The Cure for Literally Everything | Vegetarianism

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 10:00: Sylvester Graham, William Metcalfe, KB Morgan’s All-Bran Malted Nuts, Corn Flakes
2. 10:00 – 20:00: Sylvester Graham, Benjamin Rush
3. 20:00 – 30:00: Sylvester Graham, Bronson Alcott, Fruitlands, William Metcalfe
4. 30:00 – 40:00: Sylvester Graham, Vegetarian Society, William Metcalfe, American Vegetarian Society
5. 40:00 – 50:00: Ellen White, James Caleb Jackson, Vegetarian Society, John Harvey Kellogg
6. 50:00 – 1:00:00: John Harvey Kellogg, Sylvester Graham, Granola, James Caleb Jackson
7. 1:00:00 – 1:10:00: Vegetarian Society, John Harvey Kellogg, Nebula, Henry S Clubb
8. 1:10:00 – 1:16:04: Corn Flakes, Graham crackers, Nebula

Notable quotes from "The Cure for Literally Everything | Vegetarianism"

• When I began this project, it was only supposed to be about two things: graham crackers and corn flakes.

  about Corn Flakes · at 0:14

• [Intro music] This video was brought to you by my streaming service, Nebula. And…

  about Nebula · at 2:29

• While he was speaking in Philadelphia, he met William Metcalfe.

  about William Metcalfe · at 5:57

• Sylvester Graham is responsible for the first wave of vegetarianism in the United States.

  about Sylvester Graham · at 8:52

• Now, this isn’t on the board because it happened in England, so who cares, but in 1847, the Bible Christians helped to found the Vegetarian Society.

  about Vegetarian Society · at 29:29

• Shortly after, Ellen White received a divine vision telling her that she should open her own health facility based on her Adventist beliefs.

  about Ellen White · at 43:24

• Ten years later, he called for the formation of the Vegetarian Society of America and was elected as its Chairman and Director-General.

  about Henry S Clubb · at 1:00:14

• If you’re keeping track, John Harvey Kellogg is responsible for popularizing nuts in America and inventing granola, peanut butter, mock meats, and vegan cheese.

  about John Harvey Kellogg · at 1:01:54

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Sylvester Graham — Person · Primary historical figure / referenced reformer · 19 mentions · first at 4:15
  Central figure used to explain the first major popularization of vegetarianism in the U.S. and its linkage (in the episode’s argument) to temperance, hygiene reform, and anti-masturbation ideology.
• John Harvey Kellogg — Person · Primary historical figure / referenced physician-entrepreneur · 9 mentions · first at 45:42
  Key figure in the ‘second wave’ of U.S. vegetarianism in the episode: Adventist health doctrine, Battle Creek Sanitarium, cereal/health-food commercialization, and anti-masturbation moral medicine.
• William Metcalfe — Person · Referenced organizer / bridge figure · 8 mentions · first at 5:57
  Portrayed as the key conduit bringing Bible Christian vegetarianism into U.S. reform networks and directly influencing Graham; later helps organize the American Vegetarian Society.
• Ellen White — Person · Referenced religious leader / doctrinal influencer · 4 mentions · first at 43:24
  Depicted as converting water-cure/vegetarian practices into Seventh-day Adventist doctrine and as the institutional catalyst who brings Kellogg into leadership of an Adventist health facility.
• James Caleb Jackson — Person · Referenced health reform entrepreneur · 6 mentions · first at 32:06
  Introduced as a hydropathy/sanatorium operator who commercialized early breakfast cereal (Granula) and influenced Adventist health institutions that later hired Kellogg.
  James Caleb Jackson might be the first person to sell health food to the general public, rather than just serving it at a hospital or sanatorium.
• Henry S Clubb — Person · Referenced organizer / movement administrator · 5 mentions · first at 39:07
  Presented as a Bible Christian immigrant who becomes a key organizer of the later Vegetarian Society of America and attempts a vegetarian abolitionist settlement in Kansas.
• Bronson Alcott — Person · Referenced utopian reformer · 3 mentions · first at 26:46
  Serves as an example of Grahamite influence entering Transcendentalist circles and spawning a vegetarian utopian experiment (Fruitlands) with Charles Lane.
  Bronson Alcott got together with a man named Charles Lane to create a utopian community based on socialist and vegetarian ideals to prove that dietary intemperance and meat-eating caused all of society’s ills.
• Benjamin Rush — Person · Referenced medical theorist · 2 mentions · first at 13:43
  Used to supply a ‘secular’ medical rationale (overstimulation theory) that the episode says influenced Graham’s synthesis of diet, disease, and sexual morality.
  Separate from that, in 1790, one of the founding fathers named Benjamin Rush proposed a more secular theory: There was only one disease that took many forms.
• William Cowherd — Person · Referenced originator (religious vegetarianism) · 1 mention · first at 6:04
  Presented as the founder of the Bible Christian Church, framed as the first Christian sect to make vegetarianism a core belief—an upstream source for Metcalfe and later U.S. vegetarian currents.
  William Cowherd began the Bible Christian Church in Manchester, England in 1809.
• Vincent Priessnitz — Person · Referenced originator (hydropathy) · 2 mentions · first at 30:39
  Used to explain the ‘water cure’ lineage that intersects with vegetarian reform networks and later American water-cure institutions connected to the AVS ecosystem.
  Vincent Priessnitz took that idea and ran with it, opening the first water cure facility in 1822 in Gräfenburg, Austria – now part of Czechia.
• Irving Fisher — Person · Referenced researcher / later ideological link · 2 mentions · first at 1:07:17
  Cited as conducting an endurance study comparing vegetarian and non-vegetarian athletes after being a Battle Creek patient; later noted for leadership in American eugenics, tying to Kellogg’s eugenic interests.
  Irving Fisher would go on to become the president of the American Eugenics Society.
• Mary Baker Eddy — Person · Referenced follower / anecdotal example · 1 mention · first at 23:07
  Mentioned as a Grahamite follower and later framed as connected to the broader 19th-century alternative-religion/health-reform milieu (Christian Science is alluded to).
  Grahamism quickly spread across the Northeast, attracting thousands of followers, including one Mary Baker Eddy.
• Charles Lane — Person · Referenced utopian collaborator · 1 mention · first at 27:43
  Appears as Bronson Alcott’s partner in founding Fruitlands, illustrating how vegetarian ideals fed into short-lived utopian communal projects.
  Bronson Alcott got together with a man named Charles Lane to create a utopian community based on socialist and vegetarian ideals to prove that dietary intemperance and meat-eating caused all of society’s ills.
• Samuel Hahnemann — Person · Referenced medical founder (homeopathy) · 1 mention · first at 30:08
  Introduced as the creator of homeopathy whose dilution logic is presented as a stepping stone to ‘water cure’ beliefs that later mingle with vegetarian reform circles.
  Water has been used as medicine since basically forever, but we didn’t start assigning mystical healing powers to it until 1810, when Samuel Hahnemann published the Organon and created homeopathy.

Companies & orgs

• Vegetarian Society — Company · 12 mentions · first at 29:35
• American Vegetarian Society — Company · 7 mentions · first at 29:44
  Not to be outdone, William Metcalfe got together with William Alcott and Sylvester Graham to organize the first meeting of the American Vegetarian Society in May 1850.
• Battle Creek Sanitarium — Company · 3 mentions · first at 49:57
  On October 1, 1876, John took over as the director of the Western Health Reform Institute and his first order of business was to change the name to the Battle Creek Sanitarium – a new word he just came up with.
• Our Home on the Hillside — Company · 1 mention · first at 41:54
  James Caleb Jackson, the guy who gave the water toast, opened a sanatorium named Our Home on the Hillside in upstate New York in 1858.

Products & tech

• Corn Flakes — Product · Mentioned as a historical food item · 5 mentions · first at 0:18
  Part of the discussion on vegetarianism and its historical context
• Graham crackers — Product · Mentioned as a historical food item · 4 mentions · first at 0:18
  Part of the discussion on vegetarianism and its historical context
  When I began this project, it was only supposed to be about two things: graham crackers and corn flakes.
• Granola — Product · Mentioned as a historical food item · 2 mentions · first at 52:03
  Part of the discussion on vegetarianism and its historical context
  Jackson sued him for infringing on his trademark and won, forcing John to change the name of his product to Granola.

Places & events

• Fruitlands — Event · 3 mentions · first at 27:38
  They began their experiment in June 1843.
• World Vegetarian Congress — Event · 1 mention · first at 1:04:54
  They called the meeting the World Vegetarian Congress, which came to order on June 8.

