Transcript

Four Times a Day | John Harvey Kellogg

From Knowing Better · Episode page · Watch on YouTube

· 1 h 1 min · 9,903 words · 91 timestamped sections

This is the full, timestamped transcript of "Four Times a Day | John Harvey Kellogg", an episode of Knowing Better published November 22, 2023 (1 h 1 min, about 9,903 words). It mentions 23 people, works and ideas, including John Harvey Kellogg, Battle Creek Sanitarium, Will Keith Kellogg, Corn Flakes, Nebula.

What is discussed, and when

  1. – 10:00: Nebula, John Harvey Kellogg, James White, Seventh-day Adventists
  2. – 20:00: John Harvey Kellogg, Battle Creek Sanitarium, Plain Facts for Old and Young, Sylvester Graham
  3. – 30:00: John Harvey Kellogg, Will Keith Kellogg, Battle Creek Sanitarium, Plain Facts for Old and Young
  4. – 40:00: Battle Creek Sanitarium, Granola, John Harvey Kellogg, Corn Flakes
  5. – 50:00: Corn Flakes, Battle Creek Sanitarium, John Harvey Kellogg, Will Keith Kellogg
  6. – 1:00:00: John Harvey Kellogg, Corn Flakes, Will Keith Kellogg, Charles W Post

Notable quotes from "Four Times a Day | John Harvey Kellogg"

  • Let me tell you about the man who is singularly responsible for so much of our present-day lives, including breakfast, exercise machines, vegan burgers, health spas, and…
    about John Harvey Kellogg · at
  • Yeah, if you’re watching this on Youtube maybe, but over on Nebula, this video came out just after the Vegetarianism one. It’s only been an hour.
    about Nebula · at
  • Ellen Harmon was a follower of William Miller. Two months after the Great Disappointment, when she was sixteen years old, she had a divine vision. Along with her future husband, James White, they created the Adventists.
    about Ellen Harmon · at
  • These included fresh-air exercise, hydropathy, temperance, and the vegetarian teachings of Sylvester Graham, the guy who repopularized whole wheat flour in America.
    about Sylvester Graham · at
  • On October 1, 1876, John took over as the director of the Western Health Reform Institute to put it on a more scientific, less religious footing.
    about Battle Creek Sanitarium · at
  • John Harvey Kellogg married Ella Eaton Kellogg on February 22, 1879. He spent his honeymoon writing and revising his various books, including his magnum opus, Plain Facts for Old and Young, published in 1881.
    about Plain Facts for Old and Young · at
  • William Keith Kellogg was born on April 7, 1860. His parents thought that he was dim-witted, because he couldn’t read or recognize people’s faces. It wasn’t until he was twenty years old that he discovered that he was near-sighted.
    about Will Keith Kellogg · at
  • In February 1891, Charles W Post was admitted for treatment at the Battle Creek Sanitarium for indigestion and neurasthenia. However, he couldn’t afford to actually stay at the San itself.
    about Charles W Post · at

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

  • John Harvey Kellogg — Person · Primary referenced figure / central biographical subject · 18 mentions · first at
    The episode frames him as a pivotal late-19th/early-20th century health reformer whose ideas and businesses shaped modern breakfast foods, wellness culture, and medical misconceptions.
  • Will Keith Kellogg — Person · Primary referenced figure / co-protagonist in business-history arc · 6 mentions · first at
    Presented as the operational and marketing force who turned sanitarium health foods—especially corn flakes—into a mass consumer breakfast industry and ultimately won the Kellogg name in court.
  • Charles W Post — Person · Referenced rival / competitor-entrepreneur · 2 mentions · first at
    Depicted as a former sanitarium patient/worker who founded a competing cereal business by copying sanitarium products, escalating the Kelloggs’ business conflicts.
  • Ellen Harmon — Person · Referenced religious founder / doctrinal authority · 1 mention · first at
    Identified as Ellen (Harmon) White, whose visions and leadership are portrayed as foundational to Adventism and to establishing the Battle Creek health institute that Kellogg later ran.
  • Sylvester Graham — Person · Referenced precursor / ideological influence · 3 mentions · first at
    Used as the earlier dietary-reform figure whose vegetarian and anti-masturbation ideas influenced Seventh-day Adventist health doctrine and Kellogg’s worldview.
  • James White — Person · Referenced religious founder / institutional catalyst · 2 mentions · first at
    Co-founder of the Seventh-day Adventist movement; in the episode he helps drive the Kelloggs’ relocation to Battle Creek and the creation of the church’s publishing and health institutions.
    Ellen Harmon was a follower of William Miller. Two months after the Great Disappointment, when she was sixteen years old, she had a divine vision. Along with her future husband, James White, they created the Adventists.
  • Irving Fisher — Person · Referenced expert / policy influencer (eugenics) · 1 mention · first at
    Cited as a prominent eugenicist connected to Kellogg’s Race Betterment Foundation and the Eugenics Record Office, reinforcing the episode’s argument about Kellogg’s broader social impact.
    Irving Fisher was a prominent eugenicist who helped create the Race Betterment Foundation and served as an advisor to the ERO. In 1922, he was elected as the first president of the American Eugenics Society.
  • Henry D Perky — Person · Referenced inventor / adjacent cereal innovator · 1 mention · first at
    Introduced as the patent-holder behind shredded wheat machinery; his work becomes relevant to Kellogg’s later manufacturing and trademark litigation history.
    On August 1, 1893, Henry D Perky patented a machine for making shredded wheat, which is actually just thinly stretched wheat dough made from Graham flour spooled into that familiar shape, known as a biscuit.

Books & papers

  • Plain Facts for Old and Young — Book · 2 mentions · first at
  • The Prolongation of Life — Book · 1 mention · first at
    In 1907, Elie Metchnikoff published The Prolongation of Life. In which he determined that Bulgarians lived the longest because they ate yogurt, which filled the intestines with healthy bacteria.

