April 4, 2011 • 15 mins
Before the 1920s, it was considered unseemly for women to smoke. However, as cigarette makers realized they were missing half of the potential market, they attempted to convince women that smoking was related to women's liberation movements.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to step Mom? Never told
you from House Towards dot com? Hold on, welcome to podcast.
This is Molly and then Kristen Kristen. Today's topic is
(00:21):
women and smoking cigarettes. Women and cigarettes, and uh, there
was this really big Surgeon General support in two thousand
one that highlighted the fact that of American women smoked cigarettes.
And it's kind of interesting just because a mere one
hundred years ago, that number would probably would have been
like point four percent. Yeah, it would have been really small,
(00:43):
because the only people that smoked from about the eighteen
you know, from you know, until about nineteen twenties, the
nineteen twenties, the only people smoked in public were prostitutes,
and well, the only women who smoked in public. Because
may I point to a New York Times article in
nineteen o one which warned that women's smoking of cigarettes
was quote growing to be a menace in this country.
(01:06):
And then in nineteen o four, a cop stopped a
car on Fifth Avenue because one of the passengers, a woman,
was smoking inside. It was that deplorable. And then we
fast forward even to nineteen nineteen to a New York
Times article quoting a man saying, I hate to see
women smoking. Apart from the moral reason, they really don't
(01:28):
know how to smoke. One woman smokes, smoking one cigarette
at a dinner table will stir up more smoke than
a whole table full of men's smoking cigars. Women can't
do anything, and certainly not smoked cigarettes. That last part
was my parapet So, yeah, women who smoked in public,
we're we're loose, we're morally questionable. Men smoked as a
very male activity because you had your pipes, your cigars,
(01:50):
all these things that women were too delicate to handle. Um,
and and it was really you know, it would have
just been unseemly for a woman to be seen smoking
a cigarette. But then, but then the tobacco companies realized that, hey,
we are missing out on half of our potential market share,
(02:12):
that's right, and so we have really great advertising campaigns
to thank for women's smoking. Hence our question of the day.
We're women tricked into smoking, And you know, we don't
want to say that. You know, the decision to pick
up the cigarette was anyone but the woman's you know,
Obviously you've got to take some responsibility for we're not
saying women were tricked and you know, the lighter was
lit for them and they stuck cigarettes in their mouth. Obviously,
(02:34):
any any ad campaign, we make our own decisions. But
some pretty great ads were made to entice women to smoke,
starting in nine uh, when Lucky Strike put out the
campaign reach for Lucky instead of a sweet. And so
this is the very first time in which smoking is
linked as this weight control tool. Uh. You know, women
wanted to be slim, they wanted to fit into their cute,
(02:56):
little flapp addresses. So they're saying, hey, instead of eating chocolate,
just who you know, keeps the weight off. Yeah. And
before then women, attractive women had been used in tobacco marketing,
but it was to attract men. Right. They go from
this position of using women to entice the men to
creating women that other women are going to want to
(03:16):
be like. So they're gonna want to be skinny like
the models. Hence the Lucky Strike Act. But also same time,
we've got going on stuff about women's liberation, the women's movement.
World War One had sent women into the workplace for
the first time. So women had gotten that little taste
of independence. So they took advantage of that and made
this independent woman who did smoke. And what they did
(03:38):
in nineteen nine was a guy named ebra Burne's so
called father of modern public relations, decided to send a
whole bunch of these so called independent women down the
streets of New York on Easter Sunday, smoking in public, right,
and they referred to their cigarettes as torches of freedom
to really drive home the point of hey, ladies, we
(04:00):
are liberated. And you know how we demonstrate how liberated
we are public We smoke a cigarette just like the
men do. Yeah, we take up this tool of the men.
We throw off this inequality and we will smoke in public.
We will not deal with any of these men in
the New York Times saying that we can't do it.
We are gonna do it. And you know, we'll go
in to workplaces and we'll do everything we've got to
do to be equal and uh and it worked really well. Yeah.