Media & podcasts

• The Liberator — Media · Mentioned as a media reference · 1 mention · first at 35:43
  Part of the discussion on historical context
  William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, fully endorsed the vegetarian movement.

Sponsors

• Nebula — Media · Sponsor mention · 5 mentions · first at 2:46
  Promoted as a streaming service
• KB Morgan’s All-Bran Malted Nuts — Product · Promoted health food product · 2 mentions · first at 2:59
  Featured as a health food invention
  But today, I want to talk to you about my latest health food invention – KB Morgan’s All-Bran Malted Nuts!

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 Before we get started, I want to make it clear that I am not a vegetarian or vegan and this video is not going to be discussing the pros and cons of the diet at all. Instead, we’re going to be looking at vegetarianism as a historical phenomenon in the US. When I began this project, it was only supposed to be about two things: graham crackers and corn flakes. If you already know what connects those two products, so did I– that’s why I chose them. Now this video is about like, twenty things. Admittedly, it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize that both graham crackers and corn flakes are vegetarian.

0:35 I’m not sure why, but I’ve never really thought of bread as a vegetarian food. Maybe it’s because grains and cereals have their own section in the food pyramid. Vegetarians only eat vegetables, obviously. … And maybe some fruit. But once I made that connection, it became very clear to me that vegetarianism in the West is a very recent development. Different cultures have practiced various forms of a meatless diet for thousands of years, most notably Buddhist societies in India and China. But those groups are completely disconnected from the vegetarians of Europe and America.

1:09 … Has it been thirty seconds yet? K. … This is a video about how vegetarians ruined sex for everybody. That isn’t clickbait or hyperbole – I mean it. I know everyone likes to blame the Christians, but if that were the case, why isn’t every country in Europe as sexually repressed as we are in the United States? And why does that same taboo exist among non-religious Americans? While the Evangelicals and fundamentalists are happy to take the credit, they were never successful at convincing the general population that sex and masturbation are sins. That was the vegetarians.

1:43 Now, if you’re a vegetarian or vegan, don’t worry. I’m going to be spending the rest of this video explaining the evolution of vegetarianism and how the modern movement isn’t responsible for ruining everyone’s fun… at least not when it comes to sex. To explain my thesis, we’re going to have to go on a rather complicated journey through various different subjects. And to guide us through that journey, we’re going to need a map. This is our map. Look at this– do you understand why this video took so long now? This– this is just chaos.

2:14 I basically lost my mind trying to piece all of this together. But, looking at the whole picture, it’s clear that vegetarianism in the United States was popularized by just one guy for reasons that had nothing to do with animal welfare or climate change. [Intro music] This video was brought to you by my streaming service, Nebula. And… Hi, Doctor KB Morgan here, creator of KB Morgan’s Cure-All Miracle Tonic! But today, I want to talk to you about my latest health food invention – KB Morgan’s All-Bran Malted Nuts! Guaranteed to cure all that ails you, including dyspepsia,neurasthenia, and lascivious thoughts!

3:08 Just supplement your regular diet with four bowls of KB Morgan’s All-Bran Malted Nuts every day and your bowels will be born again! And for a limited time, inside every box of KB Morgan’s All-Bran Malted Nuts, you’ll find your very own KB Morgan Plushie! Check it out, it looks just like me, right? Unfortunately, due to excessive government regulations regarding food safety, KB Morgan’s All-Bran Malted Nuts are currently only available in the Pacific island nation of Kiribati … But the rest of you can still get these!

3:38 Click the link below or head over to makeship.com and look for the all-new KB Morgan Plushie! Perfect for entertaining the kids, cuddling up on the couch, getting you to work faster, or diversifying your retirement portfolio! There’s really no limit to what you can do with these things – but you better hurry! The all-new KB Morgan Plushie is only available for the next three weeks! After that, they’re gone forever! So get yours today and plush like a sir! So let’s start where I originally intended: the graham cracker.

4:15 Or, more specifically, the guy who inspired the graham cracker– Sylvester Graham. Technically, the G in “graham cracker” should be capitalized, but we stopped doing that forever ago. It’s a common misconception that he invented the cracker, but like a lot of the other rumors surrounding this seemingly innocuous snack food, that isn’t quite accurate. Sylvester Graham was born in West Suffield, Connecticut in 1794 to the Reverend John Graham Jr and his second wife, Ruth. His father died two years later and without an income, his mother fell into debt and had a nervous breakdown.

4:48 The state declared her to be deranged and incapable of raising children, so Sylvester was shuffled between several foster homes until he was placed with a farmer. He enrolled at Amherst College to become a minister when he was 29, but his classmates hated him so much that they tried to get him expelled, causing him to have a nervous breakdown, which required a lengthy hospital stay. He fell in love with his nurse, Sarah Earle, and they married in 1826. That same year, Sylvester was ordained as a Presbyterian minister and began working as a roving preacher in New Jersey.

5:22 The American Temperance Society was also founded that year. Graham quickly gained a reputation as a charismatic speaker for his views on alcohol abuse. He soon realized that he would have much more of an impact as a social reformer than as a preacher. So in 1830, he left the ministry behind and joined the Philadelphia Society for Discouraging the Use of Ardent Spirits – the local chapter of the Temperance Society. Okay so we’ve got Sylvester Graham here, right? He’s the main character for this video, remember this guy.

5:52 As we’re sitting here in 1830, the only influence on him so far is the Temperance movement. While he was speaking in Philadelphia, he met William Metcalfe. This guy is a minister in the Bible Christian Church. Which was founded by someone named William Cowherd. Okay, got it? … We’re mostly going to be following this red line. William Cowherd began the Bible Christian Church in Manchester, England in 1809. He had split off from the Anglican and Swedenborgian churches and believed in Christian spiritualism, pacifism, temperance, and vegetarianism.

6:25 They were the first Christian sect to adopt a meatless diet as their core belief, based on his interpretation of the sixth commandment, “thou shalt not kill.” He believed this also applied to animals, so killing them was a sin. Nevermind all of the other parts of the bible where God granted humans dominion over all the animals and specifically described which ones to eat, I guess. So, much like their Eastern counterparts, the first Europeans to go vegetarian did so on religious grounds. On March 29, 1817, his subordinate ministers, William Metcalfe, led a group of 41 Bible Christians to establish a church in Philadelphia.

7:04 The second largest city in the United States and a hub for various reform movements. I just want to point out how ironic it is that the two guys most responsible for introducing vegetarianism to America were named Cow-herd and Met-calfe. Unfortunately for the Bible Christians, their complete abstention from meat and alcohol were not popular ideas when they arrived. The Temperance Society wouldn’t be formed for another decade, so the church failed to gain any traction and was slowly losing members. In an attempt to save his dwindling flock, Metcalfe sought connections with other movements, like the pacifists and abolitionists.

7:42 Which is how he came into contact with William Alcott. Remember this guy. As you can see, he becomes important later, but he’s on a different branch. In 1820, Metcalfe began writing pamphlets to spread his views, including the first pro-temperance and the first pro-vegetarian arguments to be published in America. As the years went by, the Bible Christians gained enough support that they opened a proper church in the city and officially incorporated in 1830. Their constitution stated that nobody could join unless they abstained from eating animals.

8:14 Which brings us right back to when William Metcalfe and Sylvester Graham first crossed paths in June 1830. They became instant friends and within six months, Graham resigned from the Temperance Society to become a full-time public lecturer. He still spoke out against alcohol, but now encouraged people to adopt a meatless diet as well. Sylvester Graham is the Elon Musk of vegetarianism. He didn’t come up with the idea, but he was so good at promoting it that he became the movement. The word vegetarian didn’t exist yet.

8:47 If you didn’t eat animals in the 1830s, you were known as a Grahamite. Sylvester Graham is responsible for the first wave of vegetarianism in the United States. The Bible Christians may have come up with it first, but there were never more than a few hundred of them. They’re more like proto-vegetarians. And unlike the Bible Christians, Graham didn’t use a religious justification for vegetarianism. He thought that a change in diet would cure all of society’s problems. This is where things are going to go off the rails.

9:22 In the Christian world a thousand years ago, love and sex were completely separate ideas. Sex was only for procreation and love was something you only gave to God. The Church was known as the Bride of Christ, loving anyone other than God was a betrayal. Marriages were arranged and romantic love wasn’t really a concept yet. If you were infatuated with someone other than God, that was lust. Which was a sin. Around the time of the Renaissance, lust came to be viewed as more of a sickness, which was blamed on demon possession.

