John Harvey Kellogg

• Born: February 26, 1852
• Birthplace: Tyrone, Michigan
• Died: December 14, 1943
• Place of death: Battle Creek, Michigan

American physician and surgeon

A health reformer, Kellogg advocated a way of life that included exercise, cleanliness, and a vegetarian diet focused on fruits, nuts, and whole grains. His search for a ready-to-eat form of whole grains led to the invention of flaked breakfast cereal.

Primary field: Food processing

Primary invention: Cereal flakes

Early Life

John Harvey Kellogg was born to John Preston and Ann Stanley Kellogg on their farm near Tyrone, Michigan, in 1852. A few months after his birth, Kellogg’s parents embraced the faith of Seventh-day Adventists. When Kellogg was four years old, the family moved to Battle Creek, Michigan. Though he received irregular schooling as a boy, John became an avid reader. He worked in his father’s broom shop for a year, until at the age of twelve he first attended school full time. After a year in school, he became acquainted with James and Ellen White, who helped found the Adventist Church. When James White, president of the Review and Herald Press, heard about the boy’s impressive performance in school, he offered him a job in 1864. As he worked his way up to typesetter and proofreader, Kellogg became familiar with Ellen White’s writings on Seventh-day Adventist health principles, which included vegetarianism.

At the age of sixteen, Kellogg accepted a position in a rural school, but he found the job too taxing on his somewhat delicate health. Eventually, he finished high school. As they hoped to improve the medical foundations of the Seventh-day Adventist’s Western Health Reform Institute, the Whites offered Kellogg encouragement and financial support to acquire a medical education. Kellogg completed the six-month course in water therapy at Dr. Russell Trall’s Hygieo-Therapeutic College in New Jersey and then attended the University of Michigan Medical School. He completed the first series of lectures but left because of the lack of clinical instruction. James White then lent him money to complete his medical degree at Bellevue Hospital Medical School, which combined classroom and clinical teaching. Kellogg graduated in 1875. In 1878, he married Ella Eaton. They had no biological children, and it is likely that their marriage was never consummated. During their marriage, however, they reared forty-two foster children, seven of whom they adopted.

Life’s Work

Kellogg led an extremely busy life filled with diverse projects. He joined his knowledge of standard medical practice in the performance of surgery with Adventist-inspired health principles that included vegetarianism, sexual continence, exercise, and hydrotherapy. In 1876, the Whites persuaded him to become chief physician of the financially failing Western Health Reform Institute. Within a year, Kellogg had renamed it the Battle Creek Sanitarium and had begun promoting its program of “biogenic” living to remain healthy. From its beginning, the sanitarium had a bakery to produce foods for those with digestive difficulties. As he initiated expansion and modernization of the facility during the 1880’s, his control grew and he integrated his health principles and current therapies observed during travels to European medical centers and health spas. In 1892, he reorganized the sanitarium and acquired full control of it.

All of the activities had one goal: the improvement of human health by means of correct living. Kellogg proscribed the consumption of not only meat but also sugar and condiments—foods that Kellogg felt impeded proper digestion and led to sexual excess—as well as stimulants, such as coffee, tea, and chocolate. Tobacco and alcohol were also forbidden. On the positive side, he recommended legumes and nuts for protein, whole grains, and fresh fruits.

Kellogg invented a number of grain foods, but not the first cereal. In 1863, James Caleb Jackson, whose ideas had inspired Ellen White, produced granula, a cereal composed of hard wheat-bran nuggets that required overnight soaking to eat. Kellogg conceived of the possibility of the “ready-to-eat” breakfast food during his days at Bellevue. In 1877, he invented a product called granola prepared from a mixture of oatmeal, cornmeal, and wheat baked into a thick biscuit that was then ground up. He had discovered that baking grain at a high temperature turned its starch into dextrin—that is, it completed the first stage of digestion and thus benefited those with digestive disorders. Kellogg started a mail-order business when former patients wanted to purchase his grain products. In 1890, he founded the Sanitarium Food Company. Besides granola, the company produced other healthful foods, such as crackers and a cereal-based coffee substitute. In 1894, Kellogg invented his most famous food, the flaked breakfast cereal, with the help of his brother, Will Keith Kellogg. When the Adventist board of directors refused to finance Kellogg’s ongoing research, Kellogg continued at his own expense and with his brother set up the Sanitas Food Company to market the new cereal as Granose.

