Friday 2 June 2017

6 HEALTH FADS FROM THE PAST THAT SOUND SERIOUSLY CRAZY NOW.

Miracle cures, health tonics, super foods—these sorts of cure-alls have always proved irresistible to Americans. Eager to adopt the next lifesaving physic, we’ve downed countless potions, brews, tonics and tablets in pursuit of longevity, fitness, beauty, happiness—or, preferably, all of the above. Some were relatively harmless and maybe even beneficial; others were downright dangerous. Here are some of the most fascinating—and terrifying—miracle remedies Americans have embraced.



Meat juice. (Really.)

“Dear Sir: I have been using your 'Meat Juice' on different cases in this Hospital. It has more than answered my expectations,” wrote Dr. Walter Reed to Mann S. Valentine on April 16, 1872. “I find that patients improve rapidly in appetite and strength under its administration. Of all the various preparations of Meat that I have met with and used, I consider yours by far the most serviceable.”
“It is par excellence the medicine food of the age,” agreed Dr. W.M. Brodie some months later, in February of 1873. “One lady has used a dozen bottles, and does not tire of it.”

For a time, Valentine’s Meat Juice, a patented bottled extract created by Mann S. Valentine, was the cure-all miracle tonic of the day. 
Valentine originally created it in 1870 for his sick wife, who lay ill and unable to eat for weeks. Obsessed with the thought that he could cure her if only he could create the perfect restorative drink, he devised a method to extract “the rich treasure stored and locked up in the body of the flesh” of raw meat and fed the resultant brew to his wife. She recovered, and Valentine decided to patent and bottle his creation.
With help from the testimony of doctors and some high-profile fans like President Garfield, it wasn’t long before scores of Americans—and plenty abroad as well—were swearing by its life-giving properties.  

Valentine’s famous Meat Juice was successful enough that Valentine made his fortune from it and became a prominent art and artifact collector, paving the way for a museum in his home of Richmond, Virginia. The concoction fell somewhat out of favor after it was associated with a famous murder case, when Florence Maybrick used it to conceal arsenic to murder her husband in 1889 (though the Valentine Meat Juice Company itself remained in business until 1986). Which brings us to our next “remedy”:

Arsenic

Taking arsenic topically and internally was reportedly great for the complexion—possibly because it constricted capillaries and killed red blood cells. Marketed under several brand names, arsenic products were touted as perfectly safe if taken in small amounts, although its popularity as a health strengthener didn’t last long, for obvious reasons.  


Rattlesnake oil

Chinese immigrants to the US in the late 1800s brought with them oil of the Chinese watersnake, full of omega-3s, which they would rub on joints to help with inflammation.  That, of course, gave Americans the brilliant idea to start making and selling their own so-called rattlesnake oil (since Chinese water snakes are hard to come by on this continent) to unsuspecting consumers. When the most famous of these was discovered to contain nothing even related to a snake, the term became shorthand for a sham cure.



Lentil flour

A dry powder meant to be mixed with water or milk and marketed as a cure-all health food, the maker of Ervalenta asserted that “This agreeable, nutritious, farinaceous food radically cures habitual constipation, indigestion, piles, and all diseases originating in a disordered state of the bowels and digestive organs, which it speedily restores to their natural vigour and action, without the aid of medicine, or any other artificial means.”
Too bad it was basically a little cornstarch mixed with lentil flour. (The latter might make one mean protein-packed pasta, but it's not a miracle worker!)


Cocaine

After discovering natives of South America chewing coca leaves for their stimulant effect, Americans quickly began synthesizing coca extracts for medicinal use. Widely touted as a tonic for the nerves and a cure for all sorts of ailments like aches and pains, indigestion, hay fever, fatigue, and melancholy, it was added to wine, toothache drops, lozenges and other medicines, and, of course, Coca-Cola’s original recipe. It began to fall out of favor when addiction surged in the early 1900s.

Radioactive water




When radiation was discovered, radioactive water became all the rage—marketed as safe, of course, because slightly radioactive water naturally occurs in many hot springs around the world. It fell out of favor when Eben Byers, a prominent industrialist and socialite at the time, died from radiation sickness after a 3 bottle-a-day habit of a popular brand, Radithor. He reportedly had to be buried in a lead-lined coffin.



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