1830s the typical American diet consisted of little more than red meat and blood. From his pulpit each Sunday Graham would spend many hours highlighting the perils of poor eating and masturbation. These beliefs were based on the work of Samuel Tissot and his then-famous book: Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism.
As influential as Tissot was on Graham's thinking, an equally strong influence came in the shape of the English clergyman, William Metcalfe, who was the first advocate of vegetarianism in America. Again Graham interpreted Metcalfe's writings and thoughts into his own, while Metcalfe argued in favor of vegetarianism on moral grounds. Graham was more concerned with the carnal passions that eating meat produced in people. At that time the stomach was considered to be the major organ in the body, so anything that inflamed it was compared to lust. Graham actively promoted a vegetarian diet and claimed it was a cure for almost every form of human sickness. The cure consisted of sexual moderation (no more than 12 times a year for a married couple), exercise (this would help with nocturnal emissions, he told us) and a proper diet.
In the 1830s Graham took his show on the road, lecturing an inquiring public about the perils of ‘self-pollution’. As the first of its kind it had an amazing impact on the general populace and the man behind it was just as dynamic. He sought to revolutionize the diet and sexual behavior of an entire country and in many ways was successful. Graham knew his audience well and if he were alive today no doubt would make a wonderful spin doctor, given his grasp of rhetorical devices. He was a master at making claims that no one could disprove. Considering that he preached that masturbation caused its victims to become shy, suspicious, languid, unconcerned with hygiene and, in acute cases, to suffer from hysteria, you'll see how hard it would be for your average masturbator to disprove his theories.
Around 1834, Graham stopped lecturing about sexuality and turned his thoughts toward sound nutrition. The truth was, his lectures had become too unpopular for him to continue, but our friend Graham was determined to find a way to spread his thoughts. Graham believed that there were two kinds of hunger – sexual and nutritional – and that both kinds threatened good health.
As strange as this may seem to many of us today, the Graham movement was a powerful one back in the 1800s. By 1840, his public career was over but his ideology remained deeply ingrained in society and had influenced a number of bran-loving entrepreneurs. One of those was James Caleb Jackson (1814–1895), a diet expert who combined Graham’s health-reform plan with his own ideas, which mainly consisted of hydropathy. Hydropathic therapy, also known as the ‘water cure’, involved applying extremely cold water – showers, tubs, soaks, and wet-packs – to different parts of the body. Jackson's real brainstorm, however, was creating a stone-like wafer out of Graham flour and water. He called his treat ‘Granula’ and would later go down in history as having made the first cold breakfast cereal.
Graham’s legacy to the world was what we today know as the humble Graham Cracker, all be it a sweetened and processed version of the one that was served during his lifetime at the many Graham hotels and boarding houses that sprang up and catered to his devoted followers. Although Graham's career had ended, his effects on sex and nutrition teachings still remained popular and the invention by Jackson of Granula was considered a major breakthrough in medical nutrition.
Of course, back then Granula was not considered a tasty treat and was not popular at first, but Jackson, like many eminent people of the day, had an ace up his sleeve. He had a ready-made market in the form of his patients at his sanitarium in Dansville, NY, where it was served on a daily basis to the residents.
It was this sanitarium that Sister Ellen White of the Seventh Day Adventists visited and asked Jackson to duplicate his Dansville establishment in Battle Creek, Michigan, the home and world headquarters of the Seventh Day Adventist movement. This facility would later become known as the Kellogg Sanitarium, or just ‘the Sans’, but the fact is the institute was to play a key role in not only revolutionizing the American breakfast but also the ideas behind health, nutrition, and sex.
When Sister White first opened the Sans she, too, was considered a health reformer. Inspired by Jackson and Graham, she too published a book on masturbation in 1864 called, An Appeal to Mothers: The Great Cause of the Physical, Mental and Moral Ruin of Many of the Children of Our Time. As we can see from the passage below, even though this text was written by a woman, women were still regarded as the weaker sex.
‘Females possess less vital force than the other sex, and are deprived very much of the bracing, invigorating air, by their indoors life. The results of self-abuse in them is seen in various diseases, such as catarrh, dropsy, headache, loss of memory and sight, great weakness in the back and loins, afflictions of the spine, the head often decays inwardly. Cancerous humor, which would lay dormant in the system their lifetime, is inflamed, and commences its eating, destructive work. The mind is often utterly ruined, and insanity takes place.’
Sister White, although intelligent, proved to be no leader and the Sans floundered for about ten years until a quirky young doctor named John Harvey Kellogg took over daily operations. Kellogg was another Graham disciple and advocate. He was also highly regarded within the Adventists for his hard-hitting medical journalism. Unlike Graham, he openly embraced medical science and was constantly experimenting with wholegrain foods. Two years into the job, he invented the first Battle Creek health treat, which consisted of a mixture of oatmeal and corn meal baked into biscuits and then ground into bits.
For some reason he decided to call his treat ‘Granula’, a strange decision when you consider that the only other cereal on the market was also called Granula. Once they finished suing him, Kellogg took the decision to rename his new product ‘Granola’. Granola wasn't the only delicacy that was served to the inmates of the Sans. Other specialties included caramel cereal coffee, Bulgarian yogurt and meat substitutes.
At one point in his career Kellogg concentrated his research solely on nuts. He wrote a paper entitled ‘Nuts May Save the Race’. During this period of his studies he is believed to have invented peanut butter as well as malted nuts. As strange as it may seem now, this bland diet helped turn around the fortunes of the once-failing Sans. Kellogg believed that most of the patients admitted to the Sans simply suffered from Americanitis and the remedy was simply a change in diet. The cure rate at the Sans was remarkably high simply because no one who was seriously ill was ever admitted. Kellogg never admitted any chronic masturbators to the Sans, either. This suited his purpose and like Graham he continued to preach the doom and gloom of such abhorrent practices.
For example, on the night of his honeymoon, Kellogg spent his time writing his most famous book, Plain Facts for Old and Young, a Warning on the Evils of Sex. This book featured an amazing collection of symptoms and cures for the curse known as ‘self-pollution’ as well as covering all important sexual ills of the time, but self- pollution was by far the biggest. In this book, he included the 39 signs that would indicate to an outsider that someone in fact masturbated. The fact that this list covers just about anyone who even vaguely looks human was no accident. For example:
Sleeplessness, love of solitude, bashfulness, unnatural boldness, confusion of ideas, capricious appetite, use of tobacco, and acne.
This was a clever ploy from his point of view. Just as Graham had done before him, it was extremely difficult for anyone to prove the theories wrong. Dr Kellogg was never wrong, his way was the only way and to prove a point, although he married he never consummated his marriage to Ells Eaton and they lived in separate apartments. This was supposed to prove that sexual relationships were not necessary to obtain good health.
It's quite likely, though, that the doctor was in some way dysfunctional (one book suggests he had mumps). After breakfast every morning, he had an orderly give him an enema. This may mean he had klismaphilia, an anomaly of sexual functioning traceable to childhood in which an enema substitutes for regular sexual intercourse. For the klismaphile, putting the penis in the vagina is experienced as hard, dangerous, and