In 1892, Kellogg invented a peanut butter composed of boiled peanuts mashed into a paste. He developed other vegetarian foods such as Savita Gravy (a bullion made from brewer’s yeast), meat substitutes composed of boiled peanut mash combined with wheat gluten or starch and flavored like different meats or salmon, and Bromose, a milk substitute composed of cereals and nuts that he touted in his 1896 book The Stomach for its digestibility and efficacy for weight gain. One meat substitute, Nuttose, introduced in 1896, served as the main dish for sanitarium dinners.

In 1902, the Battle Creek Sanitarium burned down, and during the process of rebuilding, the Adventist Church quarreled with Kellogg, both over his use of profits for his projects instead of for the church’s programs and over the suspicion that he ascribed to pantheism and not to the church’s theology. Though the church severed its relationship with Kellogg in 1907, he nevertheless retained control of the sanitarium and its food companies.

Relations between the Kellogg brothers soured over different business and marketing strategies; after almost a decade of conflict, the courts gave Will exclusive rights to sell corn flakes and to use the Kellogg name. John Kellogg continued to promote his ideas on food and diet. He accepted autointoxication, a theory that viewed the fecal content of the colon as the source of illness. Inspired by the views of microbiologist Ilya Mechnikov that attributed the long lives of Bulgarians to the consumption of beneficial bacteria in yogurt, Kellogg became an advocate of yogurt therapy by the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. At the sanitarium, patients ate yogurt and received yogurt enemas to maintain a healthy colon.

By the end of the second decade, Kellogg had discovered a nutritious meat substitute in the soybean, devoting several pages to soy-based foods in his The New Dietetics (1921). He invented foods such as an acidophilus soy milk in 1933, patented the following year, and a soy cheese and sold them through his Battle Creek Food Company. During his life, he received a total of thirty patents for food products, exercise equipment, and even an electric blanket. He also wrote more than fifty books.

At its zenith between 1915 and 1930, the sanitarium attracted many notable visitors such as Edgar Welch of grape juice fame, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and J. C. Penney. In the early 1930’s, the sanitarium experienced severe financial difficulties and was placed in receivership in 1933. After years of negotiations and reorganization, the U.S. government bought several of the main buildings in 1942. Kellogg had hoped to restore the sanitarium, but the ensuing legal and personal troubles adversely affected his health. He died on December 14, 1943, at the age of ninety-one.

Impact

The development of ready-to-eat cereals revolutionized the breakfast habits of Americans. Before their introduction, a typical American breakfast consisted of ham and fried potatoes. Kellogg’s flaked wheat cereal enjoyed sales of more than fifty tons at twelve cents a pound during its first year. A sixty-cent quantity of grain could thus be turned into $12 in sales. This success and the potential for profit inspired a number of competitors, including C. W. Post, who had been a patient at the Battle Creek Sanitarium. Post introduced Grape Nuts in 1897 and in 1908 introduced Elijah’s Manna, a corn flake cereal, later sold as Post Toasties. By the first decade of the twentieth century, more that forty companies selling cereals existed in the area around Battle Creek. Almost immediately, the competitors found ways to circumvent the patent taken out by Kellogg by adding ingredients to the flakes, for example. The courts ruled the patent invalid in 1903.

While Kellogg’s views on autointoxication soon met with disavowal from the medical profession, some of his products, such as the meat substitutes, did find markets in European countries, notably Germany. Eventually, foods such as soy and yogurt reached the standard market in the United States. Another food introduced by Kellogg, the psyllium seed, is the ingredient in contemporary laxative foods. Ironically, cereal is not highly nutritious unless fortified.

Bibliography

Money, John. The Destroying Angel: Sex, Fitness, and Food in the Legacy of Degeneracy Theory—Graham Crackers, Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, and American Health History. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1985. Provides context for Kellogg’s views on sexuality and his perception of the evils of masturbation and what he considered to be sexual excesses. Bibliography and index.

Numbers, Ronald L. “Sex, Science, and Salvation.” In Right Living: An Anglo-American Tradition of Self-Help, Medicine, and Hygiene, edited by Charles E. Rosenberg. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. Scholarly article explaining the influence that Ellen White’s ideas on sexuality had on Kellogg’s views of the subject. Fills in gaps left by Kellogg’s biographers. Endnotes.

Schwarz, Richard W. John Harvey Kellogg: Pioneering Health Reformer. 1970. Reprint. Hagerstown, Md.: Review and Herald, 2006. A full-length biography, though written in an admiring tone. Organized by topic rather than chronologically, the book lacks discussion of Kellogg’s views on sexuality as well as references and bibliography. Photographs and index.

Whorton, James C. Inner Hygiene: Constipation and the Pursuit of Health in Modern Society. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Examines the idea of autointoxication and the effects that the obsession with constipation had and continues to have on the American psyche. Places Kellogg’s views in their historical context. Index, endnotes.