagle and many other birds by making their shells too thin to produce viable offspring. That’s the only reason!
Another reason to love 7-Up then is it was made from lithiated water which apparently has a citrusy flavor…lithium is a mood enhancer and highly toxic so they of course don’t include it anymore…but lacing sodas with lithium and cocaine extracts must have guaranteed plenty of repeat customers. “Pep” indeed. Now all we can hope for is caffeine highs..
Cellophane isn’t actually plastic. It’s wood cellulose, and it’s biodegradable, compostable, and ecofriendly.
And, like other commenters, I’m dismayed at the insinuation that meat is actually bad for you (although “factory farmed” meat is bad for EVERYONE, don’t get me wrong).
But I really just decided to comment because, seriously? You’re seriously suggesting that granola bars and an acai fruit supplement could be the next lead or cigarettes? That chia seeds, which have been around for thousands of years in certain cultures, are some marketing ploy by the large corporations?
Really now.
Surely you could have found better examples. Let me start for you: xylitol, every prescription drug ever made, Crystal Light, artificial sweeteners, GMO foods, and foods using nanotech. There. Fixed that for you.
I play this game all the time with my friends. Look around, what are your grandchildren going to make fun of? Organic milk that causes cancer? Or Tom’s that cause flat feet! We’re right to question everything but keep in mind that sometimes we know no better.
And don’t forget a little drop of cocaine…
http://i421.photobucket.com/albums/pp297/gwensharp/Soc%20Images/Picture5-1.jpg
I found the look-back interesting. I’m sure that in the future there will most certainly be some advertising blunders that would keep in the spirit of the article. As someone mentioned previously, sometimes they just don’t know… However… SOMETIMES they DO!!! Keep yourself abreast. After all we only know what they want us to know!
“We now know that eating too much meat increases the risk of heart disease and cancer.”
We “know” that? How can we know for certain that high consumption of red meat causes heart disease and cancer when the conclusion is based on the most tenuous sort of science, epidemiological studies?
Actually, what we know is that excessive consumption of omega-6 industrial seed oils is associated with increased risk of obesity, diabetes, and many non-communicable diseases. http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolutionary-psychiatry/201103/your-brain-omega-3
We also know that the recommendation to reduce fat intake in general and saturated fat in particular was a mistake. Here’s a history lesson: http://jhmas.oxfordjournals.org/content/63/2/139.full
Great article showing how our perceptions of different products changes over time.
What’s important to remember, and the article mentions this, is that our perceptions continually change as we increase our understanding of the health effects of various items in our life.
The consumption of red meat is one item on the list that is questionable in this day and age as the realization that the conventional wisdom of our society may not be backed up by scientific evidence, but the inclusion of that item on the list just goes to show what a though-provoking article this is.
lets not forget that cocaine in coca cola
Ignorance is the driver for this kind of dangerous information..fortunately we are not that ignorant still…we have new dangerous things to promote!!
IMO
Meat is definitely not the -only- reason why we have become fat and diseased, however….
We are a corn-fed nation. Our ancestors were raised on grass fed beef and free range chickens. Today, corn is in almost everything we consume. Cattle are not naturally equipped to eat large quantities of corn. It may make the meat more tender but it weakens and distresses the animal terribly, leading to medicating them. Same with chicken. The price of a large juicy chicken breast comes at a terrible cost to the animal – they grow so fast on an unnatural(for them) diet that their slower growing bones cannot keep up with their weight gain and so many die by being smothered under their own weight.
We are what we eat. Meat has changed and that’s why we have changed.
The so called ill effects of DDT have long since been refuted. As have the claims that it was bad for the environment.
Banning DDT had directly led to the deaths of 100′s of millions around the world.
Ditto your complaints about GMOs. The risks are well understood and nowhere near as bad as the anti-crowd has made them out to be.
I’m assuming that “violet” means “ultraviolet,” which of course can be very dangerous at the wrong levels. (Since it comes from sunlight, there’s no healthy way to avoid it altogether.) But to link it to infrared is just foolish. Infrared is the other end of the spectrum and is completely harmless. Those lights that heat french fries in McDonald’s are infrared; microwaves are infrared, but are shielded not because of solid evidence but “just in case” and because of plain heat issues (which is why ordinary ovens are covered).
I can’t speak to efficacy of DDT, but the purported dangers to birds, the environment, and people- anything, really- has long been disproven.
Nachum Says:
I can’t speak to efficacy of DDT, but the purported dangers to birds, the environment, and people- anything, really- has long been disproven.
Not true at all. Many studies still show effects on humans and the environment.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDT
Just go paleo and stay away from all processed food, grains, legumes etc. I made the switch one year ago and have never felt healthier.
The version of the “DDT is Good For Me” ad that you have posted has been altered from the original. The logo at the bottom should read “Penn Salt”, rather than “Killing Salt”. I replaced the original logo using Photoshop. Thank you hogarth! We just updated our article. -Eds
Plenty of comments about the poor aspect of this article, but I’ll add my two cents.
For the donut cereal, please keep in mind that the vast majority of cereal still sold today is nutritionally no better than the donut cereal. Eating cookies in the morning with a multi-vitamin is just as good (perhaps even better depending on the cookie). Highly refined wheat / corn / etc is only very slightly better for you than table sugar. Speaking of which…
The eating sugar to help keep thin isn’t really any different than most of the nonsense you read today. Body weight is simply a matter of calories in and calories out…but the trick of not over-eating is far from a simple subject that any ad from yesteryear or today is going to accurately represent. The advice most people are given about eating a good breakfast comes from industry…most scientists not involved in the breakfast industry agree that breakfast is a great meal to skip.
Cellophane is not plastic. Really not much to add to this one…your commentary around this is simply wrong.
The red meat issue was completely debunked recently by a large Harvard study (and actually has been debunked by a number of old studies that don’t make it to the front-page of your local paper courtesy of the large farming corporations that dwarf the meat lobby) that pointed out that most nutritional studies didn’t differentiate between highly processed meats and just plain red meats. When they studied the meats separately, not only is red meat absolutely not an issue, but is actually very good for you.
Best wishes with digging deeper into this area, and I look forward to more informed articles in the future.