16-year-old Helena Muffly wrote exactly 100 years ago today: 

Tuesday, November 21, 1911: Nothing doing.

Her middle-aged granddaughter’s comments 100 years later:

Since Grandma didn’t write much a hundred years ago today, I’ll share an old advertisement for Quaker Oatmeal.

It has lots of mind-boggling “statistics.” I wonder if there were any truth in advertising requirements regarding what types of research was needed to back up the numbers a hundred years ago.

How Much of This Difference is Due to Oatmeal?

We have canvassed hundreds of homes which breed children like these. And we find in the tenements—where the average child is nervous, underfed and deficient—not one home in twelve serves oats.

Among the highly intelligent—where mothers know food values—seven-eighths are oatmeal homes.

In one university, 48 out of 50 of the leading professors regularly serve oatmeal. Among 12, 000 physicians to whom we wrote, fourth-fifths serve their children oatmeal.

The average daily serving in the finest hotels is one pound to each 28 guests.

Boston consumes 22 times as much oatmeal per capita as do two certain states where the average education is lowest.

It is everywhere apparent that the use of oatmeal is directly in proportion to the percentage of the well-informed.

A canvass of 61 poorhouses shows that not one in 13 of the inmates came from oatmeal homes. Only two per cent of the prisons in four great penitentiaries had oatmeal in their youth. In the lowliest vocations very few are found to be oatmeal bred.

But four-fifths of all college students came from oatmeal homes. So did the great majority of the leaders interviewed in every walk of Life.

Scientific Opinion

This seems to confirm scientific opinion that a child’s fitness depends largely on food. Oats are richer than all other cereals in proteids, the body builders—in organic phosphorous, the brain –builder—in lecithin, the builder of nerves. They form the best-balanced food that Nature supplies, especially for the years of growth.

Quaker Oats

Just the Richest Oats

Quaker Oats is made of just the richest, plumpest oats, selected by 62 siftings. We get only ten pounds to a bushel. Millions know that these selected oats, prepared by our process, form the most delicious oat food in existences. And the cost is only one-half cent per dish.

Regular size package 10 cents.

Family size package, for smaller cities and country trade, 25 cents.

The prices noted do not apply in the extreme West or South.

Look for the Quaker trade-mark on every package.

The Quaker Oats Company

Chicago

National Foods Magazine (December 1910)