White Rock beverages - How's your acid?

So here's a very brief ad that comes tumbling down the tunnel of time from 1937, only to flop on the floor and get stared at by us Future Dwellers. Why? A) Because we've (probably) never heard of the product and B) the health scare they're trying to use on us doesn't ring a bell, so it won't work on us.

Click for big.

Ah hah hah hah. A man is leaving his family to get a drink that tastes "keen". Well done, 1937. You're killing me. Okay, so White Rock used to be... err,..totally IS a beverage company that seems preoccupied with putting fizz in drinks of various kinds. Fair enough. But then there's the description of the drink "on the alkaline side". What exactly the eff?

Well turns out there actually can be an imbalance of acids and bases in the fluids of the body: "acidosis". But there's a different kind of acidosis for a number of illnesses that can result in too much acid in your inside regions - metabolic acidosis, respiratory acidosis, lactic acidosis, MELAS syndrome, Cytochrome C Oxidase Deficiency, etc. Just about the only one you've ever encountered is a temporary lactic acidosis after you work out. It's what makes your muscles sore, and it goes away in a day or so unless there's something really wrong.

So why would a basically normal guy be running off to get an alkaline drink? Because "alkaline" things like sodium bicarbonate counteract the effects of acid. It can help with indigestion and stuff like that. So, in 1937 or thereabouts, it was a bit of a thing to use the phrase "on the alkaline side" when choosing what to drink, as if there was a constant war in your body between acids and bases, and if you didn't keep them in balance by carefully drinking the right beverage, you would die and your corpse would melt a hole to the center of the Earth with all its acidy guts and stuff. Strange that you don't hear people talking about whether they "feel alkaline" or "acidy" these days. It;s also worth noting that you don't hear of people dropping dead in the street from a sudden assault of acidosis. Yes, it's a real illness, but if you have it, you'll know it, and you probably don't.

Ha ha, what a bunch of suckers those nineteen-thirty-seveners were. They would believe anything. Want a modern analog? Let's see. Which to choose? "Carbs versus protein" was so 2001. What's more current? I know. Gluten. A very tiny minority of people have a metabolic propblem called "celiac disease". If they eat gluten (commonly found in grains), it messes up their digestion and causes intestinal irritation. This leads to malnutrition, pain, and other illnesses. Celiac is hard to diagnose, but once you do, a drastic change in diet keeps symptoms under control. It's a tough diet to stay with but as my celiac-suffering brother says "it beats the alternative".

If your dog had celiac disease, your carpet
would definitely tell you.

So now, idiots with no real problems have decided wheat is the source of all their problems (which they obviously don't have or they'd be dealing with them instead of imagining they're sick), and they must "go gluten free". Surprisingly, this is great news, partly because I'm generally in favor of any strategy to remove money from dumb people, and gluten-free foods tend to be expensive, but mostly because marketers will listen to large groups of people whether they're idiots or not. So because of the gluten-free craze, actual celiac sufferers can walk into almost any grocery store and find a pretty good selection of food items to choose from. Of course, you can buy water proudly labeled as "gluten free". See, if you put "gluten free" on your product, you can increase sales, whether or not it's even possible to have, say, non-gluten-free beef, for example. Thank you, retards, for accidentally making life easier for those who actually have your imaginary adopted disease.


I predict that, in the future, so many bored stupid people will convince themselves they are amputees that it will lead to a boom in the prosthetics industry, making sophisticated cybernetic limb replacement affordable for everyone, including people who actually are missing a limb.