Ironized Yeast for Keira Knightley

keryx linked a while back to an article about finding an advertisement in a 1933 issue of Woman's World magazine for Ironized Yeast, a "special quick way to put pounds on fast":

"Now there's no need to have people calling you 'skinny,' and losing all your chances of making and keeping friends. Here's a new, easy treatment that is giving thousands healthy flesh and attractive curves--in just a few weeks! . . .

Skinniness is a serious danger. Authorities warn that skinny, anemic, nervous people are far more liable to serious infections and fatal wasting disease than the strong, well-built person. So begin at once to get back the rich blood and healthy flesh you need. Do it before it is too late!"

I think the endless advertisements for diet programs these days would be significantly less annoying if there were any advertisements mixed in with them that promised to help people gain weight. At least then there'd be some acknowledgment that there at least is some such thing as excessive skinniness, and of people who want to gain weight and have trouble doing so. It still wouldn't be ideal; ideally, there'd be no advertisements claiming that either weighing a lot or weighing very little would cost you "all your chances of making and keeping friends" or signify that you must automatically possess certain personality traits ("skinny, anemic, nervous people"). But it would be less bad than the current situation, I think. Currently, to the extent that our culture has any concept of such a thing as "too skinny" at all, the concept is only of anorexic women who wish they were even skinnier. There's no concept at all of the fact that gaining weight can be as difficult as losing it, or that anyone anywhere would ever even want to gain weight.

Meanwhile, bay_bus_rider linked today to photographs of nightmarishly anorexic Keira Knightley, which I do not recommend that you click on unless you have a very strong stomach, because I am not exaggerating when I say that those photographs are likely to make you feel physically nauseated and to give you nightmares. Anyway, I'd been meaning for a while to link to the Ironized Yeast thing, and now Keira Knightley has provided an absolutely perfect illustration of what excessive skinniness exists around us, and thus of how absurd it is for us to be endlessly surrounded with advertisements promising only to help people lose weight, and never to help people gain any.