While we’re on the subject of television ads I’ve got to pass one along that’s one of the most pernicious I’ve seen in a long time. This one, sent to me by a reader, has to take the cake for being subtle, yet misleading and dangerous.

Television and print advertisers have long feed on the desire of young women to be thin, and have probably caused untold numbers to purge their way to anorexia. Now comes Proctor & Gamble encouraging them to purge from the other end.

Their new ad campaign for Metamucil is ostensibly aimed at women who want to lower their cholesterol levels, but I doubt that many women who are the ages of and look like the models in the ads give a flip about their cholesterol levels. I suspect that the brains behind the ads figure that women will buy into the hype to make their insides beautiful (read: empty and thin), which will somehow translate into outer thinness.

What will they think of next to prey on the gullible.

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Unbelievable as it seems, this was a television commercial that ran in the early 1950s. We’ve come a long way, baby.

For those who didn’t grow up with it or those who did and just don’t remember, it’s hard to imagine how pervasive cigarette ads were in the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s.

Here America’s cuddliest family lights up. Is it any wonder that everyone smoked back then?

Sometimes it seems as if things change slowly. This old Flintstones clip shows just how much things have changed over the past generation.