Remove the cause of your excessive stoutness, recover an irreproachable figure, youthful looks, and perfect health and strength.
Tweet
No, that heading is not the result of me swallowing an antique style guide. It's the title of an advert from 1910, marking the fact we've just racked up at least 100 years of obesity blather in the media. It's from a magazine called ‘The Quiver’, about Antipon which "removes all excess of subcutaneous fat" and any need "to put up with any hardships in the way of dietary restrictions".
The main text starts:
' “It’s all very well to say, ‘Remove the cause of your excessive stoutness’ – how am I to do it?” That is doubtless what many an impatient, stout reader will fretfully ask, remembering past experiences and innumerable failures. It is, alas, those fatal failures that make hardened sceptics who are loth to accept the most conclusive proofs that obesity can be cured – and cured permanently. '
And so it goes on for several more paragraphs. No hint that eating might have anything to do with overweight. Or lack of exercise. But there is a quick fix….. which isn’t so very last century. Quick fixes are still around today, still attractive to the audience in spite of better education, more information and more choice. But there are also more adverts, more pressures and more obesity.
“Doubting reader, it is infinitely easier and simpler to remove the cause of obesity …. The process is pleasant and quite harmless, and leaves you physically stronger, and mentally more alert and “fit” for work and pleasure than you ever were before, not to speak of the graceful, slender and well-knit figure which is the welcome result of the famous Antipon treatment when consistently followed.”
The advert comments ‘Whenever one sees a person who is painfully over stout one feels inclined to whisper discreetly “Antipon! Why don’t you take Antipon?” '
I don’t feel inclined to do anything of the sort, as it happens. Anyone who did then would surely have deserved a quick smack in their exquisite Edwardian hat, but there was a more genteel response available in the public domain at the time.
"It's rubbish, that's why."
In 1909, the year before this advert appeared the British Medical Association (admittedly in a spirit of professional protectionism) had published ‘Secret remedies: what they cost and what they contain’. Antipon was citric acid and red colouring, apparently.
“Antipon! Why don’t you take Antipon?” The BMA had the answer, in one - there's nothing in it.
