Loading summary
Transcript114 lines
- [00:00]
Boost Mobile Announcer
Big news. Boost Mobile is now sending experts nationwide to deliver and set up customers new phones at home or work.
- [00:05]
Peter Frankopan
Wait, we're going on tour?
- [00:07]
Boost Mobile Announcer
Not a tour. We're delivering and setting up customers phones so it's easier to upgrade.
- [00:11]
Peter Frankopan
Let's get in the tour bus and hit the road.
- [00:12]
Boost Mobile Announcer
No, not a tour bus. It's a regular car we use to deliver and set up customers phones at home or work.
- [00:17]
Peter Frankopan
Are you a groupie on this tour?
- [00:18]
Boost Mobile Announcer
We deliver and set up phones. It's not a tour.
- [00:21]
Peter Frankopan
Oh, you're definitely a groupie.
- [00:23]
Boost Mobile Announcer
Introducing store to door switch and get a new device with expert setup and delivery wherever you're at. Delivery available for select devices purchased@boostmobile.com.
- [00:33]
Peter Frankopan
Hello and welcome to a new series of Legacy AFWA. Tell me what we're going to talk about today.
- [00:42]
Afra
Well, actually this is funny because people listening don't know this, I suppose, but usually when we get on we get set up and get our mics and our headphones all checked out. We usually do a sound test by asking each other what we had for breakfast. Right. That's the classic.
- [00:56]
Peter Frankopan
I was going to ask you. We've asked each other that question. I don't know how many times. Can you ever remember what it is that I've said? Because I'm scratching my head after it. Do you normally have chia seeds?
- [01:10]
Afra
I do remember what you've said. Very emphatically. Legacy Followers is a sausage, eggs and bacon man.
- [01:23]
Peter Frankopan
I know what that means. I've got to get on the wegovia. The Ozempic. Oh my Lord. I'm a cosplay. I'll have.
- [01:32]
Afra
No, there's no full English breakfast shaming on this show. And then I say I had. I've actually stopped doing chia seeds because of some new research that suggests they might actually not be as good as I thought they were. These days. I'm on the flax with some added B vitamins and protein, some cacao collagen, almond milk smoothies for my breakfast. Yeah, I am fully faddish and we'll get to that. But the reason that we're asking each other what we have for breakfast after we've done the sound check is because.
- [02:06]
Peter Frankopan
Today, that's right, we're talking about Kellogg's in general, but John Harvey and William Keith Kellogg in particular. Do you have a favorite cereal when you were young, Afro? You can't have always been on flax and Chia seeds. Did you, did you head for the Cocoa Pops or the Crunchy Nut Cornflakes?
- [02:28]
Afra
I was a hardcore crunchy nut Cornflake Stan as a child. And then I went to America for the first time as a teenager and discovered Pop Tarts. Oh, my God. And people who are younger might not get this, but like in the 90s, all of these were things that we saw on TV but couldn't actually get in the UK. So being able to go and eat a Pop Tart, it just felt like the height of sophistication. It felt like.
- [02:52]
Peter Frankopan
I can tell you why, as big as the sugar rush was so great that these things are all basically made illegal. So my favorite cereal was ricicles, but I think the sugar dose. Ricicles. You're too. You're too young. Thank God. That makes me feel.
- [03:05]
Afra
Ricicles. I've never even heard of a ricicle.
- [03:08]
Peter Frankopan
It was Rice Krispies with unlimited sugar.
- [03:11]
Afra
Between a Rice Krispie and a.
- [03:13]
Peter Frankopan
They were the. They were the first. First to be burned.
- [03:16]
Afra
That's just a Rice Krispies.
- [03:17]
Peter Frankopan
So I grew up anywhere watching this stuff on the tv. Like you said, breakfast cereal, that's all anybody had for breakfast. If you're really, really lucky on a special day, you might get bacon and eggs, but it was just all cereal. And.
- [03:32]
Afra
Well, I had a Scottish au pair at one point and I will never forget her giving me porridge with cream for breakfast and my mom going absolutely nuts. Because this was the 80s where everyone thought it should be low fat, even if that means it's absolutely jam packed with sugar. You know, this was the era where we were being sold these kind of diet yogurts that were like zero nutrition and sugar and sweetness. And so the idea of me having cream on my breakfast porridge was extremely outrageous to my mum, but I've never forgotten it because it was so delicious. So maybe even the Kellogg's pumped child that I was was craving a more wholesome, you know, like organic fats and whole grains kind of breakfast. And she puts salt.
- [04:22]
Peter Frankopan
That's a whole other story about the legacy, the legacy of how the Scots got tough by eating salt. But listen, I think it was such an important part of our childhood, everybody else's childhood for the whole of the 20th century and the good part of the 21st century, too. Fans have slightly changed, but by the way, when we do our quiz for subscribers and non subscribers, the answer to the question is, what do I have for breakfast? Is always a strong cup of coffee and that's it. I feel bad about that. Anyway, I'm going to enjoy this one.
- [04:50]
Afra
And there's plenty to talk about in real time on Legacy.
- [04:52]
Peter Frankopan
So let's see how we talk about breakfast. Hello, and welcome to a new episode of Legacy. I'm Peter Frankopan, and this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives, events and ideas that have shaped our world and asks whether they have the reputation that they truly deserve.
