The Problematic Guru
Cleanse your colon and more with John Harvey Kellogg
Well hello horny readers! The newsletter is going out a bit late tonight, which was giving me some anxiety. I had to remind myself that this is read across 48 US states and 102 countries. Fun fact: I have zero subscribers in the Dakotas.
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Adult Sex Ed comedically challenges why we think what we think about sex. In case you’re new, I’m Dani Faith Leonard, a comedy writer, film producer, and performer. In 2018, I started a comedy show called Adult Sex Ed and launched this newsletter last year. Each week, I take a fun deep dive into a topic that I’ve been researching. Want to know more? Read the whole description on substack here.
Ready to get a little smarter? Okay, let’s go!
In last week’s post about the strange and debatable history of chastity belts, I dropped a quote from “medical” professional and cereal inventor John Harvey Kellogg. He once said about chronic masturbators that “such a victim literally dies by his own hand.” Ahhhh, but what a way to go!
Kellogg is perhaps best known for inventing Corn flakes with his brother with the goal of stopping people from cracking one off at the breakfast table, or at any other time of the day. His legacy is actually really complicated. He promoted nutrition and hygiene to Americans at a time when streets were filthy and the average life expectancy was 41 years old. He held many patents and invented foods that would pave the way for the way we eat today. He was one of the nation’s first wellness gurus, so it sucks that he also espoused dangerous ideas about sexuality and race. The problematic health guru is a trope that has been around since the beginning of time and isn’t going anywhere.
I texted three friends and asked who the first person is who comes to mind when I say “problematic health guru” and they all shot back the same name—Gwyneth Paltrow. It’s true that in recent years, Paltrow has used her platform to promote vaginal steams, coffee enemas, jade eggs, impossible cleanse diets, and rectal ozone therapy, where one shoots ozone gas up their own butthole. She also uses her platform to link vibrators to self-care and promote sexual wellness, so the legacy of Goop will likely be complicated. A century before Goop, there was a problematic, but hilarious business genius named Lydia E. Pinkham who was the original snake-oil saleswoman (I wrote about her last year HERE). I specifically want to focus in on John Harvey Kellogg because his methods were WILD and he was so obsessed with masturbation that he built a whole career on preventing it.
So how did Kellogg become both a breakfast staple AND a wellness prophet? As it turns out, he mixed religion and medicine. Kellogg was born in Michigan in 1852 to a huge family of Seventh-day Adventists. The Adventists campaigned against alcohol and sex. The second half of the 1800s were the start of America’s hygiene revolution. By the time he earned his medical degree in 1875, Kellogg combined his obsessions with hygiene and abstinence and started to develop his own heath methods. He took over the Battle Creek Sanitarium, which was kind of like a health spa for Adventists and that’s where shit got crazy.
He started off by revolutionizing breakfast, which at the time consisted mostly of meat. He thought that patients should be eating “sterile” foods, and focused heavily on nuts, grains, and yogurt. Oh boy, did this motherfucker love yogurt (you’ll see what I mean in a minute). Kellogg and his brother first used graham biscuits to invent granola, but they were unsatisfied with the results. They tried the recipe with corn and launched Corn flakes in 1902. They sued each other for years for the rights to the company, but that’s a whole other story. The goal of Corn flakes: to start the day with a “clean” food that fight’s off the deadliest carnal desire, masturbation.
Kellogg was disgusted by sex his whole life and reportedly didn’t even consummate his own marriage. Different strokes for different folks might be how I would usually respond, but Kellogg used his position to push his views on others. He said that eating spicy foods and round shoulders are signs of a chronic masturbator (any one else checking their shoulders in the mirror?). He promoted genital mutilation, tying children’s hands to the bedposts, and eating Corn flakes if the first two options didn’t sit right with you.
Masturbation wasn’t the only focus at the Sanitarium. He was obsessed with exercise and clean colons, too. He invented machines for exercise, like the mechanical horse, and also a chair that shook patients so violently that they involuntarily defecated. He encouraged his patients to get multiple enemas a day — and invented his own enema machine for group use. Kellogg himself received an enema at breakfast and lunch. Watching your lunch date get an enema is more intimate than sex, if you ask me. As I mentioned earlier, he also loved yogurt and prescribed a pint of yogurt per day — one half through the mouth and the other through the anus. Excuse me?
He treated thousands of patients over the years, including Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Amelia Earhart, and President William Howard Taft, who definitely doesn’t look like someone who shot yogurt up his own ass. Perhaps Henry Ford honed some of his own views at the Sanitarium because Kellogg was a staunch eugenicist who promoted segregation. While so many of his views were problematic, he also invented some cool things: peanut butter (with George Washington Carver), meat substitutes, soy milk, the loofah mitt, and multiple surgical devices.
So, why is this even relevant today? Because there are problematic health gurus and “activists” all over the internet carrying on his traditions. The obsession with preventing masturbation brings the current anti-p*rn and anti-masturbation movement to mind. The current U.S. speaker of the house uses software to manage his own p*rn consumption and carries a lot of the same views about sex that Kellogg promoted over a century ago. Kellogg would have loved No Nut November, as long as it actually lasted all year. His yogurt enemas have strong Goop vibes, but I don’t think anyone would run out to buy that mechanical chair that makes people shit themselves.
While his methods were dangerous and strange, Kellogg lived to the ripe old age of ninety-one. We should all finish into a bowl of cereal in his honor.
PS: The vibrating chair that made people poop involuntarily is on the top left. #grouppoop
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Great post. I knew Kellogg was a nut, but this is some great research.