9:54 You see, demons needed to collect human semen in order to create bodies for themselves. No, you can’t leave, you’re stuck on this ride with me now. Anyway, a female succubus would seduce a man in order to extract his vital fluid. Then it would transform into a male incubus to deposit that corruption into a woman in the hopes of birthing a demon. They used to blame birth defects on laying with demons. The idea that semen has some sort of mystical power associated with vitality and strength predates writing and can be found in completely disconnected cultures all over the world.

10:32 This isn’t just a weird Christian thing. But when people started performing human dissections and publishing anatomy textbooks, the demon possession stuff fell away and we were left with humoral theory. Which existed well before Christianity and continues in different forms to this day. You have four humors in your body and all illnesses result from an imbalance of those fluids: Black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, and blood. … Semen was thought to be derived from blood. In 1724, “Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution” was published in the American colonies by an unknown author.

11:10 It connected the blood/semen humoral theory to a new Christian idea that masturbation and non-procreative sex were sins. God doesn’t want you to waste your vital, life-giving fluid. Until the sinner stops, they’ll be stricken with disease. In Genesis 38, Onan was instructed by his father to give his dead brother’s wife a child. This was an ancient practice known as Levirate marriage. His dead brother’s child, who is really his child, would inherit everything as if Onan never existed. Obviously, Onan was not a fan of that arrangement.

11:46 Rather than go through with it, he withdrew and spilled his seed on the ground. The Lord was so displeased, that he was put to death. This is the story that many Christians use to say that masturbation and sex that isn’t for the purpose of bearing children are sins. This interpretation of the Bible didn’t come about until the 1600s or 1700s. And if you listened to the story, he wasn’t punished for pulling out, he was punished for disobeying his father. And even though he wasn’t jerking it in that story at all, masturbation came to be known as the Sin of Onan.

12:21 Doing it habitually was called Onania or Onanism. Auguste Tissot’s “A Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism” was translated into English in 1776. It introduced the idea of Sexual Degeneracy, which does not mean what you think it means. It has nothing to do with morality or kinks or anything. You see, almost all human illnesses can be traced back to chronic masturbation and the loss of semen. Since blood is turned into semen, the more semen you expend, the more blood you lose, causing an imbalance of your four humors.

12:56 This starts off as a general debility and loss of strength, but if it continues, your body will literally waste away – or degenerate. Tissot recognized that age alone did not turn boys into men. That was the result of semen being retained in the testicles. Which isn’t that far off right? It’s the correct body part at least. Every farmer who had castrated their animals and every choir boy in the church had been witness to that effect, so the idea was accepted pretty quickly. And you’re not off the hook either ladies, even though your fluid is less valuable and matured, your weaker nervous systems make you much more sensitive to its loss, okay?

13:36 … Don’t get mad at me, that’s just science. Separate from that, in 1790, one of the founding fathers named Benjamin Rush proposed a more secular theory: There was only one disease that took many forms. Which he called Overstimulation. This is when a specific organ or part of the body becomes polluted due to overexcitement. If you eat something too spicy and get an upset stomach, that’s overstimulation. If you drink something too hot or too cold and get a headache, that’s also overstimulation. Rush taught that alcohol, tobacco, coffee, tea, spices, and condiments were all too stimulating for the body and should be avoided.

14:16 Since there was no germ theory yet, Rush proposed that venereal diseases were a localized putrefaction caused by overuse of the genitals. Either from the social vice, prostitution, or the secret and solitary vice, masturbation. Which is why masturbation was often referred to as self-pollution or self-abuse back in the day. Anyway, with that, we have four of the five major influences on Graham’s ideology in place. He was already a believer in temperance before he met the Bible Christians, who turned him on to vegetarianism.

14:49 Then he read some stuff about sexual degeneracy from Tissot, who combined religious justifications with humoral theory to say that masturbation was a sin. Followed by Benjamin Rush and his take on the four humors, known as overstimulation. Graham combined and repackaged all of these different ideas and began promoting them to the American public as a way to completely reform humanity. According to Graham, lascivious thoughts and sexual desires were the source of all disease. Whether it’s an irritated part of the body or a general debility brought on by the loss of blood, it all traces back to sex and masturbation.

15:27 He didn’t necessarily put the blame on the individual, though. At least, not in the sense that it was some kind of innate moral failing. According to Sylvester Graham, diet was the root cause of basically all evils in the world. The more varied your diet, the more stimulating and exciting it will be to your nervous system, causing irritability and disease. Therefore, Graham advised that you should limit yourself to only a few simple, plain foods. Eating a carnivorous diet increased carnal desires and salty foods caused salacious thoughts – even when you’re unconscious.

16:03 … There was no better proof of that to Graham than the wet dream. This is a quote from Graham’s “A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity,” originally published in 1834. When the night emissions are frequent, and the system extremely irritable, the patient should confine himself to a very few articles of diet, and eat but little, and be very uniform in all his habits: always very carefully avoiding full and late suppers. Milk will be found too heating and too oppressive for such persons. No animal food, therefore, should be used, in any quantity, by the patient: and no other liquid but pure, soft water, or toast water, should be drank by him.

16:46 Toast water is exactly what it sounds like. Put a piece of toast in a glass of water, let it soak for an hour, remove, and enjoy – If you can. The patient cannot be too careful to observe a strictly correct and undeviating regimen: – nor too scrupulously avoid spirits, and wine, and malt-liquors; and every other kind of alcoholic drinks – even in the smallest quantity; and opium, and tobacco, and coffee, and tea, and all other narcotics; – and pepper, and ginger, and mustard, and horse-radish, and peppermint; – in short, every kind of stimulating and heating substances.

17:25 I have had many young men come to me for advice, who were exceedingly reduced and afflicted by venereal errors; and I have invariably found that, after they had been relieved from nocturnal emissions for a considerable time, by strictly observing a correct regimen, and begun to feel themselves improving in spirits and health, a single glass of brandy and water, or a glass of wine or porter, or a cigar, or a cup of coffee, or a full meal of flesh, would cause emissions in the succeeding night. He goes on to describe masturbation’s effect on the body in great detail, including the pollution of the genitals, blindness, insanity, all of the other things we heard about and laughed at as kids.

18:10 But you have to put yourself in his shoes for a moment. The fact is, those symptoms were happening. But rather than being manifestations of a moral punishment for masturbation, they were caused by actual diseases like syphilis and gonorrhea. The microscopic causes for those diseases wouldn’t be discovered for decades. So he was kind of onto something when he blamed sex, he was just wrong about the mechanism. According to Graham, animals were pure and able to control their sexual urges. If humanity were in a similar state of purity, we wouldn’t want to engage in that activity to injurious effect.

18:47 So, we are clearly doing something wrong. The cure, as you’ve already figured out, was a bland, vegetarian diet with as little variation as possible. Well before Darwin’s Origin of Species, Sylvester Graham compared humanity to great apes and concluded that our natural food was supposed to be vegetables. Eating meat makes us no better than the violent, carnivorous animals. It causes a coarse disposition and irritable temper. War, poverty, and slavery only exist in the world because meat has made men cruel and aggressive.

19:20 If he could convince everyone to switch to a vegetarian diet, he could completely reform society. And that became the ultimate goal of first-wave vegetarians, or Grahamites. Ever since he was taken from his mother and sent to live in a series of foster homes, Graham was kind of obsessed with recreating his mother’s cooking and an idealized version of family life on a farm. It was the Industrial Revolution. People were moving into the cities and making fewer meals at home. They were going to grocers, butchers, and bakers to buy pre-made stuff – much like today.

19:55 Bread was eaten with practically every meal, sometimes, it was the meal. In order to keep up with demand, bakeries turned to cheaper ingredients, most notably white flour which had been bolted to remove the bran, and therefore most of the nutritional value, and then bleached using chlorine. In his 1837 book A Treatise on Bread and Bread-making, Graham called for a return to the days when mothers baked the family bread using homegrown, stone-ground, whole wheat flour. His slogan was “put the bran back in the bread” That message resonated with women and within a few years, recipes for Graham flour, Graham bread, and Graham crackers were being published in ladies’ magazines.

20:39 Not by Sylvester Graham himself, but by the Grahamites. I just want to make it clear that he did not invent anything. Whole wheat flour was the norm for most of human history. He just inspired its return. … So they named a cracker after him. Bread wasn’t his only recommendation though, Graham was preaching an entire lifestyle. Sleep on a hard mattress, no feather beds. Open your windows in the morning to breathe in fresh air. Get plenty of exercise and wear loose-fitting clothes – no more corsets, ladies. He also thought people didn’t bathe enough and encouraged people to wash their entire bodies in cold water at least once a week.

