Is your blood tired?

Well, it obviously worked for Betty White.



For everyone else though, Geritol's efficacy was a bit more questionable.

The Twentieth Century was one long barrage of paradigm shifts and nutrition was no exception. The very word 'vitamin' was new.



Advertisers jumped on the nutrient bandwagon in a big way. All sorts of products bragged about being vitamin-rich. When it came to television, the king of the nutrient hawking business was arguably Geritol, which sponsored a number of popular shows.

Geritol was introduced as an alcohol-based, iron and B vitamin tonic by Pharmaceuticals, Inc. in August 1950 and primarily marketed as such into the 1970s. Geritol was folded into Pharmaceuticals' 1957 acquisition of J. B. Williams Co., founded in 1885. J. B. Williams Co. was later bought out by Nabisco in 1971. The Geritol product name was formerly owned by the multinational pharmaceutical firm GlaxoSmithKline. Geritol was acquired by Meda Pharmaceutical in 2011. The earlier Geritol liquid formulation was advertised as "twice the iron in a pound of calf's liver," and daily doses contained about 50–100 milligrams of iron as ferric ammonium citrate. The Geritol tonic also contained about 12% alcohol and some B vitamins.

It was also one of the first vitamin and mineral supplements to get into serious trouble with the FTC.

Geritol was the subject of years of investigation starting in 1959 by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). In 1965, the FTC ordered the makers of Geritol to disclose that Geritol would relieve symptoms of tiredness only in persons who suffer from iron deficiency anemia, and that the vast majority of people who experience such symptoms do not have such a deficiency. Geritol's claims were discredited in court findings as "conduct amounted to gross negligence and bordered on recklessness," ruled as a false and misleading claim, and heavily penalized with fines totaling $812,000 ($4,313,826 as of 2015), the largest FTC fine up to that date (1973). Although subsequent trials and appeals from 1965 to 1973 concluded that some of the FTC demands exceeded its authority, Geritol was already well known and continued to be the largest U.S. company selling iron and B vitamin supplement through 1979.

That didn't stop it from becoming entrenched in popular culture

In the early days of television, the marketing of Geritol was involved in the quiz show scandal, as the sponsor of Twenty-One. For many years after that, Geritol was largely marketed on television programs that appealed primarily to older viewers, such as The Lawrence Welk Show, What's My Line?, Hee Haw, and Ted Mack's Original Amateur Hour. It was also one of the sponsors of the original Star Trek. Geritol was often used in the 1960s as a punch line for a joke in sitcoms or in comedy routines; comic singer Allan Sherman satirized Geritol on his 1962 album My Son, the Folk Singer, singing "Yasha got a bottle of Geritol" to the tune of "Joshua Fought the Battle of Jericho"