Companies & orgs

Products & tech

  • Corn Flakes — Product · Mentioned as a breakfast option · 12 mentions · first at
    Corn Flakes are a significant part of American breakfast culture.
    Let me tell you about the man who is singularly responsible for so much of our present-day lives, including breakfast, exercise machines, vegan burgers, health spas, and…
  • Granola — Product · Mentioned as a breakfast option · 4 mentions · first at
    Granola is a popular health food often consumed at breakfast.
    Let me tell you about the man who is singularly responsible for so much of our present-day lives, including breakfast, exercise machines, vegan burgers, health spas, and…
  • Metamucil — Product · Mentioned as a health supplement · 2 mentions · first at
    Metamucil is significant for digestive health.
    Let me tell you about the man who is singularly responsible for so much of our present-day lives, including breakfast, exercise machines, vegan burgers, health spas, and…
  • Grape-Nuts — Product · Mentioned as a breakfast option · 1 mention · first at
    Grape-Nuts are a well-known cereal brand that contributes to breakfast culture.
    Let me tell you about the man who is singularly responsible for so much of our present-day lives, including breakfast, exercise machines, vegan burgers, health spas, and…
  • Kellogg's Toasted Corn Flakes — Product · Mentioned as a breakfast option · 1 mention · first at
    Kellogg's Toasted Corn Flakes are a staple in breakfast foods.
    Let me tell you about the man who is singularly responsible for so much of our present-day lives, including breakfast, exercise machines, vegan burgers, health spas, and…
  • Soy Acidophilus milk — Product · Mentioned as a health product · 2 mentions · first at
    Soy Acidophilus milk is relevant for those seeking dairy alternatives.
    Let me tell you about the man who is singularly responsible for so much of our present-day lives, including breakfast, exercise machines, vegan burgers, health spas, and…
  • Activia — Product · Mentioned as a health product · 1 mention · first at
    Activia is known for its probiotic benefits.
    Let me tell you about the man who is singularly responsible for so much of our present-day lives, including breakfast, exercise machines, vegan burgers, health spas, and…
  • Protose — Product · 1 mention · first at
    Along with peanut butter, they also sold nut-based mock meats. Their most popular being Protose, which was a meatloaf substitute that Ella had been able to flavor like chicken, beef, or veal.
  • Nuttolene — Product · Mentioned as a health food · 1 mention · first at
    Nuttolene is relevant in discussions of dietary choices.
    Let me tell you about the man who is singularly responsible for so much of our present-day lives, including breakfast, exercise machines, vegan burgers, health spas, and…
  • Nuttose — Product · 1 mention · first at
    They also sold Nuttolene and Nuttose, which blended nuts and gluten into a brick that could be sliced like cheese.

Concepts & topics

  • Seventh-day Adventists — Concept · 4 mentions · first at
    The Jehovah’s Witnesses were one of them. But more relevant to us today, so are the Seventh-Day Adventists. Named so because they believe we are currently in the seventh and final day.

Places & events

Full transcript with timestamps

So, I’ve been working on a theory that pretty much all of our modern culture originates from two time periods: the post World War 2 years in the 1940s and 50s, and the post Reconstruction Era from the 1880s to 1900. Otherwise known as the Gilded Age in the US or the late Victorian Era in England. JJ McCullough and I talk about this all the time. It’s something we’ve noticed from researching several videos that take place during those periods. To give you a few recent examples: Cigarettes as we know them weren’t invented until 1881. Christian Scientists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and a third religion that shall not be named all began in the 1860s and 70s.

Thanksgiving wasn’t a holiday until the Civil War. Christmas became a national holiday in 1870. Santa Claus didn’t start wearing red and white until 1881. Christmas was viewed as an evil Catholic holiday, it was banned in many colonies and states for over a century. It wasn’t widely celebrated until the Irish and Italians came over. Which led to the first Columbus Day in 1892. I mean, if that isn’t enough to convince you and you need like, another deep dive into an ultra-specific topic you never thought you’d care about… Okay, fine. I swear, the things I do for you guys…

I know we’re not necessarily supposed to teach the Great Man Theory of History anymore, but every once in a while, one guy does come along and like, you know. Let me tell you about the man who is singularly responsible for so much of our present-day lives, including breakfast, exercise machines, vegan burgers, health spas, and basically every old wives’ tale and medical misconception regarding diet and health: John Harvey Kellogg. Care to take a guess as to when he lived? [Intro music] This video was brought to you by my streaming service, Nebula.

Michigan Fever began in 1833, when the federal government began selling land to settlers at rock bottom prices to populate the Midwest in the wake of the Indian Removal Act. John Preston Kellogg and his wife Mary Ann Call Kellogg bought 320 acres for $400 and arrived with their two sons in the spring of 1834. They had three more children before she died from tuberculosis in 1841. Six months later, he married the teenage caretaker whom he hired to look after the house while Mary was dying. John Preston and Ann Jannette Kellogg had eleven children together over the next twenty-four years.

The only ones we care about are these two. John Harvey Kellogg, born on February 26, 1852, and Will Keith Kellogg, born on April 7, 1860. Shortly after John Harvey’s birth, John Preston was convinced by his neighbor to attend a few prayer meetings being put on by Joseph Bates, a Seventh-Day Adventist preacher. … You’re not gonna …? [Tapping] Hey, you in there? What? I’m talking about the Seventh-Day Adventists, I need your video. I’m not done with that yet! You’re not?! It’s been months! Yeah, if you’re watching this on Youtube maybe, but over on Nebula, this video came out just after the Vegetarianism one. It’s only been like, an hour.

That is true, Nebula subscribers got to see this video back in September. Nebula is a subscription streaming service which I have been a part of since the very beginning. It was made by and for fellow creators as a safe haven where we can try out different types of content without worrying about being punished by the algorithm. Along with getting to see videos like this video months early, you can find all of my previous content over there without sponsor segments like this one. Many of these are alternate versions containing jokes that were too spicy for Youtube and extended cuts with bonus segments. I’ve even made a few Nebula-exclusives.

If you go to nebula.tv/knowingbetter or use my link below, a portion of your subscription fee comes directly to me for as long as you’re a member. You can currently get a year of Nebula for only $2.50 a month. Will my next video be up a few months early over on Nebula? I don’t know, you’ll have to go to nebula.tv/knowingbetter to find out. If you haven’t seen my previous video on Vegetarianism, you should probably go do that, because, well… You see this? This is the guy we’re talking about. So you need to know who all of these other people are, what they believed, and how they’re all connected to each other for this video to make complete sense to you.

I know right, it’s like homework. … This took me forever. I mean, I am going to summarize it here too, but like… I made these videos at the same time. They’re companions to each other. Later on you’re going to be like, “What? How did he come up with that idea?” And the answer is over here, he got it from this guy who combined these two other guys’ ideas to write a pamphlet… And now that’s why you’re circumcised. Oh, do I have your attention now? That’s a real example that will come up later. In any case, we’re going to be focused on this guy during this video, along with his brother and this shady character.

William Miller calculated that Christ’s Second Coming would occur on March 21, 1844. When that didn’t happen, he revised it to October 22, 1844. If you want to know the math behind that, I go into it in detail in my video about Jehovah’s Witnesses. His second failed prediction came to be known as the Great Disappointment. Instead of accepting that the world did not end, several groups splintered off from Millerism and decided that the Second Coming did happen, it was just spiritual in nature rather than physical. The Jehovah’s Witnesses were one of them. But more relevant to us today, so are the Seventh-Day Adventists. Named so because they believe we are currently in the seventh and final day.

Ellen Harmon was a follower of William Miller. Two months after the Great Disappointment, when she was sixteen years old, she had a divine vision. Along with her future husband, James White, they created the Adventists. Ten years later, James and Ellen White moved their congregation from upstate New York to Battle Creek, Michigan. Funny side note. Back in 1825, an Army expedition was surveying land in Michigan and a minor altercation between two Americans and two Potawatomi occurred. So they jokingly decided to name the nearby stream “Battle Creek.” John Preston moved the entire Kellogg family to Battle Creek in order to be closer to the Whites. He then became a major financier for the church.

Since the end of the world was imminent, the Kelloggs didn’t see much reason to educate their kids, with one exception: John Harvey. Soon after enrolling in grammar school, it became clear that he was academically gifted. Even so, when he was eleven years old, he was put to work in his father’s broom factory, working ten hour shifts for two dollars a day. John soon developed bloody colitis which scarred his colon and led to constipation and hemorrhoids. Then he got an anal fissure, which caused extremely painful bowel movements and would repeatedly open back up while it was healing.