21:20 … Which was quite the ask in the early 1800s. This might sound like basic health and hygiene advice to us now, but these were completely new ideas back then. They might not have caught on if not for Sylvester Graham, who just happened to be in the right place at the right time. In the 1830s, most Americans lived on a diet of pork fat and pie. Just saying that made my insides gurgle. Which is probably why this time period is known as the Great American Stomachache. Can we take a moment to appreciate how stupid that word looks? Stoma-cha-chee?

21:56 The most common diagnosis was dyspepsia, which was a blanket term for indigestion, constipation, diarrhea, and everything in between. An entire industry of snake oils and miracle tonics was created to solve this problem. Eventually including Pepsi – that’s where the name comes from. Dyspepsia. Pepsi. But to add insult to injury, cholera arrived in the United States in 1832, which was basically dyspepsia on steroids. Imagine getting diarrhea so bad that you die in a matter of hours. That’s cholera. So not only was Graham’s prescribed lifestyle significantly more hygienic than the standard, but whole wheat bread added much more bulk to his followers’ diets, which tended to help move things along while preventing excessive dehydration.

22:47 Eating bread, drinking water, and taking a bath once a week made just as much sense, if not more, than all of the other cures that were on the market. Many of Sylvester Graham’s followers credited his diet and lifestyle with saving them from cholera. Grahamism quickly spread across the Northeast, attracting thousands of followers, including one Mary Baker Eddy. Mary was constantly sick. Her complaints included spinal irritation, neuralgia, dyspepsia, stomach ulcers– One of her diets was of bread and water only, developed by the inventor of the graham cracker.

23:23 He didn’t invent the Graham cracker you doofus! … I hadn’t researched this yet when I wrote that line. The Grahamites soon began to open boarding houses in major cities like New York and Boston which adhered to the Graham lifestyle. Visitors were fed bread and water in a communal dining space, slept on hard mattresses, and were required to take regular baths. These Graham houses quickly became a hub for reformists. If you believed in abolition, temperance, women’s suffrage, pacifism, socialism, or anything else, odds were, you were a Grahamite.

23:58 In April 1837, the followers of this progressive diet took it upon themselves to start the biweekly Graham Journal of Health and Longevity to promote the teachings of Sylvester Graham, without his direct involvement. Kind of like a fan-made r/Grahamite subreddit. It featured a schedule of his public appearances, reprintings of his writings and lectures, recipes for vegetarian meals, and most importantly, conversion stories. Grahamites wrote testimonials for the Journal that sounded almost evangelical. They would talk about how they went to a doctor who was unable to treat them, but once they switched to a vegetarian diet, they were cured of all of their ailments.

24:41 Testimonials like that were a popular tactic among certain religions at the time. But it’s also one of the few things modern vegetarians have in common with the Grahamites. The Graham Journal also featured the research of William Beaumont, who was able to observe the process of digestion through a fistula, or hole, leading directly into a man’s stomach. He concluded that vegetables were much more easily broken down in the body than meat. This argument is still used today and is rooted in 1800s Overstimulation theory: don’t overwork your body or you might get sick.

25:14 The Graham Journal had several competitors at the time which divided its readership. So in October 1839, they merged with the Library of Health, a medical magazine started by William Alcott. Which also promoted vegetarianism. In the first issue after the merger, Graham suggested that the next generation be raised without access to meat, alcohol, spices, and all of the other overstimulating temptations. It was extreme views like that which made Graham start to seem like a weirdo, causing the movement to distance itself from its spiritual founder.

25:49 As a result, he retired from the lecture circuit in 1841. As we’ve already established, William Alcott met William Metcalfe shortly after he came to the United States. Through Metcalfe, he was introduced to Sylvester Graham and became an instant convert to vegetarianism. In 1837, he invited Graham to speak in Boston and the event was protested by a bunch of butchers and bakers who viewed Graham’s homemade bread and meatless diet as threats to their livelihoods. The crowd had to be dispersed by guards shoveling lime down on them from the rooftops.

26:23 It burns your skin on contact, it’s the closest thing they had to tear gas. Graham and Alcott founded the American Physiological Society in 1837, which combined Graham’s somewhat religious fanaticism with Alcott’s medical training to move vegetarianism in a more secular and scientific direction. When William Alcott brought Graham to Boston, he likewise convinced his cousin, Bronson Alcott, to adopt a meatless diet. Bronson belonged to the prestigious Transcendentalist Club with notable figures like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, both of whom were fellow Grahamites.

26:59 Within a few years, he convinced his entire family to go vegetarian, which his wife absolutely hated. My diet too is obviously not enough diversified, having been almost exclusively coarse bread and water. The apples we have had, not being mellow, and my teeth very bad, my disrelish for cooking so great that I would not consume that which cost me so much misery to prepare. All these causes have combined to make me somewhat irritable, or morbidly sensitive to every detail of life. For the record, many women became Grahamites specifically because preparing vegetables was less time consuming than preparing meat.

27:35 Despite that convenience, the food made her miserable. She must’ve felt even worse when her husband came up with the idea for Fruitlands. Bronson Alcott got together with a man named Charles Lane to create a utopian community based on socialist and vegetarian ideals to prove that dietary intemperance and meat-eating caused all of society’s ills. They advertised their venture in newspapers to attract people to their proposed community. Aside from Bronson and his family, a grand total of eleven people signed up and they bought an eleven-acre plot in Harvard, Massachusetts.

28:12 They began their experiment in June 1843. … It lasted all of six months. Fruitlands wasn’t just a meatless community – they took animal welfare very seriously. No butter, milk, eggs, or cheese. Honey could not be stolen from the bees and rabbits were allowed to roam freely through their fields. They had similar views regarding the exploitation of people. Tea, sugar, and molasses were banned because of their reliance on slave labor. Everyone had to wear linen because cotton was produced by slaves and wool was harvested from animals.

28:48 They were so extreme that the soil had to be tilled by human hands and animal manure could not be used as fertilizer. Unsurprisingly, crop yields were so poor that the commune fell apart that December. Bronson Alcott’s family was the last to leave on January 14, 1844. His daughter Louisa May Alcott eventually wrote a book about her experience at Fruitlands titled Transcendental Wild Oats. That’s why this branch just ends. Epic fail. Interesting side note, Bronson briefly dabbled in Christian Science later on, so if this were a different video there’d probably be a string here but, let’s keep it simple.

29:29 Now, this isn’t on the board because it happened in England, so who cares, but in 1847, the Bible Christians helped to found the Vegetarian Society. Not to be outdone, William Metcalfe got together with William Alcott and Sylvester Graham to organize the first meeting of the American Vegetarian Society in May 1850. Finally, all of the different vegetarian groups were united under one banner: the Bible Christians, Grahamites, physiologists, and the water-curists. Water has been used as medicine since basically forever, but we didn’t start assigning mystical healing powers to it until 1810, when Samuel Hahnemann published the Organon and created homeopathy.

30:12 The basic gist is that like cures like. So if you have a fever, you should take something that induces a fever to like, cancel it out. And the more you dilute it in water, the greater the effect. Within a decade, people began to think that if you have to dilute a compound until it’s basically undetectable for it to have any benefit, what is the point of adding the medication at all? It’s clearly the water itself that is doing the healing. Vincent Priessnitz took that idea and ran with it, opening the first water cure facility in 1822 in Gräfenburg, Austria – now part of Czechia.

30:49 According to the water-curists, there are three properties of water. Number one, taken inside or out, water dissolves poisonous elements in the blood. Two, water withdraws all unhealthy matter to purify the system. And three, water strengthens and braces the constitution … whatever that means. A visit to a water cure facility included drinking lots of water, taking lots of baths, visiting the saunas and steam rooms, and wrapping any areas of the body that were giving you trouble with wet towels to draw out the toxins.

31:22 Through osmosis, I guess? So we’ve got Vincent Priessnitz here, the father of hydropathy, or hydrotherapy, or just the water cure. But he was a German and not a vegetarian. This was Graham’s fifth and final influence. He incorporated a few hydropathic teachings, like drinking lots of water and taking lots of baths, but didn’t think that water itself had any magical healing powers. The fullest version of hydrotherapy didn’t take off in America until Joel Shew opened Dr. Shew’s New York Water-Cure Institution in 1843.

31:56 The first facility of its kind in the United States, where he fed people the Graham diet. Within a few years, numerous competing establishments were opened across the country by people like Russell Trall and James Caleb Jackson… and while we’re here, since we’re already on the subject… Mary checked into the Vail Hydropathic Institute, where they treated people using what they called “the water cure.” You basically drank a lot of water and took a lot of baths. It’s almost like they’re all connected or something. Anyway, Joel Shew also began the Water-Cure Journal in 1845, edited by Russell Trall.