(04:23):
And then I think that the ad campaigns surrounding women
and cigarettes are interesting because on you you do have
either focus on body image or on liberation. And it's
somehow all like worked beautifully it. Did you know, I
thought that Virginia slim stuff would be kind of the
first stuff where feminism would be tied in with cigarette smoking.
(04:45):
But now they're they're going at it from way back
in the twenties, and uh, they continue obviously to use
these aspirational figures, either the pretty woman that we all
want to be or the enlightened modern moment you all
want to be, and that does culminate in that add
for Virginia Slims. You've come a long way, baby, And
people say this is just one of the best ads
(05:05):
ever because feminism is is rolling up second way of feminism.
People are, you know, it's it's it's prime time to
appeal to a modern woman with this kind of slogan
and sell her a cigarette especially made for her. Yeah,
because in the meantime, cigarette companies had done a great
job with getting film stars to smoke, getting them free cigarettes.
(05:28):
And if you watch films from the thirties, forties, fifties,
all the leading ladies, almost all of them are always smoking.
People are smoking left and right. Um. But then yeah,
with the with Virginia Slims, we have more of the
rise of these specifically female like capris and Misties and
Virginia Slims cigarettes that are just for women. Yeah, in
(05:50):
a hundred and twenty years, we went from prostitutes smoking
those being the only one who smoked in public to
cigarettes being specifically female and uh and you know, a
sign of enlightenment and freedom and all this. And what's
interesting is this doesn't end obviously, any good campaign kind
of keeps going on with this aspirational marketing of you know,
you want to be this person, you want to be
(06:11):
thin um. And one really interesting thing that happened is,
you know, we've talked about how feminism can be kind
of a dirty word in this day and age. Christen
like a lot of people don't identify with it anymore.
It means something different than it might have met some
women in the sixties and seventies. And Virginius Slims has
had the same problem with that kind of image this
You've come a long way, baby. They found in the
nineties that didn't appeal to their target buyer anymore, and
(06:34):
they needed to kind of, uh lose that strident feminist
tone and take a more empowering tone that didn't you know,
rub people the wrong way. Yeah, because their markets you're
actually dropped with the decline of I guess, like you said,
the popularity or the acceptance of the term feminism and
(06:54):
the idea of feminism. But then in two thousand seven,
are J. Reynolds came out with a new women targeted cigarette,
the Camel Number nine, which were obviously geared towards women
because the camel on the cover was pink. They had
it had teal piping on it. Even the piping around
(07:15):
the filters on the cigarettes were pink. Like I don't
want to I don't want to sound like a stereotypical girl,
but I don't smoke. And even I thought those cigarettes
were pretty, so I mean, you know, they definitely appealed
to that kind of feminine demographic. But you know, this
has been a very US centric look at how cigarettes
have been marketed. And one of the most interesting things
(07:35):
that you found, christ and the kind of spurred the
whole podcast, is that as countries around the world developed
more and try and model themselves in some ways after
the US as a developed country, that's when women start smoking. Right.
If you look globally at the gender gap in smoking
taken as a whole, five times more men smoke than
women do. But when you break it down country by country,
(07:58):
that gap starts to close depending on how industrialized the
nation is. So with the US, the gender gap between
men and women who smoke is pretty pretty slim, about
roughly as many men and women smoke in the US.
