When Corn Flakes Were Part of an Anti-Masturbation Crusade

The piece traces how 18th- and 19th-century Western moral and medical thought turned masturbation into a declared social and medical crisis, citing influential works that portrayed it as a cause of physical and mental illness. John Harvey Kellogg emerges as the most prominent American crusader: a Seventh-Day Adventist physician who ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium, edited the health magazine Good Health, promoted vegetarianism and abstinence, and argued in Plain Facts for Old and Young that chronic self-stimulation produced a long list of ailments. Kellogg personally practiced sexual abstinence, lived in a sexless marriage, and supported eugenic ideas in his public health work.

Kellogg believed bland diets would suppress sexual desire and developed several dietary and medical interventions to that end. He created granula (later renamed granola after a naming conflict) and invented flaked cereals, including corn flakes, which his brother Will commercialized - adding sugar and founding what became the Kellogg Company, sparking a decades-long sibling feud. Other interventions ranged from a yogurt enema machine to more extreme, now-discredited medical treatments for persistent cases. Those drastic therapies faded, leaving Kellogg’s breakfast innovations as his enduring legacy.