32:35 When William Alcott’s Library of Health closed down in 1847, Shew’s publication became the main vegetarian magazine. So it shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that when William Metcalfe organized the first meeting of the American Vegetarian Society with William Alcott and Sylvester Graham, he invited Joel Shew and Russell Trall along for the ride. William Alcott was elected as its first president, with nine vice presidents, including Joel Shew and Sylvester Graham, with William Metcalfe and Russell Trall serving as secretaries.

33:07 The preamble to the group’s constitution lays out their intended goal: The objects of this Association are to induce habits of abstinence from the flesh of animals as food, by the dissemination of information upon the subject, by means of verbal discussions, tracts, essays and lectures, exhibiting the many advantages of a physical, intellectual, and moral character, resulting from Vegetarian habits of diet; and thus to secure, through the association, example, and the efforts of its members, the adoption of a principle which will tend essentially to true civilization, to universal brotherhood, and to the increase of human happiness generally.

33:46 At their first official meeting in September 1850, the Society’s main task was to define vegetarian, which was an entirely new word. Yes, the British came up with it three years earlier but who cares? Here’s what they decided on. (Vegetarianism is) the art and science which teaches man to cull, dispose and modify, for food, those products of the vegetable kingdom only, which are best adapted to produce and sustain a sound mind and a sound body. The Dictionary of Medical Science followed up a year later with this definition.

34:20 Vegetarianism: A modern term, employed to designate the view that man, for his full mental and corporeal development, ought to subsist on the direct productions of the vegetable kingdom and totally abstain from flesh and blood. Now, I have a question for you – what counts as flesh and blood? It may seem obvious to us now, but when the AVS began, this was an actual question they had to answer. Is honey vegetarian? It isn’t in the vegetable kingdom, but it also isn’t flesh and blood. What about milk or eggs? Those come from animals but again, aren’t flesh and blood.

34:55 The AVS came to the conclusion that “animal food” are “such substances as have been a component of a living animal body.” That left milk, eggs, honey, and all of the other little exceptions up to the individual. If you ate those, you were known as an ovo-lacto-vegetarian. If you didn’t, you were simply an extreme vegetarian. Nowadays, we call people who avoid all animal products “vegans.” But that term didn’t exist until 1944. The AVS kept the definition loose because even though it’s called the Vegetarian Society, it was really a social reform group pushing for true civilization and universal brotherhood.

35:37 They needed all the people they could get. And good luck telling a bunch of farmers that they can’t consume their own dairy products. William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, fully endorsed the vegetarian movement. The two were inextricably linked, which is to say that if you were against slavery, you were probably a vegetarian. When the AVS launched the American Vegetarian and Health Journal in January 1851, James Caleb Jackson raised a glass of water and toasted its creation, saying “Total Abstinence, Women’s Rights, and Vegetarianism!” If you believed in temperance and women’s suffrage, you were probably a vegetarian.

36:16 So, to all of the people who swear that if you were alive back then, you would have been against slavery and for women’s rights – Would you also be willing to give up meat? Because that was kind of part of the deal. The American Vegetarian Society was founded the same year as the Compromise of 1850. Which basically said that for every free state, you had to have a slave state to keep a healthy balance and not throw off the country’s humors. Vegetarianism was thought to be a vehicle through which we could avoid a Civil War and achieve lasting peace with gender and racial equality.

36:51 And to stop people from masturbating, don’t forget that part. Sylvester Graham died on September 11, 1851. The worst thing to ever happen to America on that date – Never Forget. Since he was still the celebrity figurehead of the vegetarian movement, his death cast doubt on the efficacy of the diet. The AVS tried to keep it quiet by only announcing his passing in the back pages of the Journal. But of course, people kept asking questions about how and why he died. So the vegetarian brass had to go into damage control.

37:22 In December, Russell Trall, who was present at Graham’s death, basically threw him under the bus. Stating that while he was 57 years old when he passed, he only became a vegetarian at the age of 40, and he was always kind of feeble. He also noted that Sylvester strayed from his diet in his later years. His doctor had prescribed him red meat in order to increase his blood circulation. There were even rumors that he was drinking. Some time later, William Alcott wrote his account of Graham, saying that he was always overworked, irritable, fretful, and anxious.

37:56 Going so far as to say that Sylvester was addicted to worry, which undoubtedly contributed to his death. With that no-fap weirdo Sylvester Graham out of the picture, the AVS hoped to be taken more seriously as a social reform movement and became more politically involved. Here’s another rhetorical question for you – what party do vegetarians and vegans typically vote for today? I ask that question because in 1854, the Republican party was founded specifically to end slavery, and quickly became a haven for every other reform movement.

38:29 This is a political cartoon making fun of its menagerie of progressivism. Moving from left to right, we have a vegetarian and temperance advocate. Then a suffragette. A socialist. A free love advocate. A Catholic. And an offensive racial caricature. The man on the far right is John C Fremont, the Republican presidential candidate who lost to James Buchanan in 1856. The Republican party was created in direct response to the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which introduced the idea of popular sovereignty. Meaning that the people living in a territory get to decide whether it will be a free state or a slave state.

39:07 This gave Henry S Clubb an idea. He was a British Bible Christian who recently moved to America and joined the AVS. On May 6, 1855, he organized the Kansas Vegetarian Settlement Company, which hoped to turn Kansas into a free state by populating it with vegetarians. Every single colonist had to be vetted to make sure they were a true vegetarian and supported the abolition of slavery. In the end, 50 families were chosen. The proposed settlement would be based on Orson Fowler’s Octagon design. Every house was octagon-shaped and would be centered around an octagonal town square – or town octagon, I guess.

39:45 In any case, it was known as Octagon City, Kansas. They chose a site along the proposed route of the Transcontinental Railroad. So that once the line was complete, the town would automatically be connected. This is a letter from one of the group’s surveyors. The weather has been quite seasonable and crops are truly promising -- corn especially -- in fact every thing. All wild fruits are in abundance -- such as have not passed and there is no country I reckon can match this in yield of wild fruits. Grapes are ripe now in the greatest plenty I ever knew -- and the best ones too.

40:19 Fall grapes will come in yet. Plums -- "lots of 'em." In every respect -- there cannot well be a land better suited to vegetarians than Kansas. The first settlers arrived in March of the following year to find the area infested with mosquitoes. By October, there was a malaria epidemic, their water source had dried up, and they were being harassed by pro-slavery forces and the Osage Indians whose land they were living on. This second attempt at a utopian, vegetarian society also fell apart after six months. Many of the settlers decided to join John Brown to actually do something about slavery.

40:57 Sure, they believed in pacifism. … But they believed in abolition more. Henry S Clubb went on to fight for the Union during the Civil War, and this won’t be the last we see of him. While all of this was happening, the American Vegetarian Society was struggling financially. In October 1854, they discontinued the American Vegetarian and Health Journal, with all of its subscribers being rolled over to the Water-Cure Journal. By 1857, the American and British Vegetarian Societies had a reciprocal relationship. Being a member of one meant you were also a member of the other.

41:30 Two years later, William Alcott died and our old friend William Metcalfe was elected as its new president. In September 1862, having failed to prevent the Civil War, the American Vegetarian Society voted to disband entirely. For the next few decades, there was no organized vegetarian movement in the United States. James Caleb Jackson, the guy who gave the water toast, opened a sanatorium named Our Home on the Hillside in upstate New York in 1858. It was a water cure facility that fed people a Graham diet with an emphasis on exercise.

42:05 There was no meat, alcohol, or tobacco allowed on the premises and guests were encouraged to take part in outings, lectures, concerts, and dances. Women weren’t allowed to wear corsets because they were considered too constricting. Instead, they wore bloomers, which was the unofficial uniform for suffragettes and other reformist women. … And were extremely controversial at the time. In 1863, Jackson invented a new health food for his guests by taking slow-baked Graham bread, crumbling it into pieces, and then baking them again.

42:37 He named it Granula and it became the first cold breakfast cereal. It had to be soaked in water for at least twenty minutes before it was edible. Most people just left it in a bowl overnight. Despite that, it proved popular enough that he founded the Our Home Granula Company to sell it as a packaged good in grocery stores along with a product named Somo, a cereal-based coffee alternative with no caffeine. James Caleb Jackson might be the first person to sell health food to the general public, rather than just serving it at a hospital or sanatorium.

43:10 After becoming paralyzed, possibly from a stroke, a man named James White checked into Our Home in 1865. Unfortunately, he wasn’t cured, and his wife Ellen blamed the various social distractions like dancing and theater. Shortly after, Ellen White received a divine vision telling her that she should open her own health facility based on her Adventist beliefs. Oh snap, is this it?! You’re finally going to do it?! No, this isn’t a religion video, we’re talking about vegetarianism. How are you going to make a video about vegetarianism and not talk about the Seventh-Day Adventists?

