This is What Keeps You Thin, Weak and Unfit, 1921

There is little that distinguishes the advertising of yesteryear from today so much as those products designed to fatten up the unbecomingly thin person. Enter Sargol, which claimed to overcome the “faulty food assimilation” keeping you thin, weak and unfit.

The British Medical Association’s “More Secret Remedies…” from 1912 reveals that the actual contents of Sargol pills differed widely from batch to batch, but mainly contained sugar, albumen and calcium.

Interestingly, Sargol was successfully taken to trial for fraud in the USA in 1917 on account of not doing what it claimed – although this evidently hadn’t deterred them four years later in the UK. However, the American version differed in that it mainly contained Saw Palmetto, a plant found in the south west of the US.

A thin person’s body is like a bone-dry sponge – eager and hungry for the fatty materials of which it is being robbed by the failure of the assimilative apparatus to take them from the food.

“There are thousands of men and women today distressed by excessive thinness, weak nerves and feeble stomachs, who, having tried no end of flesh-makers, foodfads, tonics, physical culture stunts, resign themselves to life-long skinniness, and imagine that nothing can ever give them flesh and strength.

Excessive thinness, often attended by nervous indigestion, is simply due to “mal-assimilation” in the vast majority of cases. Even if you feel comparatively swell, you cannot get fat if your digestive apparatus fails to “assimilate” the food you eat – food that now passes through your system as a waste, like unburned coal through an open fire-grate.

What thin folks require is a means of gently urging the assimilative functions of the stomach and intestines to extract the oils and fats from the regular daily food that is eaten, and pass them into the blood, where they can reach the starved, broken-down tissue cells and build them up.

You know that the human body is built of tissue cells and you must know that the only right way to gain flesh and strength is by replenishing the depleted tissue cells with more nourishing, fat-making elements. Is there anything better than the food Nature provides for that purpose?

A thin person’s body is like a bone-dry sponge – eager and hungry for the fatty materials of which it is being robbed by the failure of the assimilative apparatus to take them from the food.

The best way to overcome this sinful waste of flesh-building elements and to stop the leakage of fats is to use Sargol, the recently discovered regenerative force that is recommended so highly here and abroad. Take a little Sargol tablet with every meal and notice how quickly your food will make your cheeks fill out, and rolls of firm, healthy flesh are deposited over your body, covering each bony and projecting point.

All good chemists recommend and sell Sargol. Try it. It is inexpensive, easy to take, highly efficient and perfectly harmless.”