As a result, John became obsessed with colon hygiene and finding bowel-friendly foods which would produce soft, painless stools. After a year in the broom factory, the Whites hired John as a printer’s apprentice for the SDA’s publishing house. While editing The Health Reformer, he learned about the church’s new wellness doctrines before anyone else. These included fresh-air exercise, hydropathy, temperance, and the vegetarian teachings of Sylvester Graham, the guy who repopularized whole wheat flour in America. This guy was the focus of the previous video, he’s the father of vegetarianism in the United States and the inspiration behind the Graham cracker. You know what to do if you want to know more about him.

Sylvester Graham believed that a vegetarian diet was the cure to all illnesses and societal woes, including war, poverty, and masturbation. John Harvey already had an aversion to sex – he wasn’t asexual, we’ll come back to that later – but Graham’s teachings gave him an additional justification for his previously held beliefs. Say the line! [Sigh] … This will be a recurring theme. Yay! Almost all of the SDA’s diet and health recommendations were plagiarized from James Caleb Jackson, who operated a water cure facility named Our Home on the Hillside.

In 1865, James White was paralyzed by a stroke and was treated by Jackson. Shortly afterwards, Ellen White received a divine vision telling her to open her own health institute focused on healthy living and drugless medical care. She signed up for a three week course to learn all of Jackson’s tricks and bring them back to Battle Creek. After a successful donation drive by John Preston, the Western Health Reform Institute was opened on September 5, 1866. It was a direct copy of Our Home. Yet another water cure facility which fed people the Graham diet.

It was pretty uninviting and poorly managed by a bunch of naturopaths with spurious medical degrees. It averaged sixteen patients a month and was spiraling into debt. At this point, John Harvey was a school teacher in a town twenty-five miles away, but the Whites recognized his leadership potential and urged him to study medicine so that he could take over at the Institute. So in the fall of 1872, he took a six month course at the Hygeio-Therapeutic College run by Russell Trall, a homeopathic water-curist and former colleague of Sylvester Graham.

Upon graduating, he was given a degree and the title of doctor, but knew that it carried very little weight. He didn’t even bother to list the course on his CV. So the next fall, he began taking classes at the University of Michigan medical school. But he became frustrated by the lack of hands-on medical training he received due to the sparse population in the state. So, his professors encouraged him to go study in a big city. In August 1874, he convinced Ellen White to give him a small loan of $1000 to enroll at the prestigious Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City, attached to the oldest and largest public hospital in the United States.

While studying at Bellevue, he subsisted on a diet of seven Graham crackers and two apples a day, with one coconut a week and the occasional serving of oatmeal. As a medical student in 1874 I rented a room and boarded myself, purchasing raw materials and prepared it. One day I found in the market a package of food, oatmeal labeled “steam cooked.” However, I found it as raw as any. That brought me to think it important to prepare cooked foods to be bought at market in packages, ready for immediate use and I resolved to give that consideration.

The modern equivalent of that would be a broke college student complaining that ramen was too difficult to cook. I have a weird feeling that the desire to bring ready-to-eat cereal grains to market will become important to the Kellogg story later on, so remember that. John Harvey focused on two fields of medicine while attending college. Gastrourinary surgery and “midwifery and the diseases of women.” Given his past experiences, it’s not surprising that he’d want to learn about digestion and reproduction. His doctoral thesis was about how all diseases were the body’s way of indicating that its natural processes had been disturbed and the cure was to follow SDA health doctrines, including a vegetarian diet.

Bellevue taught the allopathic school of medicine, a term coined by Samuel Hahnemann, the creator of homeopathy. You have homeopathic medicine, which believes that the more you dilute a medication, the more effective it will be. And then you have allopathic medicine, which is a term you don’t hear anymore because allopathic medicine is just medicine. In order to graduate from Bellevue, Kellogg had to complete a three-year residency under an allopathic doctor – which he did not. He lied to the College and studied under OT Lines, a homeopathic and hydropathic doctor who used to teach at Russell Trall’s Hygeio-Therapeutic College. He followed that up by studying electrotherapeutics under George Miller Beard.

In the end, John Harvey Kellogg graduated with a legit degree in allopathic medicine giving him real credibility. Yet he continued to practice the water cure, electrotherapy, and various other humbugs. On October 1, 1876, John took over as the director of the Western Health Reform Institute to put it on a more scientific, less religious footing. His first order of business was to change the name to the Battle Creek Sanitarium. A word he made up specifically to differentiate it from a sanatorium. I didn’t like the name because I had already had enough experience in the world to know that people didn’t like to be reformed; they liked to be informed and taught, but they didn’t like to be reformed. So I thought I would get rid of that phrase, Health Reform Institute. …I found the word “sanatorium” in the dictionary defined as … a health resort for invalid soldiers; so I changed the word “sanatorium” to “sanitarium.” We didn’t

want the institution to be looked upon as a health resort; I wanted it to be … something different from what existed before, and a place where people would cultivate health in every possible way by every means afforded by medical science and by modern hygiene. Despite what he just said, the Battle Creek Sanitarium, also known as just “the San,” was very much a health resort, serving up every food and health fad to the country’s rich and famous. Notable patients at the San included Sojourner Truth, Booker T Washington, John Philip Sousa, Ivan Pavlov, Henry Ford, Amelia Earhart, Upton Sinclair, William Howard Taft, William Jennings Bryan, Warren G Harding, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many, many more.

Basically any famous person you can think of between 1880 and 1930 visited the Battle Creek Sanitarium at some point. It was far from a regular hospital. John only took in patients with dyspepsia and neurasthenia, two vague conditions that encompass a wide range of minor complaints like headaches, fatigue, irritability, indigestion, constipation, and diarrhea. They would turn away patients with any serious medical conditions or infectious diseases. They only treated people who were mostly okay but wanted to feel better.

Shortly after taking over, John petitioned the SDA leadership to begin a fundraising campaign to build a newer, larger facility. After initially rejecting the idea, John convinced them to take out a 20-year bank loan to fund the project. He did so by invoking the Adventist belief that the impending end of the world would occur well before the debt would be due. The Sanitarium was a five story building with several open air verandas. Ellen White referred to it as a “grand hotel.” Every room and suite featured gas lighting, hot and cold water, and central heating.

Over the years they would continue to expand, adding several patient wings, operating rooms, laboratories, a charity hospital, a nursery, kindergarten, lecture hall, and even an orchestra. [Inhale] Out. [Inhale] Out. [Inhale] Out. [Inhale] Out. Guests at the San were schooled in “Biologic Living,” which was John Harvey Kellogg’s lifestyle brand. His version of Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop. Kellogg combined the water cure, Graham diet, legitimate medicine, and whatever quack treatments caught his eye to improve the health and well-being of his patients. Much like James Caleb Jackson before him, this included open-air exercise and loose-fitting clothing like bloomers.