43:46 I mean, I was just gonna briefly mention them. I wasn't gonna go in-depth or anything. Why not? Okay, you claim to be me from the future, right? Right. Have you ever made a Seventh-Day Adventist video? No, that’s why I’m trying to get you to. Right but, you’re from the future, so you know how this plays out already. I never make that video. I’ll tell you what man, if you want an SDA video so badly – You make it and I’ll put it on the channel. Is this a trick? Nope, not a trick. I will upload it as soon as you get it to me.

44:24 Are we going to… split the revenue– Don’t press your luck buddy. Oh… well I better get started! That’s right, off you go! Okay well, I do need to like, summarize them a bit, otherwise the rest of this video won’t make sense. As a result of her experiences at Our Home, Ellen White took many of Jackson’s methods and turned them into Adventist doctrine. No alcohol, tobacco, meat, salt, condiments, lard, or cake. Only fruits, vegetables, Graham bread, and water. Today, they are the largest group of vegetarians in the country.

44:57 They’re the reason we have vegetarian options on airplanes. But back then, they were just another tiny Third Great Awakening sect. Just like the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Christian Scientists. This was all happening at the same time. Ellen White opened the Western Health Reform Institute in 1866. It was a direct copy of James Caleb Jackson’s Our Home. Yet another water cure facility that fed people the Graham diet and dressed women in bloomers. Even the Seventh-Day Adventists thought it was lame, it averaged sixteen patients a month and was hemorrhaging money.

45:30 The Institute didn’t employ any doctors, it was just a bunch of degree-mill naturopaths. So the SDA leadership decided they needed to hire an actual physician as its director to increase its credibility. The man they chose for the job was John Harvey Kellogg. John was raised as an Adventist and worked for the church’s publishing company as a teenager. As a result, he was very well acquainted with their health doctrines. Including the works of Sylvester Graham and the various water-curists. Growing up, he suffered from numerous gastro-intestinal problems, including bloody colitis and anal fissures.

46:09 So he used the Graham diet as a way to alleviate his symptoms. In 1864, Ellen White published An Appeal to Mothers: The Great Cause of the Physical, Mental, and Moral Ruin of Many of the Children of Our Time. … Care to guess what she thought the cause was? It was masturbation, because of course it was. Since Kellogg was the one editing and printing these works, he adopted many of these ideas and developed a strong aversion to sex. After six years of trying to get the Western Health Reform Institute off the ground, Ellen sent John to take a six-month course from a homeopathic water-curist so that he could take over as director of the facility.

46:48 In the Fall of 1872, he began studying at the Hygeio-Therapeutic College. Run by our old friend, Russell Trall. It’s like there were only a dozen vegetarians in the country and they just keep showing up as background characters in each other’s stories. John Harvey Kellogg and Russell Trall did not see eye to eye, especially when it came to sex. In fact, Russell had an exceedingly progressive view on women’s rights considering the time period. This is from his book titled Sexual Physiology, which came out in 1866. Just one year after the Civil War.

47:23 No truth is to my mind more self-evident, no rule of right more plain, no law of Nature more demonstrable, than the right of a woman to her own person. Nor can this right be alienated by marriage. … The great want of the age, of humanity – the great need of man as well as of woman – is, the recognition of women’s equality. Would it not excite the just indignation of a man to be told by any person, even though that person were his “lawful-wedded” wife, that he must beget children when he did not desire them? Or that he must perform the act of sexual intercourse when he did not feel inclined to?

48:02 Certainly, he would never submit to such dictation, such tyranny, nor should he. And why should woman? Once Kellogg graduated the course, he did not feel qualified to run the Institute. He didn’t even list Trall’s course on his CV. So, less than a year later, he began medical school at the University of Michigan and then transferred to the Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City; the most prestigious medical training facility in the country at the time. While he was there, he specialized in two areas: Gastrourinary surgery and “midwifery and the diseases of women.” He lived on a diet of two apples and seven Graham crackers a day, with the occasional coconut or oatmeal – which had only recently been introduced as a mass-produced packaged food by Henry Parsons Crowell.

48:52 Like many broke college students today, Kellogg complained that preparing oatmeal was too difficult and wished he could just buy pre-cooked cereal that was ready to eat. Bellevue strictly followed the allopathic school of medicine, or as we call it today… Medicine. So when it came time for Kellogg to complete his three years of residency, he was required to do so under a similarly trained physician. Kellogg didn’t do that. He lied and studied under a homeopathic water-curist named OT Lines, who was a faculty member at Russell Trall’s Hygeio-Therapeutic College.

49:29 His doctoral thesis proposed that all diseases and illnesses were the body’s way of expressing that its natural processes had been interrupted. The only cure was fresh air, exercise, a vegetarian diet, and drinking lots of water. You’d think at some point someone would come up with an original thought, but nope. On October 1, 1876, John took over as the director of the Western Health Reform Institute and his first order of business was to change the name to the Battle Creek Sanitarium – a new word he just came up with.

50:03 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.

50:42 Despite Kellogg’s intentions, the Battle Creek Sanitarium was indeed a health resort and not a hospital. They didn’t treat any contagious diseases or what they called “stretcher cases.” They only accepted patients with dyspepsia and neurasthenia – or weakness of the nerves. The Sanitarium, commonly known as just “the San,” quickly became a high-end spa for the rich and famous. And a hub for quack medicine, health fads, and miracle cures. While he encouraged a vegetarian diet, meat was still on the menu. To counteract that, he fed his patients zwieback as an appetizer before meals, which is basically twice-baked Graham bread.

51:24 You know these rye chips in Gardetto’s? Imagine these but as a whole slice of bread. The idea was to add bulk to whatever you eat next, so that your gut can keep things moving. But people hated them. They were too hard, too dry, and without any discernible flavor. So in 1877, he baked oats, wheat, and corn into loaves at extremely high temperatures and then crumbled them into pieces. He called this new invention Granula and it quickly became a favorite among guests at the Sanitarium. John Harvey Kellogg absolutely knew who James Caleb Jackson was.

51:59 Jackson sued him for infringing on his trademark and won, forcing John to change the name of his product to Granola. John hired his brother Will Keith Kellogg as his assistant and gave him a 25% stake in the newly founded Sanitarium Food Company so that they could continue to sell Granola to former Sanitarium guests through mail-order. He also opened an experimental kitchen in the basement in 1883, where Will was put to the task of creating wholesome foods that were free of added sugar, animal products, fillers, additives, and preservatives.

52:34 John Harvey quickly assumed the vacancy left by Sylvester Graham and became the celebrity voice of the vegetarian movement, which had been scattered to the wind ever since the breakup of the AVS. His lectures, articles, and books were incredibly popular, including The Proper Diet of Man and his magnum opus, Plain Facts for the Old and Young. Where he rails against the dangers of not only masturbation, but sex in general. 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.

53:11 That solitary vice is one of the most common causes of insanity, is a fact too well established to need demonstration here. Every lunatic asylum furnishes numerous illustrations of the fact. Authors are universally agreed, from Galen down to the present day, about the pernicious influence of this enervating indulgence, and its strong propensity to generate the very worst and most formidable kinds of insanity. It has frequently been known to occasion speedy, and even instant, insanity. In a chapter titled “Results of Secret Vice” he describes the various symptoms that will arise from masturbation, including: General debility, dyspepsia, heart disease, sore throat, impotence, sterility, testicular atrophy, spinal irritation, dimness of vision, ocular weakness, deafness, epilepsy headaches hysteria hot and cold flashes, cancer, stunted growth, and I’m going to stop there because I’m ran out of breath.

54:04 Since his books were obviously written for adults, he also includes a very creepy description of how to catch your child in the act. Many children pursue the practice at night after retiring. If the suspected one is observed to become very quickly quiet after retiring, and when looked at appears to be asleep, the bedclothes should be quickly thrown off under some pretense. … If he is found in a state of excitement, in connection with the other evidences, with a quickened circulation as indicated by the pulse, or in a state of perspiration, his guilt is certain, even though he may pretend to be asleep; no doubt he has been addicted to the vice for a considerable time to have acquired so much cunning.

54:45 Don’t laugh ladies, he had equally disturbing advice on how to catch you too. If the same course is pursued with girls, under the same circumstances, the (genitals) will be found congested. Ulceration about the roots of the nails, especially affecting one or both of the first two fingers of the hand, usually the right hand, is evidence of the habit. Now that he had sufficiently scared every parent in America into believing that their children were going to grow up to be chronic masturbators who won’t amount to anything, he laid out the various preventive measures they could take.

