Dangerous chocolate? Yes, it was in 1931! From 1931-36, German chocolate makers Burk and Braun made a product called Radium Schokolade. The promise: it would make their customers look younger and feel rejuvenated. Their manufacturing process ensured that the purity of the radium was preserved and rapidly delivered through the blood stream to every part of the body.
Radium was discovered by Marie and Pierre Curie in 1898. It was being synthetically manufactured in the United States just 12 years later. At the time, the effects of radiation were not well understood. It was believed that radium provided a rejuvenating effect to the body. It was added to water, cosmetics, toothpaste and butter for its supposed health benefits. Then it was added to chocolate.
The radium health craze did not last long. Rather than curing arthritis and making people feel younger, it caused devastating and sometimes fatal side effects. Ironically, as symptoms of radium exposure, such as exhaustion, first started to appear, doctors, not knowing the true cause, may have prescribed radium as a treatment.
The effects of radium exposure were infamously brought to light by the Radium Girls, a group of women who worked in factories painting watch faces with glow-in-the-dark radium-laced paint. As more and more of the factory women began to experience pain, tooth and jaw decay, brittle bones and other health issues the link to radium exposure became clear. Radium was removed from products and protections were put in place for the handling of radioactive materials.
While radiation does have wonderful benefits in the treating of cancer, today the idea of using it as health supplement and food additive seems shockingly absurd. But rather than wonder at the absurdity of people in the past, it should serve as a warning to us, not to leap at every new miracle health cure to hit the market.
It seems every few months brings a new miracle diet, supplement or protocol that promises to cure all ailments and provide vitality, strength and longevity – all claiming to be backed by science or rediscovered from our ancestral past. As time passes and research accumulates, many of these supposedly healthy things have proven to be dangerous as we learned the lesson from the former use of radium.
Crystal Kelly is a feature writer for Bizarre Bytes with those unusual facts that you only need to know for Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy or to stump your in-laws.
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