In its 157 years of publication, The Atlantic Monthly has been home to many transcendent ads in retrospect, but this page from the February 1922 issue is particularly prescient. It's for Fleischmann's yeast. Now, I know what you're thinking: We all know Fleischmann's makes a very fine yeast. Beyond that, what the copywriter is saying about food and health is, strangely, basically all that we still know today. Before we went through a century of highly-processed, low-carb, fat-free, infinite-shelf-life food-like creations, there was a movement that linked food to health in a comprehensive way.
If you substitute "fruits and vegetables" where it says "yeast," it's especially canny.
The Atlantic Monthly, February 1922
I'm not here to talk about yeast or to plug Fleischmann's yeast. Though, if you're looking for yeast, look no further than Fleischmann's yeast. For more than 140 years, recreational and professional bakers alike have trusted Fleischmann's yeast because its bakery scientists are committed to solutions for your baking success—just kidding. This is not an ad. Use whatever yeast you like. Or none at all.
It was in 1826 that French physician and father of the Paleo and low-carb diets Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote:
Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es.
That is, "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are." Brillat-Savarin's quote is commonly appropriated today by medical practitioners and diet-book hawks, especially those who identify as integrative or holistic. It's also cited as the origin of the adage "You are what you eat," which wasn't literally found in English until nutritionist Victor Lindlahr began selling a weight-loss diet based on catabolic foodsin the 1920s. Lindlahr was quoted in a 1923 ad for United Meat Markets:
Ninety percent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap foodstuffs. You are what you eat.
In 1923 the U.S. life expectancy was 57 years. Diseases known today were unknown then. So it's hard to measure the accuracy of Lindlahr's 90 percent estimate, but if you add a slight caveat and say "at least partly influenced" instead of "caused," it's probably about right. But many doctors didn't appreciate the integral role of diet in health and mortality until decades later. As long as you weren't obese or diabetic—diabetes being an exponentially rarer condition in the early 20th century—your relationship with food was generally beyond medical reproach. In 1993 the study "Actual Causes of Death in the United States" put diet high on the list, and the anti-junk-food movement crescendoed around that time. Only now are many practitioners seriously incorporating dietary modification to address conditions from depression to asthma.
The yeast that Fleischmann's sold, and still sells, is the same type as any yeast commonly used by brewers or bakers, Saccharomyces cerevisiae. It's a unicellular fungus that turns sugar into carbon dioxide and alcohol, and delicious yeasty flavor. Medical literature no longer recommends eating it straight, as this ad suggested at the end. I don't believe it ever did, or that "your body tissues crave it." Especially not 2 or 3 cakes per day.
Aim high, Fleischmann's did. For better or worse, the average person's relationship with yeast never realized the intimate potential envisioned here. But the appeal to health through food did. The idea that nutrition is much more than "As long as you're not obese, you're eating well," that really what we eat affects everything, is only 92 years later becoming a central tenet of preventive medicine, behavioral health, and happiness.
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