Advertisement from Ladies’ World Magazine 1898 for Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Tonic, which contained 15 percent alcohol.
The reason why I liked exploring the 1910 Era is because by doing so I learn so much about this day and age and about human nature, by acquiring a better understanding of what things change about it and what things stay the same.
Take this advertisment for Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Tonic, a huge bestseller in Victorian times until the 20′s. The ad above is from 1898, when Edith Nicholson, of my novel in progress, Flo in the City based on the letters of http://www.tighsolas.ca/ would have been 14. This ad was aimed at mothers with their young daughters in mind: it says that these young girls can avoid embarrassing, painful, humiliating (my words) gynecological exams by taking the tonic.
I also have a brochure for the same product from the 20′s. There it is described as a beauty aid with this advice to women: get plenty of fresh air, and exercise and rest, drink lots of clean water, eat lots of fruits and vegetables, coarse bread, and take Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable tonic. Who can argue with that advice?
Now, just this morning I read an article from the New York Times,Healthy Aging with Nary a Supplement
aimed at aging Boomers, like me, claiming that there is little science to back the many exuberant claims of the supplements and nutrition industry; that in order to age healthily it is probably good to stay active and eat a Meditteranean style diet, with olive oil, fruits and veggies, fish and precious little meat. Oh, it is a good idea to take a calcium pill and vitamin D. Remember, everyone up North took cod liver oil in the winter. (And stay away from buzz words like anti-oxidant.)
Think about it! Think about all the advances in science in the past 100 years! Think about all the advances in science that happened in the last 100 seconds! To think we have come full circle with respect to COMMON SENSE about health and longevity.
A few years ago I visited Brockville, Ontario to participate in a Canadian Antiques Road Show practice sesssion. The event was held in one of those gracious old homes on the water. As I waited for the show to get on the road, so to speak, I learned that many of the huge homes on the water there were erected by men in the ‘pseudo pharma’ industry. As I understand it, the laws for selling medicinal products were tighter in the US, so the men worked out of Canada, but lived right across the water from the US for easy access. Hmm.
Now, I tend to eat a Mediterranean diet (and I PROMISE to start my exercise program THIS AFTERNOON!) but I also buy fish oil, and those super expensive de-tox greens that I drink, sometimes with Bentonite, believing the BS, because it suits me to believe it. (Then I hear that singing in a choir is excellent for your health. SINGING. Maybe that’s all we have to do to be healthy. Edith, a smoker who lived to 92, attended church all her life. People in the old days sang a lot.)
I know detoxing by eating greens and taking salt baths is probably a useless thing to do. Or the common sense meter in my brain knows it is a useless thing to do. But I also have a part of me that likes to believe in magic. (Don’t scoff. I know plenty of people with science training and they are no different. When it comes to diet, which is tied into self-esteem, even scientists cherry pick the facts, the only difference being they can defend their actions with ‘facts’. )
Ps. I just saw an advert for a new product: water with all the nutritional benefit of fruit and no calories. Are we all idiots?? Except the marketers of course. They know what they are doing. That NYT article claims that the goodness of fruit comes form the eating the entire ovary, so to speak, that the myriad health benefits are a by-product of some kind of synergy, not entirely understood.
Now, I eat tonnes of veggies, much more than I ate as a child and a wider variety of them, but the fruits for sale most of the year all taste SO BAD, I can hardly stomach them anymore. Frankenfruit. When I was a little girl, my parents had to lie to me to keep me from eating all the pears or apples or oranges. They said “You’ll get sick.” I never did. And those peaches, in season, I would eat them by the basketfuls.
(Actually, I recall one month when I was 14 when I stayed with a family friend in the Laurentians north of Montreal, away from my stressed out and unhappy parents, and I gorged on hamburgers (cooked super-rare) and peaches and spent the rest of the time outside in the woods playing with a boy a bit younger than me and we got along like soulmates (we were too young to be awkward or obnoxious ) and I NEVER felt better.
The recipe for health, one simple ingredient: happiness.
A mediterranean diet is terrific, but it’s better on the Mediterrean, I suspect. I’m going to Greece this year. For sure. Mamma Mia.
