Today’s Throwback Health Thursday is dedicated to the 1946 marketing campaign of Camel cigarettes when doctors were actually used to promote the habit of lighting up. I find this pretty shocking because this advert tells anyone looking at it back then, that smoking is perfectly okay because your doctor does it. Doctors who we look to for the correct health advice. It is these kinds of adverts that have played a role in making smoking what it is today; hard to phase out.
Camel were not the only brand to use doctors and health professionals to promote their cigarettes, as Old Gold Cigarettes once used the slogan; “Ask your dentist why Old Golds are better for the teeth.” Better for teeth?! They definitely are not because smoking is one of the leading causes of causing mouth cancer (the other being drinking alcohol).
Exceptional Marketing
But this seems to be the problem with marketing in general, the team hired to promote a brand will take snippets of information and use it to create many catchy sales pulling slogans. Not worrying too much about making sure they have presented hard facts. As many studies that were done back in the 1940’s were not done for long enough to actually rule out the long term negative health effects of a product to a persons health which can allow for these ‘errors’.
This happens still today; drugs are not tested for long enough with great marketing companies hired to spin incredible stories of how they claim to make you better. Whilst not enough natural remedies are tested for their benefits over using drugs that come with more nasty side effects simply because the financial interest isn’t there (and because it is hard to patent nature).
Learn From Our Mistakes
This old vintage smoking campaign should be used as a way to demonstrate that even the experts get good health advice wrong. And that as years go by, and as more people demand natural remedies, more research will be put into finding the benefits of natures pharmacy, and a lot of the current health advice we are given at present may end up to be wrong and outdated.
Just like in the 1970’s doctors and many health professionals were told to tell their patients that they must stop eating fat to avoid developing heart disease. This ended up being utter lies once a better conducted meta-analysis was carried out in 2009 on almost 350,000 people. Saturated fat isn’t your enemy! Trans fats and refined sugar are!
Manage Your Health Yourself
So, I don’t want to come across as a hater for all doctors and health professionals that practice conventional medicine as there are many great ones out their currently practising my favourite type of medicine, functional medicine. But my point here is to learn from old health adverts, appreciate that health advice will change and to become governors of our own health for the most part. And stop relying so much on the latest set of guidelines to tell us what to do with our health. You are the best person that knows what works for you after all!
