“GET SLIM QUICK”

Evening Star, Issue 19454, 12 January 1927, Page 9

“GET SLIM QUICK”

PERILOUS FASHION CULT American physicians (writes a New Yterk correspondent) are alarmed at the cult of “ get-slim-quick,” which is now sweeping over the United States, causing countless women to risk their health in mad efforts to reshape themselves so timt they may have a boyish figure. Men are not largely affected by the craze, their desire to “ reduce ” being a physical one, and as such more normal. But women are acting under the influence of fashion. The motives behind the cult offer a problem which the psychologists have not solved, but, whatever the reasons, it made an instantaneous appeal to American femininity, and nostrums of all kinds, guaranteed to reduce weight and make the slim slimmer, have had amazing sales throughout the country. The results of this disregard of the laws of hygiene and physical nature aro now so increasingly apparent to physicians as to cause danger warnings to be issued by medical practitioners everywhere. Doctors aro constantly being called in to women who are suffering from nervous complaints, and even mental derangements, which the physicians trace to badly advised weight reduction. THE AA’OMAN OF FORTY. “ Slow suicide,” the doctors are calling the activities of great numbers of women who insist on being thin at any cost. Dr Eugene Lyman Fiske, medical director of the Life Extension Institute of New York, who has joined with scores of other protesting physicians, says: “The desire of a woman of forty

to have her figure conform to fifteen years is running many women into tuberculosis, turning them into nervous wrecks. Ignorant and ill-advised attempts to got rid of flesh are destroying feminine beauty, too, so that women are defeating their own ends.” A New York woman physician, Dr Mary Halton, joins in the condemnation. Shesavs:

“ We need* concerted action by the medical societies to warn women. It will keep them from secretly trying the wrong means of reducing. I have many cases before me now of women who have been making martyrs of themselves. They starve and exercise and fret and spend hundreds of pounds, surreptitiously or brazenly, for anything that will burn the tissues off their bodies.” In Chicago Dr Carl Meyer, associate professor in surgery at North-western University, says; “ Women are grabbing at the first thing recommended to them to get thin in a hurry, and unscrupulous physicians are getting rich from the new fad of gland extracts. Practically all of the anti-fat preparations have a thyroid extract for a foundation, which should never bo given for anything except under the directions of a reputable physician. . THE BEST CURE. “It is over-action of the thyroid gland that causes goitre, and taking thyroid extract to get thin produces all the symptoms of goitre. The patient gets thin, but she becomes extremely nervous, and her heart is seriously affected. “ Over-dieting and oycr-exorcise are both dangerous. If women want to exchange good health for slim figures they will have no trouble finding someone to_ take their money Too late they will want to change hack. Women should stop drinking and over-eating, and should put aside their lazy habits.” Not only are mature women in the grip of the get-slim movement. American schoolgirls, who already have slim, normal figures, wish to make them thinner, so they refrain from eating nourishing foods, and in many cases collapse. Nevertheless, they are style leaders of the younger set.