But then when you head to very underdeveloped countries, far
more men will smoke than women. So there's this analysis
(08:18):
of seventy four countries and then it found that UM
men are five times more likely to smoke than women
in countries with lower rates of female empowerments, such such
as China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Uganda. But then
as the countries will begin to become more um gender
equal in the workplace, with more women getting out of
(08:39):
the homes and getting into the workplace, they start to
smoke more. And they link it back to this idea
of cigarettes targeting women with this message of female empowerment. True,
and it's you know, it's the same thing. It's not
in the twenties and the seventies, they'll go into these
countries and say, hey, you know, in countries where women
work like you do, they smoke. They you know, they
(09:00):
have a hard day and then they smoke a cigarette,
and so that torches a freedom idea is sort of
being exported around the world with development, which is so
weird but um interesting and I guess, you know, not
a great thing to export around the world because there
is evidence that smoking cigarettes affects women in more negative
ways than it does men. Yeah, the World Health Organization,
(09:23):
just for a quick overview, called cigarettes one of the
biggest public health threats the world has ever faced. The
annual death toll around the world that's linked to tobacco
is more than five million, and it's actually rising and
could reach eight million by thirty unless smoking stops. Because
when you if you were to put um smoking related
(09:46):
deaths on a on a pie chart, it is it
is only risen in recent decades as the women had
started smoking. Smoking became more acceptable in the twenties and thirties.
So as they age and they've been smoking for years,
they're developing and physy uh uh, and heart problems and
lung cancer, and lung cancer is actually a bigger killer
of women in the United States than breast cancer. That's right.
(10:09):
And there was a really good article in the New
York Times about chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which was thought
of as this men's disease because it was the men
who were smoking for so long and having uh this
mix of emphysema and bronchitis. But now women are are
showing up with those symptoms more. And a really interesting
study out of Norway showed that UM, in cases where
(10:30):
the level the symptoms of COPD were equal equally bad,
the men had smoked for more years than the women,
so women didn't have to smoke as long to have
a severe as a fair case as men of the
cop D. And in men and women who had smoked
the same amount of time, the women had more, much
more severe cases of COPD. UM, like Kristen said, lung
(10:50):
cancer is a big deal. I mean, it's it's hard
to think of any disease in which smoking is not
a risk factor these days. Um. And there's evidence that
women have a harder time quitting, which is a good
reason never to start. And um, you know that doesn't
even touch on reproductive factors and the dangers that come
if you smoke. Called pregnant right, um and just hitting
touching back on the issue of quitting. Doctors think that
(11:14):
since women are more prone to depression than men, and
since with people who are trying to quit smoking, relapse
often happens with some type of emotional trigger. You get
extremely stressed out, you want to reach for a cigarette
because that's when you're crutch in the past, and women
might have a harder time grappling with those emotionally triggered urges, right,
(11:36):
So they're actually doing some kind of interesting research about
ways that they can complement the traditional patch or or
you know, gum that you might have for women, so
they get a little bit more of their needs met
on that emotional side that will keep them from a
relapse when they're trying to quip. But one thing to
keep in mind is that most people who smoke start
when they are teenagers. Um, and of girls in high
(12:01):
school smoke, which is more than the American adult women
who are smoking, so clearly have it start young. Well,
you know, another thing that the two thousand one Surgeon
General report that I mentioned earlier found was that women,
those girls you mentioned in high school that do you
start smoking, tend to overestimate how many other people smoke.
(12:21):
So I think one reason why it was kind of
cool to highlight the advertising is so you know, if
you're a teenage girl out there and you see some
ad in a Cosmopolitan magazine or something like that that
shows the cool girls smoking it, it really is not
probably as widespread a trend as you might imagine. But
I have just to close out a bit of trivia
(12:42):
for this is. I threw this trivia out actually last
night to a friend. It's my favorite bit of trivia.
I'm probably gonna keep tossing it out strangers. So in
nineteen seventy one, the very last television commercial four cigarettes
before it was outlawed aired and it was for the
brand Virginia's Limbs. And what famous female cartoon character used
(13:08):
to smoke to shill for Winston brand cigarettes Molly? That
was Wilma Flintstone. Yes, so I guess what we can
take from that is that Bedrock was a very egalitarian society,
since that tends to be a prerequisite for women to
smoke as much as money, you know, and Fred probably
kept woman pretty stressed out. I have a bet, you know,
there you go, So a little a little cigarette trivia
to close things out, And if you would like to
(13:30):
send us trivia or thoughts or anything related to this episode,
you can email us at Mom's stuff at house stuff
works dot com. And I have an email here from Jennifer.