55:17 Since he was such a fan of Sylvester Graham, the first line of defense was predictably a simple, vegetarian diet. So much has already been said upon the relation of diet to chastity and its influence upon the sexual organs that it is unnecessary to add many remarks here. … A man that lives on pork, fine-flour bread, rich pies and cakes, and condiments, drinks tea and coffee and uses tobacco, might as well try to fly as to be chaste in thought. … Discard all stimulating food. Under this head must be included, spices, pepper, ginger, mustard cinnamon cloves essences all condiments, salt, pickles, etc., together with animal food of all kinds, not excepting fish, fowl, oysters, eggs, and milk. …

56:02 Stimulating drinks should be abstained from with still greater strictness. Wine, beer, tea, and coffee should be taken under no circumstances. The influence of coffee in stimulating the genital organs is notorious. Chocolate should be discarded also. … In place of such articles as have been condemned, eat fruits, grains, and vegetables. There is a rich variety of these kinds of food, and they are wholesome and unstimulating. Graham flour, oatmeal, and ripe fruit are the indispensables of a (diet) for those who are suffering from sexual excesses.

56:35 When diet inevitably fails, the suggested treatments begin with shame and ramp up to the ridiculous. In children, especially those who have recently acquired the habit, it can be broken up by admonishing them of its sinfulness, and portraying in vivid colors its terrible results. … In younger children, with whom moral considerations will have no particular weight, other devices may be used. Bandaging the parts has been practiced with success. Tying the hands is also successful in some cases; but this will not always succeed, for they will often contrive to continue the habit in other ways....

57:10 Covering the organs with a cage has been practiced with entire success. If you think wearing a literal chastity belt is extreme, you aren’t prepared for what comes next. … Guys, I hope you’re sitting down. A remedy which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision.... The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anæsthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases.

57:43 The soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practice, and if it had not previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed. Non-religious neonatal circumcision was not a thing until John Harvey Kellogg popularized it as a preventative against masturbation in his 1881 book Plain Facts for Old and Young. That’s where it started. This sexually repressed vegetarian is single-handedly responsible for what 80% of American dicks look like today. And as we all know, it worked. Ever since the 1880s, American men have been completely incapable of masturbating, leading to the greatest technological advancements in the world.

58:27 We even put a man on the moon. But, for those rare men who just can’t seem to control themselves, there’s one final treatment option that is so brutal, I’m not going to have anyone read it out loud. Here it is, feel free to pause and read it if you dare. I’m really not sure why it has to be silver, unless this is intended to be used on werewolves or something. If you’re wondering about girls, their proposed treatment is not the one you’re thinking of – that procedure thankfully never caught on in the United States.

58:56 Kellogg’s recommendation just involved acid. Before you write this off as something that happened over a century ago and therefore has no bearing on the present day… John Harvey Kellogg lived until 1943. If you’re a Millennial like me, your grandparents grew up learning this and passed it on to your Baby Boomer parents. More than anyone else, Kellogg is responsible for the negative stigma surrounding masturbation that continues to this day. Now, if you don’t think his teachings affected your family, I have a question for you – Was anyone elses’ grandma obsessed with how many bowel movements you had in a day?

59:34 Any time I wasn’t feeling well, the first question was, “when was the last time you pooped?” That also comes from John Harvey Kellogg, who studied monkeys and apes at the zoo and determined that human beings should evacuate their bowels four times a day. Not two, or three, or five, but exactly four. If you’re unable to do so, it’s time for an enema. And not just any enema… a yogurt enema. In 1876, Henry S Clubb visited the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. While he was there, he reconnected with the American Bible Christians and took a position as their pastor.

1:00:14 Ten years later, he called for the formation of the Vegetarian Society of America and was elected as its Chairman and Director-General. Together with John Harvey Kellogg, they would constitute the second wave of vegetarianism. So we’ve got the proto-vegetarians, or Bible Christians, with their religious justifications. Then we had Sylvester Graham, the Grahamites, and the American Vegetarian Society, who were pushing for societal reform. Following that, we got John Harvey Kellogg and the Vegetarian Society of America, who were focused on individual health.

1:00:48 Yes, we had the American Vegetarian Society followed by the Vegetarian Society of America. AVS VSA… We just aren’t that creative. Refined white sugar had finally become cheap enough that candies and sodas were being sold like never before, which was causing all kinds of medical and dental issues. To combat that, Kellogg’s experimental kitchen started introducing all sorts of wholesome vegetarian products to the market. Kellogg was an early advocate for adding nuts to the vegetarian diet. Prior to him, nuts were thought to be too difficult for humans to digest and of low nutritional value.

1:01:25 But he saw them as a healthy, non-animal source of protein. But since sugar was rotting people’s teeth, nuts were pretty difficult to chew. So Kellogg boiled them and ground them into a paste, thus creating peanut butter as we know it today. Using nuts, he also invented Protose, a meatloaf substitute that could be flavored like chicken, beef, or veal. Followed by Nuttolene and Nuttose, which combined nuts and gluten to form a brick which could be sliced like cheese. If you’re keeping track, John Harvey Kellogg is responsible for popularizing nuts in America and inventing granola, peanut butter, mock meats, and vegan cheese.

1:02:04 Not every vegetarian was happy about these new products. In M R L Sharpe’s The Golden Rule Cook Book, she chastised those who ate meat substitutes, saying that they were still pretending to eat “scorched carcasses.” She also blasted people who became vegetarians for personal health reasons rather than a moral obligation to our fellow living creatures. Beginning a long vegetarian tradition of purity testing. Kellogg’s most famous invention wouldn’t come along until 1895, when he created a flaked wheat cereal he called Granose.

1:02:36 It was an instant favorite at the Sanitarium, so his brother Will continued to perfect the recipe. In 1898, the world was introduced to Corn Flakes and the breakfast cereal industry was born. I don’t want to get too into that story though, because it’s a tangent so large it deserves its own video. And luckily for you, I’ve already made that video over on Nebula. Nebula is a subscription streaming service which has been hosting my content since the beginning. It was made by and for fellow creators as a place where we can try out different kinds of content without being punished by the algorithm.

1:03:09 Over there, I spend almost an hour discussing the crazy antics at the San, John Harvey’s love affair with enemas, and the rift created between him and his brother over Corn Flakes. As a celibate vegetarian, John had his own bizarre theories on diet and health and became increasingly eccentric and arrogant as he got older. He literally thought his shit didn’t stink. You can see that video over on Nebula months before it comes out for everyone else. You’ll also find all of my previous content over there without sponsor segments like this one.

1:03:40 Many of those older videos are alternate versions containing jokes that were too hot for Youtube or 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 are a member. You can currently get a year of Nebula for only $2.50 a month. The Vegetarian Society of America’s official magazine, appropriately titled Vegetarian Magazine, regularly pushed Kellogg’s products.

1:04:13 They were available by mail-order or at grocery stores around the country thanks to the railroad. Since this new wave of vegetarianism wasn’t advocating for racial, gender, or social equality, and was associated with the famous Battle Creek Sanitarium, it became a fad among the upper classes. The San was no longer seeing sixteen patients at a time, but 1600. The Vegetarian Federal Union was established by members of the British Vegetarian Society who wanted to connect with other vegetarians from around the world, hoping to form a unified, global movement.

1:04:48 Henry S Clubb persuaded the group to hold their annual meeting at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. They called the meeting the World Vegetarian Congress, which came to order on June 8. Two hundred vegetarians from around the world attended, making it the largest and most ethnically diverse gathering of vegetarians ever at that point. The Federal Union’s exhibit at the Fair promoted vegetarianism as – I kid you not – the “Final Solution to the Drink Question.” Following the Expo, vegetarian restaurants began popping up.

1:05:22 The first was in New York City in 1895 and was named… Vegetarian Restaurant Number 1. In 1900, Chicago opened the much more creative Pure Food Lunch Room. By 1904, there were fifty-seven similar restaurants around the country in cities like San Francisco, Milwaukee, Salt Lake City, and Des Moines. But despite that, it was still pretty difficult to convince the general public of the physical health benefits of a vegetarian diet. Many people, then and now, believed that it was impossible to maintain strength and vitality without eating meat.

1:06:01 In the earlier days of Vegetarian propaganda, it was difficult to convince an audience of the possibility of any feats of physical strength or endurance being performed without the consumption of butcher’s meat. … Vegetarian teachings were propagated mostly by men of intellectual mould, many of whom … not presenting the robust and plethoric condition which is looked upon by so many people as a sure sign of health. To translate that into modern English, the only people pushing vegetarianism at the time were a bunch of lanky nerds.

