AMERICANA: The Theory of Weightlessness

The U.S.'s longtime preoccupation with the shape of the human figure has reached from Fletcher's mastication diet of the early 1900s to Elmer Wheeler's Fat Boy calorie counter of the '50s, but no diet fad has ever taken the U.S. so overwhelmingly as the craze for the food supplement Metrecal (TIME, Oct. 3) and its sister brands. Across the nation last week, drugstores and supermarkets were clamoring for fresh carload deliveries to accommodate the growing hordes of Schmoo-shaped addicts who were insisting on guzzling their way to the vanishing point. Cried a...

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