It's about the vitamin A podcast, and she has one
exception to sort of the position we took on vitamins.
She writes, I have been a vegetarian for fourteen years.
(13:51):
When I was a freshman in college, I started to
notice that I was just so tired all the time.
I slept ten to eleven hours a day and still
had to force myself out of bed. When I went
to the doctor, they told me that I was seriously anemic.
This is common in women, especially in vegetarians. So my
mom gave me an unlimited budget for buying iron rich foods,
and I learned about other foods to combine them with
to optimize the iron absorption. However, even with the perfect diet,
(14:12):
I needed iron supplements to keep from slipping back into anemia.
Now that I am older, I still maintain a healthy
iron rich diet as much as I can without eating meat.
But if I go off iron supplements for several months,
I start to notice them getting lethargic, shorter breadth, and
a blood test will show I am anemic again. I
suppose I could solve this by just eating a good
old steak, but I just can't do it, so for me,
iron vitems. Iron vitamins are essential for a healthy lifestyle,
(14:36):
and many vegetarians may not even realize they are anemic
and should get tested annually by their doctor. So thanks
for that, Jennifer. I've got an email here from David
and this is in response to our podcast on abortion.
He writes, the one thing that you did not cover
in the podcast is the effect on men. If you
do a Google search, you'll find books, groups, retreats that
can help with the abortion process. I'm just putting it
(14:58):
out there as an an who's had to deal with this.
I hope that others can find the help they need
as well. And that is a great point that David
brings up. Abortion certainly affects men just like well as
it does affect women too. So if you have any
thoughts to send our way mom Stuff and how Stuff
Works dot Com, head over to Facebook too. We can
get in touch with you there and you can interact
(15:20):
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(15:43):
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on iTunes, Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand
twelve Camray. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to step Mom? Never told
you from House Towards dot com? Hold on, welcome to podcast.
This is Molly and then Kristen Kristen. Today's topic is
(00:21):
women and smoking cigarettes. Women and cigarettes, and uh, there
was this really big Surgeon General support in two thousand
one that highlighted the fact that of American women smoked cigarettes.
And it's kind of interesting just because a mere one
hundred years ago, that number would probably would have been
like point four percent. Yeah, it would have been really small,
(00:43):
because the only people that smoked from about the eighteen
you know, from you know, until about nineteen twenties, the
nineteen twenties, the only people smoked in public were prostitutes,
and well, the only women who smoked in public. Because
may I point to a New York Times article in
nineteen o one which warned that women's smoking of cigarettes
was quote growing to be a menace in this country.
(01:06):
And then in nineteen o four, a cop stopped a
car on Fifth Avenue because one of the passengers, a woman,
was smoking inside. It was that deplorable. And then we
fast forward even to nineteen nineteen to a New York
Times article quoting a man saying, I hate to see
women smoking. Apart from the moral reason, they really don't
(01:28):
know how to smoke. One woman smokes, smoking one cigarette
at a dinner table will stir up more smoke than
a whole table full of men's smoking cigars. Women can't
do anything, and certainly not smoked cigarettes. That last part
was my parapet So, yeah, women who smoked in public,
we're we're loose, we're morally questionable. Men smoked as a
very male activity because you had your pipes, your cigars,
(01:50):
all these things that women were too delicate to handle. Um,
and and it was really you know, it would have
just been unseemly for a woman to be seen smoking
a cigarette. But then, but then the tobacco companies realized that, hey,
we are missing out on half of our potential market share,
(02:12):
that's right, and so we have really great advertising campaigns
to thank for women's smoking. Hence our question of the day.
