Dr. John Harvey Kellogg

^*Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (1852-1943) had a simple slogan: “Eat what the monkey eats, simple food and not too much of it.” His advice went against the grain for large numbers of his fellow Americans, who were then, as now, fond of red meat and white bread. Concerned with the dangers of constipation and a “slow colon,” Kellogg advised that healthy people should give themselves enemas at least three times each week. He published more than fifty books, many of them alerting the public to the dire consequences of masturbation- or “self-pollution,” as he called it- lest it make them idle, spotty, and depressed, and in the case of boys, stunt their height. At 5 feet 4 inches, perhaps he knew something he wasn’t telling. Although Kellogg and his wife, Ella, fostered forty-two children and adopted seven of them, they never had sex. On his wedding night, he sat up into the small hours working on one of his most successful books, Plain Facts for Old and Young, a treatise on healthy living based on the suppression of sexual urges. Kellogg was a virgin when he died, aged almost ninety-two.

          As a young man John Harvey was chosen by Ellen G. White, the founder of Seventh-Day Adventism, to help run the Western Health Reform Institute in Battle Creek, Michigan, which she had founded in 1866. Recognizing Kellogg as energetic and a fast learner, she subsidized his study of medicine in New York. One of her beliefs was that vegetarianism was part of the path to enlightenment. Studying at Bellevue Hospital, Kellogg had a strict breakfast regime of seven water biscuits and an apple, with the weekly luxury of a coconut and very occasionally some oatmeal or potatoes. However, he struggled to buy healthy grains and cereals that were easy to prepare and, returning fully qualified to Battle Creek in 1876, he set out to develop simple foods that opened up the bowels at least three times a day. From these experiments emerged granola and, in due course, the world’s most popular breakfast cereal, Kellogg’s cornflakes.

Battle Creek’s three principles were exercise, diet, and purging the body of impurities. But Kellogg was also a skilled surgeon, performing more than twenty thousand operations during his career- as many as twenty-five a day at his peak- and he was still operating at the age of eighty-eight. Trained as a gynecologist, he also specialized in removing hemorrhoids. Patients on the table received a cleansing enema of lukewarm water, and to reduce postoperative shock, their beds were packed with warm sandbags. Kellogg also sprinkled lactose on their wounds to prevent infection. Although he kept his patients confined to bed immediately after surgery, he believed in exercise to aid recovery, sometimes stimulating their muscles with painless electric shocks.

John Harvey Kellogg’s younger brother, William, began as his assistant, but was to go on to found the family cereal empire, originally called the Battle Creek Toasted Cornflake Company. Although John Harvey recognized that the sanatorium needed to function as a business, he didn’t like the idea of using his methods for commercial gain. William was more practical and -crucially- was willing to add sugar to the cornflakes to make them more palatable to a wider market. The Kellogg brothers fell out over this and didn’t speak to each other for the last thirty years of their lives. While William became a wealthy man ,John Harvey plowed his salary back into running the sanatorium and endowing hospital beds in India and China. The royalties from his books were used to feed and clothe his enormous brood of foster children.

          As well as abstaining from red meat, John Harvey Kellogg advocated fresh air and the consumption of nuts, even writing a paper titled “Nuts May Save the Race.” He was an early proponent of yogurt and tofu and, long before Jane Fonda was born, a believer in exercising to music in order to relieve boredom. Columbia Records issued a set of five phonograph records to accompany his booklet on exercise. Kellogg also dabbled in eugenics (improving human health and intelligence by selective breeding) and was a founder of the “Race Betterment Foundation.”

          Many of Kellogg’s theories, once thought to be outlandish, have since been vindicated. He was one of the first doctors to campaign against smoking. He argued that cow’s milk was unsuitable and that salt should not be added to food, and he was one of the first to state that a diet high in animal fats and dairy products was ultimately unhealthy. He also recognized that vegetable oils were preferable to lard, suet, and butter. His system of Biologic Living was aimed at promoting “good digestion, sound sleep, a clear head, a placid mind and joy to be alive.” Part of that system involved sleeping outdoors “watching the squirrels gamboling” and relying on fruit, nuts, and berries for sustenance, a simple life that Kellogg said would allow people “to listen to the music of the spheres.” He applied his theories to his own life, getting by on four hours’ sleep a night and staying fit and healthy until he succumbed to pneumonia at ninety-one.

*The Book of the Dead by John Lloyd and John Mitchinson; Copyright 2009; Published by Crown Publishers; Hard Cover; Pages 177-180