Surgeon and food reformer, born in Tyrone Township, Michigan, USA, the brother of Will Kellogg. He was born into a Seventh Day Adventist family, and took a course in a hygieotherapeutic school. He rejected this approach and took regular medical training, finishing at Bellevue Hospital Medical College (New York City) but with a thesis claiming that disease is the body's way of defending itself. He had become editor of the Adventist monthly, Health Reformer (which he renamed Good Health in 1879), and on returning to Battle Creek, he became superintendent of the Western Health Reform Institute, which Sister Ellen Harmon White had already established to promote ideas about health which were much like Kellogg's. He renamed it the Battle Creek Sanitarium and began to apply his theories about biologic living or the Battle Creek idea, which stressed the role of natural medicine such as a vegetarian diet and a spartan spa-like regimen.
He was also much in demand as an expert surgeon and would donate his fees to the sanitarium for indigent patients. During the 1890s he set up a laboratory to develop more nutritious foods, and with his brother Will, developed a dry wheat flake that soon became so popular as a breakfast cereal that they began to sell it through a mail-order business. Later they developed a rice flake and a corn flake and set up the Sanitas Food Co to produce and sell these new products. As the food business continued to expand, the brothers became legal adversaries, and by 1906 W K gained the exclusive rights to sell the products under the name of W K Kellogg; John set up the Battle Creek Food Co and developed other health foods such as coffee substitutes and soybean-derived milk.
Meanwhile, John had fallen out with the Adventist leaders who felt he and his Battle Creek enterprise had become too big and had drifted from the Church, and in 1907 the Adventists excommunicated him, but he fought to retain control of the sanitarium and his food laboratory. He wrote over 50 books promoting his ideas and also founded the Race Betterment Foundation to pursue his theories about eugenics. Although he would never become as rich or well-known as his brother, John Kellogg had actually instituted a major revolution in the human diet.
Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (February 26, 1852 - December 14, 1943) was an American medical doctor in Battle Creek, Michigan who ran a sanitarium using holistic methods, with a particular focus on nutrition, enemas and exercise. Kellogg was an advocate of vegetarianism, and is best known for the invention of the corn flake breakfast cereal with his brother.
Biography
Dr. Kellogg was born in Tyrone, New York in 1852 to John Preston Kellogg (1807-?) and Ann Janette Stanley (1824-?). The family had moved to Battle Creek, Michigan by 1860 where his father set up a broom factory. John later worked as a printer's devil in a Battle Creek publishing house.
Kellogg went to the Battle Creek public school system, then attended the Michigan State Normal School (since 1959, Eastern Michigan University), and finally New York University Medical College at Bellevue Hospital. The adopted children include: Agnes Grace Kellogg; Elizabeth Kellogg; John William Kellogg; Ivaline Maud Kellogg; Paul Alfred Kellogg; Robert Moffatt Kellogg; and Newell Carey Kellogg. Kellogg died in 1943 and was buried in Oak Hill Cemetery in Battle Creek.
Battle Creek Sanitarium
Kellogg gained fame while working at the Battle Creek Sanitarium which ran on Seventh-day Adventist Church principles.
Kellogg made sure that the bowel of each and every patient was plied with water, from above and below. The yogurt served to replace "the intestinal flora" of the bowel, creating what Kellogg claimed was a squeaky clean intestine.
If a healthy dollop of yogurt was not enough to do the trick, more drastic steps were necessary. Kellogg performed as many as twenty operations a day. Kellogg believed that most disease is alleviated by a change in intestinal flora: bacteria that is in the intestines can either help or hinder the body. The intestinal flora is changed by the diet of the individual, and is changed for the better, generally, with a well-balanced vegetarian diet that favors low-protein, laxative and high-fiber foods. This natural change in flora can be sped by enemas seeded with favorable bacteria, or by various regimens of specific foods designed to heal specific ailments.
Breakfast cereals
With his brother, Will Keith Kellogg, they started the Sanitas Food Company to produce their whole grain cereals around 1897. John and Will eventually argued over the addition of sugar to the cereals and in 1906 Will started his own company called the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company, which eventually became the Kellogg Company. John then formed the Battle Creek Food Company to develop and market soy products. A patient of John's, Charles William Post would eventually start his own dry cereal company selling a rival brand of corn flakes.
Anti-masturbation writings
Kellogg was a zealous campaigner against masturbation, recommending extreme methods. In his Treatment for Self-Abuse and its Effects he wrote:
A remedy for masturbation which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision.
Believing that masturbation was a sensual sin of the flesh, self-abuse, and an obsessive habit common to adolescent males and others, he advocated exposing the sensitive glans, which during masturbation would be subject to friction.
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