149. Today in 1920s Turkey: 7 May 1925 (Vitamin Cigars for Healthy Children)

(Photograph and caption, Resimli Dünya or “Illustrated World,” 7 May 1925, no. 2, page 7.)

Türkçe
Bremen şehrinde sigara fabrikalarından biri Brezilya purolarına “Vitamin” isminde, süt ve şeker gibi mevad-ı gıdaiyenin yerini tutan bir madde ilave etmiştir. Resmini derç ettiğimiz çocuk, "vitaminli" sigara içtiği için bir hafta zarfında üç kilo artmıştır.

English
In one of the cigarette factories in the city of Bremen a substance called “Vitamin” that will take the place of basic foods like milk and sugar has been added to their Brazilian cigars. The child whose picture we have published gained three kilos in a week after smoking "vitamin" cigars.

Comments:
This is a prime example of some of the misinformation about cigarettes that was rampant in the early twentieth century. These are the days of “doctor prescribed” cigarettes and other atrocious marketing schemes aimed at convincing every possible demographic to purchase and use the addictive substance. Far from describing it as harmful, products like “vitamin-enhanced” cigars and cigarettes were claimed by their manufacturers to have added health benefits. In the case of the present example, the weekly digest Resimli Dünya is not advertising a product per se, but has included it as a “curiosity” plucked from the headlines of world news or a German advertisement.

This “story” consists of a photograph of a precocious toddler seated in a stroller while holding a large cigar in his mouth with a brief caption below. The text reveals that the industrious German city of Bremen had a factory that was putting supplemental substances called “vitamins” in their Brazilian cigars and that these “vitamin cigars” helped a child gain weight and grow, which was a desirable thing back then when it was more common for babies to died of malnourishment or disease. The text continuously places he word “vitamin” in quotations, suggesting that the very concept of vitamins and nutrients, in the modern sense of how we understand them, was a novel concept for the Turkish readership of the 1920s. Incidentally, according to a study from 2015 Bremen and northern Germany still have the highest percentage of smokers and thus smoking-related deaths to this day. To be sure cigarettes and tobacco products continue to claim about 7.1 million lives worldwide annually, vitamins or no vitamins.

(Entire page, Resimli Dünya or “Illustrated World,” 7 May 1925, no. 2, page 7.)