Haha-haha haha-haha haha-haha-ha! Haha-haha haha-haha haha-haha-ha! That was a real breathing exercise practiced at the Sanitarium and as much as I wish I could make fun of their silly 1800s ideas… We still do that, we just call it “laughter yoga” now. Ho-ho, ha-ha-ha! Ho-ho, ha-ha-ha! Ho-ho, ha-ha-ha! Haha-haha haha-haha haha-haha-ha! Haha-haha haha-haha haha-haha-ha! The clips I’m showing you are from the 1994 movie, The Road to Wellville. Starring Anthony Hopkins as John Harvey Kellogg and Matthew Broderick as a patient at the Sanitarium. Variety Magazine described the movie as “a satire of health fanaticism in turn-of-the-century America.” Did I die? Am I in heaven? Heaven on earth, you’re at The San.

However, after researching this topic, I don’t think there’s a lot of satire going on here. Any time you see a machine or treatment that makes you think there’s no way that could possibly be real – it is. This ridiculous slapping machine? Real. Vibrating chairs? Real. This one just looks painful. I’m not sure what it was meant to accomplish. But it existed. This treadmill is interesting, because while it was real, it was originally made for horses. Speaking of, John Harvey Kellogg invented the mechanical horse and eventually a mechanical camel that went side to side instead of just back and forth.

He even invented those old-timey vibrating weight loss belts that became popular in the 1920s and 30s. They’re known as oscillo-manipulators, and as you probably guessed, they don’t do anything. The Sanitarium also offered a number of different light therapies and given its emphasis on the water cure, it shouldn’t surprise you to hear that there were over fifty different kinds of baths. Ah, the pleasures of the sinusoidal bath. One of the doctor’s better inventions. Feel the current tingle, Will? This thing was also real and combined water and electricity, which seems totally safe.

Well I leave you to the warm threads of the doctor’s electric blanket. One of his inventions that I feel will not catch on. Yes, he invented the electric blanket. Kellogg was a firm believer in electricity’s power to heal. You better believe this ridiculous cage around Matthew Broderick existed. It was known as an electrotherapy coil. It is my scientific conclusion that sex is unnecessary and dangerous. Isn’t that a bit drastic? You cannot afford the loss of life-giving fluids, the shock to the system can be fatal. Please, blow into this.

Yeah, so, I suppose we should talk about… that. John Harvey Kellogg married Ella Eaton Kellogg on February 22, 1879. He spent his honeymoon writing and revising his various books, including his magnum opus, Plain Facts for Old and Young, published in 1881. The reproductive act is the most exhausting of all vital acts. Its effect upon the undeveloped person is to retard growth, weaken the constitution, and dwarf the intellect. John and his wife never consummated their marriage. He maintained his disgust for sex throughout his life and pushed that same message onto his patients.

I don’t want to get too deep into this topic, since I covered it at length in the previous video, but much like Sylvester Graham, he was particularly interested in stopping people from masturbating. Plain Facts included a laundry list of its negative effects on the body, including blindness, deafness, and insanity. He recommended a number of treatments to prevent people from participating in that solitary vice, including bandaging the hands, wearing a chastity belt, and eventually, circumcision. Plain Facts for Old and Young was a best-seller in the 1880s, you could find a copy of it in basically every house. As a result, non-religious, neonatal circumcision was popularized in America by John Harvey Kellogg. He is the reason we still do it to this day.

I told you it would come up later. Because of his popularity, he is more responsible for stigmatizing masturbation than anyone else, including any church. Despite his celibacy and recommendations for sexual abstinence to his patients, Kellogg likely satisfied his carnal desires in other ways. Now, I want you to relax. What is that? This is a colonic wash. It is hot paraffin, soap, and tepid water. Now, bend over a little bit please. John Harvey was a staunch advocate for enemas. He told people it was to cleanse the bowels, but it is widely believed that he was a klismaphiliac. I’ll let you look that one up yourself.

He invented an enema machine that could inject fifteen quarts of water into the body per minute. The average enema today only requires two cups, so you’d have to stop the machine after exactly two seconds. Kellogg believed in a theory known as auto-intoxication, meaning the body is poisoning itself. How? Well… the longer fecal matter is retained in the colon, the more toxins are released, causing all sorts of issues and diseases. After studying primates at the zoo, he determined that human beings should empty their bowels at least four times a day. And if you are unable to do so… Well…

I’m Nurse Bloethal. Would you join me in the bathroom please? I’ve already had one of those. Well. Now you get another. I’m pretty sure that’s why my grandma, who became a nurse during World War 2, would always ask me about my bowel movements whenever I was sick. John Harvey Kellogg is singularly responsible for America’s obsession with “regularity.” If you think occasional irregularity is no big deal, think twice. It may be a sign that your digestive system could be working better. Listen to this. Oh you better believe Kellogg brought yogurt into this. Before we continue, I just want you to know that this commercial is real and came out in 2012. See if you can spot any familiar ideas.

With occasional irregularity, things your body doesn’t use could be lingering in your system, causing discomfort. But Activia has been shown in clinical studies to help with slow intestinal transit when consumed 3 times per day. Seven out of ten doctors recommend Activia. Okay, do they recommend that you eat it three times a day though? That’s a bit much. Though maybe not for Kellogg. In 1907, Elie Metchnikoff published The Prolongation of Life. In which he determined that Bulgarians lived the longest because they ate yogurt, which filled the intestines with healthy bacteria.

Kellogg heard that idea and thought, “Why do you have to eat it?” That’s right, yogurt enemas. In the beginning, the dining hall at the San was divided into three “tables.” The liberal table, where meat was still served. The conservative table, where meat was occasional, but coffee, tea, and condiments were not. And the radical table, which served the Graham diet of only grains and vegetables. By 1900, the radical menu was your only option and meat was banned entirely. Chew, chew, chew. That is the thing to do. Chew, chew, chew. Good food is good for you. Chew, chew, chew. But only if you chew.

That is the right thing to do. Chew, chew, chew. That is the thing to do. This was a real song sung at the Sanitarium, based on the teachings of Horace Fletcher, another famous patient of Kellogg’s. Have you ever been told that you should chew your food forty times or once per tooth? That’s known as Fletcherizing and was popularized in 1898. You were supposed to chew until all the flavor was gone and it was completely liquified. If you do it right, you shouldn’t even have to swallow, it’ll just naturally go down as you’re eating. The idea was to make it as easy as possible to digest.

The moment John Harvey Kellogg heard this idea, he claimed that he actually came up with it twenty or thirty years earlier. Which has been and will continue to be a recurring theme. He was so full of himself that he literally thought his sh*t didn’t stink. Your stool Mr. Lightbody, quite frankly, is pathetic. Formless, mushy, and foul-smelling. Take it away, nurse. How should they be? My own stools, sir, are perfect. They are gigantic and have no more odor than a hot biscuit. They were so gigantic because in 1911, John went on a trip to Sicily and North Africa and learned about psyllium, which absorbs water in the colon to produce a soft, bulky stool.

Today, psyllium fiber is sold as Metamucil and marketed as yet another way to maintain regularity. Start feeling lighter and more energetic by using Metamucil daily. Metamucil aids regularity and supports a healthy gut. It traps and removes waste from your gut and helps lower cholesterol. One of the main attractions at the Sanitarium was Kellogg’s weekly Question Box Hour, when patients could anonymously drop questions into a box and John would answer them in a public forum. However, he often came with prepared lectures and demonstrations, suggesting that some of those questions might have been planted.