We're women tricked into smoking, And you know, we don't
want to say that. You know, the decision to pick
up the cigarette was anyone but the woman's you know,
Obviously you've got to take some responsibility for we're not
saying women were tricked and you know, the lighter was
lit for them and they stuck cigarettes in their mouth. Obviously,
(02:34):
any any ad campaign, we make our own decisions. But
some pretty great ads were made to entice women to smoke,
starting in nine uh, when Lucky Strike put out the
campaign reach for Lucky instead of a sweet. And so
this is the very first time in which smoking is
linked as this weight control tool. Uh. You know, women
wanted to be slim, they wanted to fit into their cute,
(02:56):
little flapp addresses. So they're saying, hey, instead of eating chocolate,
just who you know, keeps the weight off. Yeah. And
before then women, attractive women had been used in tobacco marketing,
but it was to attract men. Right. They go from
this position of using women to entice the men to
creating women that other women are going to want to
(03:16):
be like. So they're gonna want to be skinny like
the models. Hence the Lucky Strike Act. But also same time,
we've got going on stuff about women's liberation, the women's movement.
World War One had sent women into the workplace for
the first time. So women had gotten that little taste
of independence. So they took advantage of that and made
this independent woman who did smoke. And what they did
(03:38):
in nineteen nine was a guy named ebra Burne's so
called father of modern public relations, decided to send a
whole bunch of these so called independent women down the
streets of New York on Easter Sunday, smoking in public, right,
and they referred to their cigarettes as torches of freedom
to really drive home the point of hey, ladies, we
(04:00):
are liberated. And you know how we demonstrate how liberated
we are public We smoke a cigarette just like the
men do. Yeah, we take up this tool of the men.
We throw off this inequality and we will smoke in public.
We will not deal with any of these men in
the New York Times saying that we can't do it.
We are gonna do it. And you know, we'll go
in to workplaces and we'll do everything we've got to
do to be equal and uh and it worked really well. Yeah.
(04:23):
And then I think that the ad campaigns surrounding women
and cigarettes are interesting because on you you do have
either focus on body image or on liberation. And it's
somehow all like worked beautifully it. Did you know, I
thought that Virginia slim stuff would be kind of the
first stuff where feminism would be tied in with cigarette smoking.
(04:45):
But now they're they're going at it from way back
in the twenties, and uh, they continue obviously to use
these aspirational figures, either the pretty woman that we all
want to be or the enlightened modern moment you all
want to be, and that does culminate in that add
for Virginia Slims. You've come a long way, baby, And
people say this is just one of the best ads
(05:05):
ever because feminism is is rolling up second way of feminism.
People are, you know, it's it's it's prime time to
appeal to a modern woman with this kind of slogan
and sell her a cigarette especially made for her. Yeah,
because in the meantime, cigarette companies had done a great
job with getting film stars to smoke, getting them free cigarettes.
(05:28):
And if you watch films from the thirties, forties, fifties,
all the leading ladies, almost all of them are always smoking.
People are smoking left and right. Um. But then yeah,
with the with Virginia Slims, we have more of the
rise of these specifically female like capris and Misties and
Virginia Slims cigarettes that are just for women. Yeah, in
(05:50):
a hundred and twenty years, we went from prostitutes smoking
those being the only one who smoked in public to
cigarettes being specifically female and uh and you know, a
sign of enlightenment and freedom and all this. And what's
interesting is this doesn't end obviously, any good campaign kind
of keeps going on with this aspirational marketing of you know,
you want to be this person, you want to be
(06:11):
thin um. And one really interesting thing that happened is,
you know, we've talked about how feminism can be kind
of a dirty word in this day and age. Christen
like a lot of people don't identify with it anymore.
