Looking Back Always Reveal the Patterns

Public Forum
1

I love to look back at old advertising campaigns and one I looked into more is sugar in the 1970s.

The sugar industry funded research that was used to promote sugar as:

  • quick energy
  • appetite-controlling
  • diet-friendly
  • perfectly fine as long as calories were counted

Low-fat foods filled supermarket shelves, and many of them were packed with sugar and marketed as healthy and slimming.

These aren’t exaggerations but slogans that dominated at the time:

  • “Sugar gives you energy — without weighing you down.”

  • “A little sugar helps the medicine go down.”

  • “For quick energy, sugar can’t be beat.”

  • “Snack smart, stay slim.”

Many “diet” yogurts, cereals, and snacks from this period contained more sugar than dessert foods, but the absence of fat earned them a health pass.

:thinking: Why This Still Matters

Why I love to look back at marketing campaigns from years ago is to see how narratives are built:

This includes what gets blamed, what is ignored and how long it takes science to catch up.

Curious to hear your thoughts, do you remember the ads in this era firsthand, or what do you see parallels with today?

2

I agree, it is indeed fun to look at the old advertising and see the social impact and what we clearly know now as false statements made by industries like the sugar industry.

The World War 2 era had a number of interesting developments as a result of the war. Some of the television advertising was promoting TV dinners as a means for convenience. Remember that women were being asked to participate in the war effort and prior to that it was more or less assumed that men go to work and women stay home and spend time in the kitchen. So, they targeted women with the TV dinner advertising.

The next thing that was interesting about WW2 was “Active Dry Yeast”. We needed to feed a lot of soldiers, and the invention of fast rising yeast helped us produce bread at a new unheard-of pace. So, the whole idea of eating sourdough bread, which takes time (but preprocesses the grain by both yeast and bacteria processes) got thrown by the wayside. That preprocessing is missing today, and one can speculate it may be one factor contributing to the widespread GI issues we have today, Celiac, etc.

The U.S. Army needed:

A yeast that could survive long-distance shipping

A yeast that didn’t require refrigeration

A yeast that soldiers could use in field kitchens

A yeast that stayed viable for months, not days

The Healing Power of Compressed Yeast | Science History Institute

Here’s a fun article someone wrote on the USDA, the source of our nutritional education in school: How the Dairy Industry Disguises Advertising as School Nutrition Education - Healing With Plants

3

Thanks for sharing these, both are campaigns I had missed.