Kellogg spent a lot of time preaching about the dangers of meat. During one demonstration, he had patients look into a microscope to see if they could tell the difference between steak and dung. What do you see Miss Muntz? White specks crawling. Dr. Lineman, please, please do not keep us in suspense. Please reveal to our good friends here the identity of the offensive slide. Sir, Miss Muntz has identified the porterhouse steak. In another, he brought out a supposedly vegetarian wolf, which appeared calm and docile when tempted with meat. He then presented it to a caged, wild wolf, which reacted exactly as you’d expect.

A beast of the wild! He’s known only the carnal pleasures. I’m showing you clips from the movie, which presents these demonstrations as ridiculous. But I can’t emphasize this enough: All of this was real. This is a quote from Kellogg’s 1892 book, Man the Masterpiece. The accompanying cut … shows the picture of a wolf which belonged to the author, and which, on coming into his possession, without the slightest demur made an immediate and complete change from a diet of raw flesh to a diet of nuts and cereals. John Harvey had a particular hatred towards oysters, which I totally get. I don’t understand why any of you enjoy eating those little bowls of seawater snot.

The oyster dwells in the slime and ooze of the ocean bottom. His business is to filter through his beard or gills the filthy water in which he thrives best, collecting and feeding upon millions of germs which swarm in the slime which covers the weeds and stones scattered over the ocean bottom….Oyster juice contains more than one hundred million germs, mostly colon germs, to the ounce…it contains more filth germs than does sewage. He spoke out against them so often that in 1931, the State of Maryland officially censured him and all of his affiliated companies for libeling the oyster.

To call the oyster a scavenger is no libel. It is merely the statement of a biologic fact; and Maryland legislators, astute politicians although they may be, by resolution or in any other way, cannot change or camouflage the fact. The oyster cannot live without filth. Okay, so everything we just talked about? I want you to put a pin in that. You know, like, a literal pin. William Keith Kellogg was born on April 7, 1860. His parents thought that he was dim-witted, because he couldn’t read or recognize people’s faces. It wasn’t until he was twenty years old that he discovered that he was near-sighted.

He was put to work at his father’s broom factory at the age of six and was promoted to principal sales agent when he was fifteen years old. All before he could see. He was known as Willie growing up, which he hated. Then he went by William, which he also hated. So when he was thirty-eight, he legally changed his name to Will Keith Kellogg. On May 16th, 1880, donning a pair of glasses, Will Keith graduated from Parson’s Business College in Kalamazoo, Michigan and was hired as an assistant by his brother, John Harvey. First at his publishing company, and then at the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

He married Ella Davis, or as he called her, “Puss,” on November 3, 1880. Seems like 1880 was a pretty good year for him. All he needed was a makeover. [Ding] John had always been a relentless bully to Will growing up, and unfortunately for– I’m sorry, I can see the reflection– Unfortunately for him, that didn’t change when he worked for him as an adult either. Will could often be seen running behind John as he dictated notes from his bicycle. In addition to being administrator at the San, Will was also the general manager at John’s exercise machine company, his sanitary supply company, and the recently founded Sanitarium Food Company.

To wear so many hats, his brother John Harvey paid him nine dollars a week. At least to start. After three years or so, he got a one dollar raise. He was eventually generous enough to give him another three dollars to look after his horse. I feel kind of blue. Am afraid that I will always be a poor man the way things look now. Will Keith thought that the Sanitarium foods, designed to cleanse the bowels of patients with indigestion, would sell just as well to a wider market of healthy people who just wanted a supplement to their otherwise normal diet.

So he convinced John to start selling their products in grocery stores, which immediately got them in trouble. Their most popular product at this point was created by John in 1877. He baked loaves of wheat, oats, and corn at high temperatures and then broke it up into crumbles. It was originally eaten dry, but Will came up with the idea of soaking it in a bowl of milk first. John named this concoction Granula and it was an instant favorite at the San. The problem was that James Caleb Jackson invented Granula fourteen years earlier. John absolutely knew that when they began selling his Granula to the public.

Understandably, Jackson sued the Kelloggs in 1881 for infringing on his trademark and won. While the recipe was different enough already, they were forced to change the name of their product to Granola, which obviously won in the end. It’s a similar situation to Hydrox and Oreo, if you’re familiar with that story. In 1883, an experimental kitchen was opened in the basement of the Sanitarium to develop more health foods which were free of sugar, additives, fillers, preservatives, and animal products. Both for the patients and the open market.

Will Keith was predictably put in charge of that operation, but in a surprise addition, John also had his wife Ella working on new recipes. A few years later, John was investigated by the local branch of the American Medical Association for violating their code of ethics. Among the charges was that he practiced irregular medicine by using the water cure. But it was also against the rules for a doctor to advertise their services. According to the AMA, it was “derogatory to the dignity of the profession.” They didn’t remove that restriction until 1975, by the way.

The petition filed against John claimed the advertisements for both the Battle Creek Sanitarium and the various health foods were ethical violations. A trial to decide whether or not to revoke his medical license was held by the Calhoun County Medical Society from January to June 1886. As a member of the society, John was somehow allowed to vote, resulting in a six-six tie. Therefore, no action was taken and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg was allowed to continue being a doctor. And while he continued to sell food to the public, he just didn’t advertise it anymore.

Within a few years, the Sanitarium Food Company was selling forty-two different health products, including Granola and gluten flour. John believed that gluten was the most valuable part of the grain and could rejuvenate the body. In 1889, the Sanitas Nut Food Company was founded to sell various nut-based creations from the San’s experimental kitchen. Nuts were previously considered indigestible and were not part of the vegetarian diet until John Harvey Kellogg popularized them at the San. Which became a problem for people with bad teeth who were still expected to Fletcherize.

So he ground boiled peanuts into a paste, inventing peanut butter as we know it today. He was awarded three patents for it between 1894 and 1898. Though, being head of the experimental kitchen, Will claims that he was the one who came up with it… which will be a recurring theme. Along with peanut butter, they also sold nut-based mock meats. Their most popular being Protose, which was a meatloaf substitute that Ella had been able to flavor like chicken, beef, or veal. They also sold Nuttolene and Nuttose, which blended nuts and gluten into a brick that could be sliced like cheese.

Eventually they began selling Dr. Kellogg’s Malted Nuts, a milk substitute made from ground peanuts and almonds. A decade or so later, he invented Soy Acidophilus milk, marketed towards infants and people with sensitive stomachs. They always make it sound like these non-dairy milk substitutes are recent Millennial fads, but it turns out they’re over a century old. In February 1891, Charles W Post was admitted for treatment at the Battle Creek Sanitarium for indigestion and neurasthenia. However, he couldn’t afford to actually stay at the San itself.

Rooms cost ten to sixteen dollars a week and suites went for fifteen to twenty dollars a week. So instead, Post got a room at a nearby boarding house and paid for daily treatments at the San a la carte, running anywhere from four to ten dollars a week. Unfortunately, even that was a bit too steep for him. So he made up the difference by working for Will Keith in the experimental kitchen. On January 1, 1895, he opened his own health food company named Postum Cereal Company and began to manufacture and sell products through his Road to Wellville marketing campaign.