It means something different than it might have met some
women in the sixties and seventies. And Virginius Slims has
had the same problem with that kind of image this
You've come a long way, baby. They found in the
nineties that didn't appeal to their target buyer anymore, and
(06:34):
they needed to kind of, uh lose that strident feminist
tone and take a more empowering tone that didn't you know,
rub people the wrong way. Yeah, because their markets you're
actually dropped with the decline of I guess, like you said,
the popularity or the acceptance of the term feminism and
(06:54):
the idea of feminism. But then in two thousand seven,
are J. Reynolds came out with a new women targeted cigarette,
the Camel Number nine, which were obviously geared towards women
because the camel on the cover was pink. They had
it had teal piping on it. Even the piping around
(07:15):
the filters on the cigarettes were pink. Like I don't
want to I don't want to sound like a stereotypical girl,
but I don't smoke. And even I thought those cigarettes
were pretty, so I mean, you know, they definitely appealed
to that kind of feminine demographic. But you know, this
has been a very US centric look at how cigarettes
have been marketed. And one of the most interesting things
(07:35):
that you found, christ and the kind of spurred the
whole podcast, is that as countries around the world developed
more and try and model themselves in some ways after
the US as a developed country, that's when women start smoking. Right.
If you look globally at the gender gap in smoking
taken as a whole, five times more men smoke than
women do. But when you break it down country by country,
(07:58):
that gap starts to close depending on how industrialized the
nation is. So with the US, the gender gap between
men and women who smoke is pretty pretty slim, about
roughly as many men and women smoke in the US.
But then when you head to very underdeveloped countries, far
more men will smoke than women. So there's this analysis
(08:18):
of seventy four countries and then it found that UM
men are five times more likely to smoke than women
in countries with lower rates of female empowerments, such such
as China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Uganda. But then
as the countries will begin to become more um gender
equal in the workplace, with more women getting out of
(08:39):
the homes and getting into the workplace, they start to
smoke more. And they link it back to this idea
of cigarettes targeting women with this message of female empowerment. True,
and it's you know, it's the same thing. It's not
in the twenties and the seventies, they'll go into these
countries and say, hey, you know, in countries where women
work like you do, they smoke. They you know, they
(09:00):
have a hard day and then they smoke a cigarette,
and so that torches a freedom idea is sort of
being exported around the world with development, which is so
weird but um interesting and I guess, you know, not
a great thing to export around the world because there
is evidence that smoking cigarettes affects women in more negative
ways than it does men. Yeah, the World Health Organization,
(09:23):
just for a quick overview, called cigarettes one of the
biggest public health threats the world has ever faced. The
annual death toll around the world that's linked to tobacco
is more than five million, and it's actually rising and
could reach eight million by thirty unless smoking stops. Because
when you if you were to put um smoking related
(09:46):
deaths on a on a pie chart, it is it
is only risen in recent decades as the women had
started smoking. Smoking became more acceptable in the twenties and thirties.
So as they age and they've been smoking for years,
they're developing and physy uh uh, and heart problems and
lung cancer, and lung cancer is actually a bigger killer
of women in the United States than breast cancer. That's right.
(10:09):
And there was a really good article in the New
York Times about chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which was thought
of as this men's disease because it was the men
who were smoking for so long and having uh this
mix of emphysema and bronchitis. But now women are are
showing up with those symptoms more. And a really interesting
study out of Norway showed that UM, in cases where
(10:30):
the level the symptoms of COPD were equal equally bad,
the men had smoked for more years than the women,
so women didn't have to smoke as long to have
a severe as a fair case as men of the
cop D. And in men and women who had smoked
the same amount of time, the women had more, much
more severe cases of COPD. UM, like Kristen said, lung
(10:50):
cancer is a big deal. I mean, it's it's hard
to think of any disease in which smoking is not
a risk factor these days. Um. And there's evidence that
women have a harder time quitting, which is a good
reason never to start. And um, you know that doesn't
even touch on reproductive factors and the dangers that come
if you smoke. Called pregnant right, um and just hitting
touching back on the issue of quitting. Doctors think that
(11:14):
since women are more prone to depression than men, and
since with people who are trying to quit smoking, relapse
often happens with some type of emotional trigger. You get
extremely stressed out, you want to reach for a cigarette
because that's when you're crutch in the past, and women
might have a harder time grappling with those emotionally triggered urges, right,
(11:36):
So they're actually doing some kind of interesting research about
ways that they can complement the traditional patch or or
you know, gum that you might have for women, so
they get a little bit more of their needs met
on that emotional side that will keep them from a
relapse when they're trying to quip. But one thing to
keep in mind is that most people who smoke start
when they are teenagers. Um, and of girls in high
(12:01):
school smoke, which is more than the American adult women
who are smoking, so clearly have it start young. Well,
you know, another thing that the two thousand one Surgeon
General report that I mentioned earlier found was that women,
those girls you mentioned in high school that do you
start smoking, tend to overestimate how many other people smoke.
