Food, Drink and Health Advertisements From the ‘Mad Men’ Era

Government nutrition guidelines, Lipitor for kids … after the two last posts, I’m afraid I may be inducing depression.  Since I need to spend tonight figuring out how Windows 7 managed to create a database connection error in my software, it seems like a good time to post something just for fun.  So here are some ads for food, drinks, and health products from a bygone era.

Ladies, this is why you need to take your vitamins.  I consider my wife a beautiful woman, but man, she’s never hotter than when she’s cleaning the house … especially when she puts on those old gray sweatpants of hers.  No vitamins, no energy, no housework, no sex appeal.

Well, that’s the downside of taking your vitamins and becoming a housework hottie:  you end up with a baby.  Thank goodness for beer.  (I’ve always thought the worst brand names for beer were Blatz and Schlitz.  They sound too much like beer’s after-effects.)

Sure, breast-feeding is better for the baby — especially after a few beers full of nourishing malt — but eventually you’ve got to wean them.  But parents, please:  don’t be stupid and give your kids Seven-Up.  If you want to hook them on sugar, give them a juice box instead.  I know juice boxes are good, because they’re available at my daughter’s school in the government-approved cafeteria.

So that baby grows up and goes to high school.  How do you ensure that she’s a happy, energetic, swingin’ teen?  Keep feeding her sugar.  Lots and lots of sugar.  High sugar consumption explains why today’s teens are in even better shape than this one.

And while your teen is at school, relax with the cigarette more doctors prefer.  (Honestly, can you believe some doctors back then were so stupid, they’d actually endorse cigarettes?!  Now they just put diabetics on high-carbohydrate diets and prescribe Lipitor to everyone whose cholesterol is over 200.)

It happens to so many of us … by the time the kids leave for college, we’re middle-aged and getting thick around the middle.  But thank goodness, it turns out sanitized tape worms will keep you slim.  They’re also easy to swallow and, as you see from the label, produce no ill effects.  (Clearly, that last claim is based on careful research conducted by Merck and Pfizer.) 

This may not seem like a health-related ad, but it is.  My wife gets up early with our girls and makes coffee, so when I wake up later, it’s just sitting there in the pot, all warm and delicious.  This makes me happy, and is thus good for my health.  On the other hand, if I ever expressed my displeasure with my wife’s coffee as shown above, I promise it would be very, very bad for my health.  Willie Nelson’s first wife once sewed him into a bedsheet while he was sleeping, then beat the daylights out of him with a broom stick.  I’d expect my wife to be at least that creative.

And finally, here’s one I think we can all agree is just as true now as it was 50 years ago.