Yeah, the title of the movie – and the book it’s based on – came from a Post advertisement, not Kellogg. He only had two products at the time, both blatantly stolen from the Sanitarium kitchen. The first was known as Postum, which was a cereal-based coffee substitute and a rip-off of Kellogg’s Minute Brew. And the second was a direct copy of Granola with a bit of added maltose – the sugar found in grapes. He sold it under the brand name Grape-Nuts. Because of that, the Kelloggs held an understandable grudge against Post, which would only get worse over time.

In the summer of 1895, the General Conference of the Seventh-Day Adventists was being held at the Battle Creek San and John introduced them to a new dish he named Granose. Like many of his other food inventions, it was an immediate favorite. On May 31st, he filed a patent for it, titled “Flaked Cereal and Process for Preparing the Same,” which was granted just under a year later. John, Will, and Ella had been working in the experimental kitchen for years to develop a flaked wheat cereal. They went through dozens of different recipes, trying to roll out the dough as thinly as possible before baking it.

They only discovered the perfect process after accidentally leaving a batch of dough to sit over the weekend, allowing it to temper. John’s name is on the patent, but all three of them disagree about who actually deserves credit. Will continued to work on the recipe and switched from using wheat to corn, which had much more flavor and was easier to work with. Each flake is just one smashed kernel of steamed corn. With that, Sanitas Corn Flakes were introduced to the world in 1898. They sold sixty tons of it that first year.

Here’s where I need to stop everything and dispel the myth that Corn Flakes were invented to stop people from masturbating. They were created as a digestive aid for Sanitarium patients with dyspepsia. By a guy who coincidentally also wanted to stop people from masturbating. Will Keith made employees at the Sanitarium food companies sign a non-disclosure agreement which included a non-compete clause in the hopes of keeping their recipe and process a secret. But that lasted all of two seconds. By 1905, over a hundred new copycat cereal companies opened in Battle Creek alone.

John wanted to avoid being accused of self-promotion again. So to separate the genuine Kellogg’s corn flakes from its imitators, they began to use Will’s name as a trademark in 1903. Going so far as to print “none genuine without this signature” on their boxes. I’m getting ahead of myself here, but today, this is the second most recognizable signature in the world, just behind Walt Disney. On February 18, 1902, the Battle Creek Sanitarium burned to the ground. At four in the morning, a furnace fire spread through a steampipe to the surrounding buildings and the entire complex was destroyed by the afternoon. The next day, John Harvey was already raising funds to rebuild. He almost seemed glad that the fire happened.

We have had a fire, all the cockroaches are burned up and now we can have just such a building as we have been dreaming about and planning for so many years. It will be a new modern structure built on the same foundation worthy of the glorious work that is being done here. He met with SDA leaders, the mayor, city council, and prominent businessmen from Battle Creek to request financial help to build a new fire-proof Sanitarium which would cost a million dollars. The town chose to fund the project after being reminded of the San’s importance as a quasi tourist attraction.

Will had resigned as administrator of the Sanitarium six months prior to focus on the food companies. But he felt honor-bound to come back to work under his brother while they rebuilt … Which he hated. The Sanitarium fire of February 18, 1902, occurred six months to the day after I had discontinued working for the institution. … Since the sanitarium seemed part of my life work, I … offered to come back to work for nothing and board myself as long as my services were needed. … During the building of the new sanitarium building, I was given the job, in addition to my other work, of securing the money with which to pay the bills. It frequently happened that on Thursday or Friday the treasury was without funds but in one way or another I secured the funds so that the payroll was never defaulted. These two and one-half years which completed my work of twenty-five years with the San were the hardest years of my life, and no amount of money would tempt me to repeat those years.

John refused to close the San during reconstruction. Patients were boarded in employee’s homes. The all-new king-sized Sanitarium opened to guests on June 1, 1903. It was almost entirely made out of brick, iron, stone, and cement. Will continued to help out for another year and a half, but his real passion was in the cereal business. In 1905, they made a hundred thousand dollars from corn flakes alone. Will thought they could make more money if they advertised, but John still wouldn’t allow it. So on January 22, 1906, Will bought the domestic production rights to manufacture Sanitas Corn Flakes from John. He paid $22,400 in cash and $147,560 in stock from his newly founded Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company.

He then launched an aggressive advertising campaign, even distributing free boxes of the product door to door – possibly the first mass-produced free sample in history. He put an ad in Ladies’ Home Journal stating that he didn’t have the sales force to keep up with demand and that 90% of grocers didn’t carry the authentic Battle Creek Sanitarium corn flakes. … So here’s a coupon for a free season’s supply. This caused women around the country to demand that their local grocery stores stock Will’s product on their shelves. It was genius.

It was a win-win for the grocers too. In the summer of 1907, he began his incredibly controversial “Wink Campaign,” telling women to wink at their grocery clerks on Wednesday for a free box of corn flakes. Winking was the turn of the century equivalent of flashing. It was very scandalous and unbecoming. On July 4, 1907, a fireworks accident caused the factory he had bought from a defunct cereal company to burn to the ground, destroying the state-of-the-art water-cooled rollers which were necessary for production. Unfortunately, the company that originally manufactured them had signed an exclusivity agreement with C.W. Post, who had just begun to sell Post Toasties. His version of corn flakes.

Post was the react channel of the cereal world. After being reminded that their company wouldn’t exist without Kellogg’s corn flakes, the Lauhoff Brothers agreed to “repair” the damaged rollers, which did not violate their arrangement with Post barring them from selling new ones to his competitors. Wanting to drive more sales and win back some market share, he wrote to his lawyer asking for his opinion on an important marketing decision. What would you think of calling these flakes “Kellogg Corn Flakes” instead of Sanitas Corn Flakes, and then using a signature somewhere on the package similar to the attached? … I have not spoken to Dr. J.H. about the matter, but I am sure he would object to the plan and he would suggest that the inference would be that it’s his corn flakes, but the signature on the package ought to take away this objection. I am exceedingly anxious to do this just right and want the benefit of all the help I can get in making the decision.

Kellogg’s Toasted Corn Flakes hit grocery shelves in August 1907 and his new brick factory was at full production capacity four months later. On November 10, 1907, both John Harvey and Will Keith Kellogg were unanimously disfellowshipped from the Seventh-Day Adventists. Ellen White had long feared their growing influence and had been speaking out against them for years. But she was mostly angry that the Sanitarium had become more secular and the Kelloggs had never paid any tithing on their growing profits. Noticing his brother’s success, John Harvey changed the name of the Sanitas Nut Food Company to the Kellogg’s Food Company of Battle Creek and began selling cereal under that name.

Will had only bought the rights to manufacture corn flakes, not wheat or rice flakes. John also printed a label on his boxes stating that his product was the only one with a “legitimate pedigree.” Which Will hated. It seems to me, Doctor, that this puts the Toasted Corn Flake Company in a rather bad light. We have been claiming in all our advertisements originality and I certainly have been laboring under the impression that the Toasted Corn Flakes had a legitimate pedigree, and not an illegitimate one. Since Will was present at the creation of flaked cereal, his Toasted Corn Flakes had just as much right to claim legitimacy as John’s.