(12:21):
So I think one reason why it was kind of
cool to highlight the advertising is so you know, if
you're a teenage girl out there and you see some
ad in a Cosmopolitan magazine or something like that that
shows the cool girls smoking it, it really is not
probably as widespread a trend as you might imagine. But
I have just to close out a bit of trivia
(12:42):
for this is. I threw this trivia out actually last
night to a friend. It's my favorite bit of trivia.
I'm probably gonna keep tossing it out strangers. So in
nineteen seventy one, the very last television commercial four cigarettes
before it was outlawed aired and it was for the
brand Virginia's Limbs. And what famous female cartoon character used
(13:08):
to smoke to shill for Winston brand cigarettes Molly? That
was Wilma Flintstone. Yes, so I guess what we can
take from that is that Bedrock was a very egalitarian society,
since that tends to be a prerequisite for women to
smoke as much as money, you know, and Fred probably
kept woman pretty stressed out. I have a bet, you know,
there you go, So a little a little cigarette trivia
to close things out, And if you would like to
(13:30):
send us trivia or thoughts or anything related to this episode,
you can email us at Mom's stuff at house stuff
works dot com. And I have an email here from Jennifer.
It's about the vitamin A podcast, and she has one
exception to sort of the position we took on vitamins.
She writes, I have been a vegetarian for fourteen years.
(13:51):
When I was a freshman in college, I started to
notice that I was just so tired all the time.
I slept ten to eleven hours a day and still
had to force myself out of bed. When I went
to the doctor, they told me that I was seriously anemic.
This is common in women, especially in vegetarians. So my
mom gave me an unlimited budget for buying iron rich foods,
and I learned about other foods to combine them with
to optimize the iron absorption. However, even with the perfect diet,
(14:12):
I needed iron supplements to keep from slipping back into anemia.
Now that I am older, I still maintain a healthy
iron rich diet as much as I can without eating meat.
But if I go off iron supplements for several months,
I start to notice them getting lethargic, shorter breadth, and
a blood test will show I am anemic again. I
suppose I could solve this by just eating a good
old steak, but I just can't do it, so for me,
iron vitems. Iron vitamins are essential for a healthy lifestyle,
(14:36):
and many vegetarians may not even realize they are anemic
and should get tested annually by their doctor. So thanks
for that, Jennifer. I've got an email here from David
and this is in response to our podcast on abortion.
He writes, the one thing that you did not cover
in the podcast is the effect on men. If you
do a Google search, you'll find books, groups, retreats that
can help with the abortion process. I'm just putting it
(14:58):
out there as an an who's had to deal with this.
I hope that others can find the help they need
as well. And that is a great point that David
brings up. Abortion certainly affects men just like well as
it does affect women too. So if you have any
thoughts to send our way mom Stuff and how Stuff
Works dot Com, head over to Facebook too. We can
get in touch with you there and you can interact
(15:20):
with other listeners. Also follow us on Twitter at mom
Stuff Podcast. Then you can follow us during the week
on our blog It's Stuff Mom Never Told You from
how stuff works dot com. For more on this and
thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.
To learn more about the podcast, Clog on the podcast
(15:43):
icon in the upper right corner of our homepage. The
how stuff Works iPhone up has arrived. Download it today
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