1:06:33 Thankfully there was a budding movement of “Physical Culturists” who were interested in maximizing their strength and athletic ability. Today we call them bodybuilders, and they experimented with a number of different diets to determine which was best. Since I’m talking about them in this video, I’m sure you can guess which one they landed on. The Physical Culture magazine began in 1898 and within a year, it was the largest publication to advocate for the vegetarian diet, with 40,000 subscribers. The VSA’s Vegetarian Magazine had fewer than 4000 subscribers.

1:07:08 They opened a vegetarian restaurant in New York City called Physical Culture in 1902, and it was so successful they opened twenty more locations. Irving Fisher was a patient at the Battle Creek San in 1904. He converted to vegetarianism and decided to do a study to compare vegetarian athletes to non-vegetarians to determine which diet was best. Since I’m talking about it in this video, I’m sure you can guess– Fisher had three test groups. Flesh-eating athletes, vegetarian athletes, and sedentary vegetarians. He had them perform three different endurance tests.

1:07:45 The first was to hold your arms out horizontally for as long as you can. The meat-eaters could do it for an average of 10 minutes, with the longest holding for 22. Vegetarian athletes averaged 89 minutes, but those results are heavily skewed by two people who held out for almost three hours. The record was earned by a sedentary vegetarian who kept his arms up for 200 minutes. Which is the entire runtime of Avatar 2 – plus eight minutes. The second exercise was deep knee bending. Carnivorous test subjects averaged 383, and again the vegetarians blew them out of the water with 927.

1:08:25 One vegetarian even managed to reach 2400 repetitions. Leg raises were the third and final exercise and surprisingly, flesh-eaters and flesh-abstainers were pretty even, with a difference of only nine. I’m curious as to why there was only one sedentary person for this exercise, but then again, I’m no scientist. Irving Fisher would go on to become the president of the American Eugenics Society. John Harvey Kellogg was also a eugenicist and founded the Race Betterment Foundation in 1914 with the goal of purifying humanity of crime, intemperance, disability, and psychosis through a vegetarian diet.

1:09:07 But also through sterilizing idiots, imbeciles, the feebleminded, the insane, epileptics, moral degenerates, and sexual perverts. We must cultivate clean blood, instead of blue blood. Society must establish laws and sanctions, which will check the operation of heredity in the multiplication of the unfit. At this point, eugenics became more important to Kellogg than vegetarianism and he would spend the rest of his life focused on that. You know where to go if you want to learn more. Since this wave of vegetarianism was focused on individual health, rather than some sort of political or societal goal, there really wasn’t much need for an organized movement.

1:09:45 When Henry S Clubb died in 1921, the Vegetarian Society of America died with him. Do you see how the board just ends here? That’s because the third wave of vegetarianism wouldn’t come along for another fifty-three years. The North American Vegetarian Society was founded in 1974 and still exists today. Their primary concern when they began was animal welfare. In the years after World War 2, the middle class exploded and the American dream was born. Everyone wanted a house with a white picket fence, two kids, a dog, and a cat.

1:10:19 Prior to this, pets were something that only rich people had the time and money for. Since the average American now had animal family members with names and personalities, it was much easier to imagine that all animals had their own wants, needs, and desires. Not being eaten was probably one of them. If I had to guess, I’m sure all of those Disney movies with talking animals played a role too, but that’s just a theory. A pet theory. Nowadays, when you ask people what argument is most likely to convince them to switch to vegetarianism, the top answer is climate change and the environmental impact of factory farming.

1:10:58 Which is how I define the fourth wave of vegetarianism. Religious reasons in the before-time, then social reform, individual health, a long period of nothing, animal welfare, and now, environmentalism. Factory farming didn’t exist when the VSA disbanded. The general population didn’t really know about climate change until the 1980s and 90s. So the current wave of vegetarianism is completely disconnected from the guys who were obsessed with masturbation. They’ve never believed that switching to a meatless diet will end all war or literally improve the human genome.

1:11:33 Unlike their predecessors, the modern waves don’t have a single celebrity figurehead to lead the movement – although many have tried. It’s a much more democratized version of vegetarianism. And there are millions of vegetarians and vegans who aren’t members of any special societies. Never in a million years did I think that a video about graham crackers and corn flakes would take me on a journey through vegetarianism, temperance, humoral theory, abolition, the water cure, women’s suffrage, quack medicine, and an entire religion.

1:12:06 And neither of those foods were even invented to stop people from masturbating. They were digestive aids that were created by men who also happened to be extreme no-fappers. So for the second time this year, my original thesis wasn’t valid. As I said in the beginning, I eat meat. That’s despite the fact that if I’m honest with myself, in the darkest corner in the back of my mind, I know that it is kind of messed up. You can say it’s natural all you want, the idea that I’m going to kill something specifically so I can consume it and feel satiated for only a few hours does feel a little wrong to me.

1:12:43 Especially if I’m not in a situation where I have to. That’s why every Intro Psych class uses vegetarianism as the prime example of cognitive dissonance. You know it’s wrong and yet you do it anyway. The problem is, I’m just not sure I can give it up cold turkey. Give it up completely. Do you remember back in the day, when Youtube beef was– when Youtube drama was really popular? Well my favorite genre was vegan callout videos. Vegans yelling at other vegans for not being vegan enough. It was hilarious. But then I heard an argument from the channel Unnatural Vegan that changed my perspective on a lot of things, actually.

1:13:22 Just like recovering alcoholics, many vegetarians and vegans quantify their success through streaks. “I’ve been a vegan for five years running,” sounds a lot like “I’ve been sober for the last ninety days.” And with just one mess-up, you lose all of your progress and the clock resets to zero. That’s a really stupid way to measure your growth because it leaves absolutely no room for error. It’s all or nothing. It’s hard to see improvement if you have to keep starting over. So, instead of that, you should think of it as a percentage.

1:13:54 If you accidentally eat meat for one meal, you don’t go back to the beginning. You are still 99.9% vegan for the year, which is miles ahead of everyone else. Most of us, myself included, probably aren’t ready to shoot for 100% when it comes to giving up meat. But I do know that I can at least increase my current percentage. If you do Meatless Mondays, you are 14% vegetarian. If you eat only corn flakes for breakfast every morning, you are 33% vegetarian. When you think of it that way, it almost becomes a game where you’re looking for ways to increase your score.

1:14:31 Maybe you were only 20% vegetarian this year. You could make it a New Year’s resolution to become 25 or 30%. Do you see how this mindset could be applied to other areas of your life? You may not be ready to go full vegan, I know I’m not. But before we start a Second Great American Stomachache, I’m pretty sure we could all benefit from trying to up our personal vegetarian percentage. I’m not going to tell you what to do, but at least now, you know better. Hey everyone, sorry for the delay in getting this project out there.

1:15:05 Making two videos at the same time was a lot harder than I expected, so go check out the Kellogg video over on Nebula. Make sure to get your KB Morgan plush, they’re only going to make them if enough of you order them. If this is successful, we might be seeing more plushies from the KBCU. In the meantime, I’d like to give a shout out to my newest Golden Fork patrons: Owen, Kaffmot, Chris, James, Carrie, Jonathan, and Ivan. If you'd like to add your name to this list of chronic masturbators, head on over to patreon.com/knowingbetter.

1:15:32 Or, for a one time donation, paypal.me/knowingbetter. Don’t forget to purify that subscribe button, or the join button if you’re a true vegan. Check out my other 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 "The Cure for Literally Everything | Vegetarianism"?

In order: 0:00 Sylvester Graham, William Metcalfe, KB Morgan’s All-Bran Malted Nuts, Corn Flakes; 10:00 Sylvester Graham, Benjamin Rush; 20:00 Sylvester Graham, Bronson Alcott, Fruitlands, William Metcalfe; 30:00 Sylvester Graham, Vegetarian Society, William Metcalfe, American Vegetarian Society; 40:00 Ellen White, James Caleb Jackson, Vegetarian Society, John Harvey Kellogg; 50:00 John Harvey Kellogg, Sylvester Graham, Granola, James Caleb Jackson; 1:00:00 Vegetarian Society, John Harvey Kellogg, Nebula, Henry S Clubb; 1:10:00 Corn Flakes, Graham crackers, Nebula.

What is mentioned in this Knowing Better episode?

26 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Sylvester Graham, John Harvey Kellogg, William Metcalfe, Corn Flakes, Graham crackers, Ellen White. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "The Cure for Literally Everything | Vegetarianism"?

The episode runs 1 h 16 min; the transcript is about 12,364 words in 125 timestamped sections.

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