But John couldn’t resist being a circumcised-dick to his brother. Grocery stores were so confused by this that they stocked both cereals on the same shelf, causing some people to accidentally buy John’s tasteless health food rather than Will’s delicious breakfast cereal. It is very apparent the sole purpose in the Doctor’s making this change is that he may be benefitted somewhat by the several hundred thousand dollars the Toasted Corn Flake Company has expended in advertising to make the name Kellogg’s of some value.

John responded that he was the famous Kellogg that everybody knew, so he added his name to the boxes to protect his brand image. In fact, it’s Will who should remove the Kellogg name from his boxes. If you were the Kellogg who was known to the public through the signature on the package, and feared that bad results would follow from the use of this name, why did you ever consent to my name appearing on the various packages of Sanitas Foods? … In view of the fact that you have refrained for thirty years from allowing your name to be commercialized, it seems to me it is mighty unwise of you, at this late day, to decide to commercialize the name of Dr. J. H. Kellogg. … I wish to state that it seems to me I have some claim upon the use of the word “Kellogg’s” as applied to cereals. I claim to have worked with you, nights and mornings, and overtime, without any compensation, in the matter of developing the

first Granose flakes. … I am advised by competent attorneys that I have a perfect right to do this. In 1910, Will sued and John countersued over the rights to use the Kellogg family name to sell cereal. John’s case relied on downplaying his brother’s contributions, stating that he was nothing more than a low level assistant, hardly involved in the invention of flaked cereal. The case made it to the Michigan Supreme Court in 1917 and was decided in Will’s favor. He had exclusive rights to use the Kellogg name and was awarded all of John’s cereal profits from the previous decade.

The Kellogg’s cereal company that exists today is the one founded by Will Keith Kellogg, who is now indisputably the more famous Kellogg. Without Will to help run the Sanitarium, the quality of just about everything began to drop. The staff didn’t work as hard, they were spending too much on food, and sometimes patients left without paying their bills. John Harvey began to shift his attention away from quack medical cures to something that’d been on his mind since he wrote Plain Facts back in 1881. The human race is growing steadily weaker year by year. The boys of today would be no match in physical strength for the sturdy youths of a century ago who are now their grandparents.

In 1910, the Eugenics Record Office, or ERO, was founded with large donations from Carnegie, Rockefeller, and you guessed it, John Harvey Kellogg. As a famous doctor, he was elected to the Michigan State Board of Health for a second time beginning in 1911. While there, he helped pass mandatory sterilization laws for idiots, imbeciles, feebleminded, insane, epileptic, moral degenerates, and sexual perverts. I know, right? I’m like, two of those. … Luckily I’m white, though. These laws weren’t written for white people.

In 1914, he founded the Race Betterment Foundation with the goal to purify humanity of crime, intemperance, disability, and psychosis through a vegetarian diet. He didn’t believe in helping the poor and advocated to inhibit their ability to multiply. The Foundation helped to pass the Immigration Act of 1924, which basically closed our borders to Asians, Eastern Europeans, and Jews. This law remained in effect for over four decades. Irving Fisher was a prominent eugenicist who helped create the Race Betterment Foundation and served as an advisor to the ERO. In 1922, he was elected as the first president of the American Eugenics Society.

He was also one of John’s patients when he visited the San in 1904. When the Great Depression began in 1929, the number of patients at the Battle Creek Sanitarium and its dozens of branches fell off a cliff. It was able to hold on for three years before falling into receivership. John Harvey Kellogg no longer owned or controlled the San, but he continued to work there on occasion while he focused on his… passion project. Unlike most eugenicists, John believed that you could improve your genes through better habits and behaviors, like diet, chastity, and all of the other things that he was already recommending anyway.

Because of that, his ideas were called Euthenics and never really caught on. It’s kind of the nature versus nurture argument, but for DNA. Since John and Ella never consummated their marriage, they adopted forty-two children. Not out of any sense of altruism, but so that John could test out different parenting methods and run Race Betterment experiments on them. Ella never agreed with or participated in those experiments. She was hardly involved in raising them at all. Once Hitler enacted his plan for race betterment and invaded Poland in 1939, the entire concept of eugenics fell out of fashion in the United States and the ERO closed that same year.

Even then, John was planning to host the Race Betterment Foundation’s fourth national conference in the spring of 1942. But the attack on Pearl Harbor put a stop to that. The Battle Creek Sanitarium was sold to the US government and converted into the Percy Jones military hospital for the duration of World War 2 and the Korean War. It would later be turned into an office building. And still, John Harvey Kellogg was writing letters advocating for eugenics. If the American Public Health Association is indifferent to this matter or lacks the moral courage to give it consideration, it will miss a great opportunity for undertaking a work which may help to solve the world’s greatest problem, how to save the human race, or at least the white portion of it.

Bruh, stop trying to make eugenics happen. It’s not gonna happen. Six weeks after that letter, on December 14, 1943, John Harvey Kellogg died from pneumonia at the age of ninety-one and nine months. He left his entire estate to the Race Betterment Foundation, which continued operations until 1967. The legislation they helped pass sterilized 60,000 people, mostly Black and Indigenous women. Luckily, these laws were repealed in… There’s just three dots, what does that mean? John Harvey wrote a letter attempting to reconcile with his brother, but his assistant thought it was beneath him and it wasn’t delivered until five years after his death.

I am making desperate efforts to get all my affairs into such shape as to preserve as much as possible what good they may represent and to mend as many as possible of the errors I have made. I earnestly desire to make amends for any wrong or injustice of any sort I have done to you and will be glad if you will give me a very definite and frank expression of anything I have said or done which you feel should be justly designated unbrotherly or otherwise open to criticism. John had become a pretty strange guy near the end.

He ate two ninety-minute long meals a day and gained an unhealthy amount of weight. He’d regularly brag about his completely odorless stools, saying they smelled as sweet as those of a nursing baby. That’s right, that movie scene was accurate. The only difference was that in reality, he’d bring them out to show you. He never once admitted that any of his theories on health, diet, exercise, or sex were wrong. Not even when germ theory, genetics, endocrinology, and like, science in general came along. Like I said, he literally thought he knew everything and his sh*t didn’t stink.

On August 1, 1893, Henry D Perky patented a machine for making shredded wheat, which is actually just thinly stretched wheat dough made from Graham flour spooled into that familiar shape, known as a biscuit. He sold them to local grocers and opened a restaurant in Denver, but also sold the machines so housewives could make them at home. John Harvey visited Perky in 1894, wanting a machine for the Sanitarium. He noticed that Perky’s biscuits were served soft and moist, which sounds awful, and taught him about dextrinization, which gave them their now-familiar crunch.

Perky never sent one of his machines to John and Shredded Wheat went on to be one of the most popular breakfast cereals. But when his patent expired in 1912, Will’s Kellogg Toasted Corn Flake company began manufacturing and selling Shredded Wheat. Even calling it Shredded Wheat. It’s like he learned nothing after getting sued over Granula. The National Biscuit Company, later known as Nabisco, filed a lawsuit against him in 1930 after buying Perky’s business. The case made it all the way up to the Supreme Court, which decided in Will’s favor.

Shredded Wheat was too generic of a name to be trademarked, which is why every cereal company in the country is still allowed to sell Shredded Wheat and call it Shredded Wheat. Even though it’s not shredded, it’s spooled. Will followed that up by introducing Kellogg’s All Bran in 1916, Pep in 1923, and Rice Krispies in 1928. The gnome-elf hybrids known as Snap, Crackle, and Pop began advertising the cereal in 1933. Snap! Crackle! Pop! Rice Krispies! Will was very effective at marketing to children. He pulled many of the same tricks as the tobacco industry.

In 1909, he put a coupon on the back of his cereal boxes that could be mailed in for a Kellogg’s Funny Jungleland Moving-Pictures book, which is basically a pop-up book. He soon realized that he could save on shipping by just putting the books, toys, and games, directly in the box. Which had the added benefit of taking up space and using less product. In 1914, Will’s son John Leonard invented a paraffin wax bag that fit inside of the cardboard box and helped to keep the product fresher for longer. Every cereal is packaged this way now, though they’ve long since switched to plastic.

John Leonard desperately wanted to take over the family business, he had been manager at their Battle Creek factory for a few years now. So Will gave him his chance when he went on a vacation to Asia from November 1919 to May 1920. Unfortunately, JL had mismanaged the company so badly that it was in the red when he got home. To make matters worse, John Leonard abandoned his wife and two children to be with another woman. So Will decided that he wasn’t worthy and cut him off. He then promised his sixteen year old grandson John Leonard Jr. that he would inherit the business and began grooming him for the job. He was also a disappointment, cracking under the pressure and showing up to work drunk all the time.

So Will cut him off as well. JL Jr. then tried to start his own cereal business, failed, and died by suicide in 1938. Speaking of, after divorcing his wife to marry his twenty year old secretary, Charles W Post never got over his chronic stomach pain and believed he was dying of cancer. So, he killed himself on May 9, 1914. His funeral was held in Battle Creek, but neither of the Kelloggs attended. In 1939, at the age of seventy-nine, Will stepped down as the head of his company. He was replaced by Watson H. Vanderploeg, but was still on the Board of Directors and demanded weekly operational updates.

He was almost entirely blind from glaucoma at this point and relied on seeing eye dogs. Will Keith Kellogg died from leukemia on October 6, 1951 at the age of ninety-one and six months. He left his entire estate to the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, which is still one of the largest charitable funds for children in the world. It wasn’t until Will was gone that Vanderploeg began introducing massive amounts of sugar to Kellogg’s cereals. Including Sugar Pops, Sugar Smacks, and Sugar Frosted Flakes. There I was eating my Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes. Delicious. Full of super energy. Sugar toasted. Tiger to tiger I can tell you that for super energy, I wouldn’t miss my Kellogg’s Sugar Frosted Flakes. Delicious. Sugar toasted. For super energy. In fact, folks, they’re grrreat!

In 1949, the Kellogg Company worked with the Leo Burnett Advertising Agency to create mascots for their cereals. They created four animals for Frosted Flakes, including Tony the Tiger. The only other one to make it onto a box was Katy the Kangaroo. They were also responsible for Toucan Sam and Cornelius, which is the name of the rooster on boxes of regular Corn Flakes. I had no idea that thing was a character until making this video. Leo Burnett would later go on to create the Marlboro Man. Throughout the 50s and 60s, sugar was advertised as a way to increase energy. A lot like how we talk about caffeine now.

It wasn’t until the 80s that a more health-conscious market forced them to drop the Sugar from Frosted Flakes. Not the actual sugar, just the word. Sugar Pops became Corn Pops and Sugar Smacks were renamed Honey Smacks. Now cereal is part of a balanced breakfast and still gets an entire aisle at the grocery store devoted to it. Around 30% of which belongs to Kellogg, 30% to General Mills with Cheerios and Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and 20% to Post. After researching all of this, I can’t help but think of Post cereals as a cheap knock-off of the superior Kellogg’s brand.

Before the Kelloggs came along, breakfast wasn’t really a thing. If you wanted to eat something as a morning meal, it was almost always leftovers from last night’s dinner. There were no foods that were specifically made for breakfast. James Caleb Jackson’s Granula was arguably the first cereal, but like John Harvey’s Granola, it was designed for sick people. It wasn’t until Will Keith began selling Corn Flakes to the general public that our modern conception of breakfast was born. The Kellogg brothers are the ones who convinced everyone that breakfast was the most important meal of the day. They’re the literal origin of that phrase.

It’s kind of amazing just how much can be traced back to John Harvey Kellogg. He is responsible for adding nuts and yogurt to the American diet. He invented peanut butter, almond milk, coffee substitutes, mock meats, vegan cheese, soy acidophilus milk, and flaked cereal. Just to name a few. He’s the reason shredded wheat is crispy and 80% of American men are circumcised. He is why you chew your food once per tooth, you drink Metamucil to make sure you poop several times a day, and you were told that if you keep doing that, you’re going to grow hair on your palms.

In most states, the courts can still order you to be sterilized because of him. So we’ve got Thanksgiving, Christmas, Santa Claus, breakfast, peanut butter, non-dairy milk, and an appreciation for enemas that began in the post Reconstruction Era, and over half of that list can be attributed to just one man: John Harvey Kellogg. If that doesn’t simultaneously prove my modern culture theory and Great Man history to you, I don’t know what else to say, but at least now, you know better. Hey everyone. Thanks for checking this video out early on Nebula, or waiting patiently to see it on YouTube. This is the first time I’ve done something like this so we’ll see how it goes.

Maybe I’ll keep releasing videos early on Nebula if I can get my act together. In the meantime, if you’d like to add your name to this list of knockoff cereal brands, head on over to patreon.com/knowingbetter. Or, for a one time donation, paypal.me/knowingbetter. Don’t forget to cleanse that subscribe button, or the join button if you want to stay regular. Check out the merch at knowingbetter.tv, follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and join us on the subreddit! [Outro music]

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "Four Times a Day | John Harvey Kellogg"?

In order: 0:00 Nebula, John Harvey Kellogg, James White, Seventh-day Adventists; 10:00 John Harvey Kellogg, Battle Creek Sanitarium, Plain Facts for Old and Young, Sylvester Graham; 20:00 John Harvey Kellogg, Will Keith Kellogg, Battle Creek Sanitarium, Plain Facts for Old and Young; 30:00 Battle Creek Sanitarium, Granola, John Harvey Kellogg, Corn Flakes; 40:00 Corn Flakes, Battle Creek Sanitarium, John Harvey Kellogg, Will Keith Kellogg; 50:00 John Harvey Kellogg, Corn Flakes, Will Keith Kellogg, Charles W Post.

What is mentioned in this Knowing Better episode?

23 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including John Harvey Kellogg, Battle Creek Sanitarium, Will Keith Kellogg, Corn Flakes, Nebula, Charles W Post. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "Four Times a Day | John Harvey Kellogg"?

The episode runs 1 h 1 min; the transcript is about 9,903 words in 91 timestamped sections.

More from Knowing Better

About this transcript: the episode's spoken words as captioned on YouTube, split into timestamped sections. Reclip.Me locates every person, work and idea in the text, keeps the time it is first named, and quotes the words around it verbatim. Last updated January 21, 2026.