- [05:29]
Afra
This is Kellogg Part 1. From the end of the World to Wellness.
- [05:36]
Peter Frankopan
When we talked about what we were going to do, afwa, and you mentioned Kellogg's, I mean, I know a bit about Kellogg's, the company, and a bit about the founders, but, I mean, it's a properly crazy, you couldn't make it up story. I mean, it's Netflix ready. It's completely unbelievable. What was it that got you interested in this in the first place?
- [05:59]
Afra
And should we maybe have a health warning at the beginning of this episode? Because you might have tuned in thinking we're talking about serial. We are also going to be talking about masturbation. And that is one of the reasons that this stuck in my mind, because I was doing some research, I think, on the kind of history of attitudes towards sexuality, and that's how I came across the role that Kellogg's and other men of the kind of late 19th century in America had played in creating this idea that masturbation was extremely harmful. Not just harmful, but kind of the source of many social evils. And. And that the invention of foods like breakfast cereal was a key part of their strategy to stop people engaging in masturbation.
- [06:46]
Peter Frankopan
And just to check, that's the word we're going to use throughout. Right. Rather than euphemism, meets the eye for masturbation, which I'm not going to give you a list, by the way, but when you said now, you said that.
- [06:59]
Afra
Go on.
- [06:59]
Peter Frankopan
The role that they played, I mean, that was what we were all told at school, that if you played with yourself, you go blind and you die young. Which I don't think turns out that it's to be true, but yes, and particularly within the religious context, the kind of the. The idea that it's sinful to experiment with your own body, it's one that's left its scars that are much deeper than Tony the Tiger has done and the. And the Frosted Flakes. I mean, it's a long jump to get from. You've tuned in to hear about icicles and cornflakes and we're straight into masturbation. I thought we agreed with masturbation. Anyway, that's a treat. So you have to wait till the end of this episode. Tell us how the story of Kellogg's begin.
- [07:47]
Afra
Well, you might think of aisles of neatly packed cereal boxes. But the story of Kellogg's does not begin in a supermarket or a factory. It begins in a religious health retreat in Battle Creek, Michigan, centered around the complex relationship between two very famous brothers, John Harvey and William Keith Kellogg. But before we understand their relationship and their creations, we need to go even further back to the 1830s when John Harvey Kellogg's parents, John Preston Kellogg and Mary Ann Kellogg, migrated from Massachusetts on the eastern seaboard of the United States and home to their ancestors for around 200 years. So from right the early years of a European colonized.
- [08:32]
Peter Frankopan
This is part of the change in the 19th century from a settler conceptualization. It's the opening up of the continental north part of northern America. As you know, Afra, to forget that amazingly there were lots of people who were living here before Europeans arrived. But seen through the sort of the John Wayne films, seen through the ideas about cowboys, I definitely want to do something about cowboys too. This is a moment where indigenous peoples are being forced off their land and they're being forced through a combination of military conquest, but also through the use of law to exclude people to provide land for new settlers right the way across the United States. And eventually, of course, that reaches the whole way as California. But that 1830 Indian Removal act had mandated not just that land should be made available, be given to settlers, although they could claim it, but the people who live there had to move and they had to move to the western part of the Mississippi River. And that's a policy that's become known unfortunately as ethnic cleansing has been used as a model, by the way, in Nazi Germany about how to get rid of people that you don't want to forcibly relocate people beyond where they were living. Already.
- [09:43]
Afra
Michigan in the Midwest was one of the key parts of the United States states where native Americans were being forced out of their lands to designated Indian territory which later would become Oklahoma. And following the remover of their tribes, the lands were being given to white settlers to purchase and cultivate. And when I say purchase, Peter, they were being offered large tracts of this Indian land at a pittance. It was all part of this incentivization to get white Christian families to become homesteaders. And John Harvey Kelly, and he was.
- [10:16]
Peter Frankopan
One of just 11 children, so good work by his mother in particular. And as a child he was sickly and small for his age. He suffered repeated bouts of tuberculosis, plenty of gastrointestinal disorders, including.
- [10:31]
Paige Desorbo
Here you go.
- [10:32]
Peter Frankopan
Constipation, hemorrhoids, colitis, and an anal fissure, problems that might well have led to his later preoccupation with the digestive system. And I'm not exactly surprised about that. In fact, he was so sickly, his parents didn't think he'd make it to adulthood. And we talked about that after, when we did Charles Dickens about how common child mortality was. I mean, it wasn't just having 11 children. It's that the expectation that most of them wouldn't make it. And in this kind of world, where there's no running water, sanitation levels are low, poor medicine, bad understanding as well as bad application, you know, it's not surprising that life is also pretty tough, particularly for children.
- [11:14]
Afra
And then there are two things that are specific about this kind of Kellogg Midwestern context. Because as you said, Peter, many of these themes are very common across the world at this time. But the things that stand out here are, one, these homesteaders who had settled on this land often had a pretty unhealthy diet. And that will become relevant to our story. They ate a lot of pork. There weren't necessarily a huge amount of fresh vegetables or a variety of grains. And that's a contributing factor to the poor health that many of them suffered. And the second thing is that they had very specific religious views. So John Harvey's father, John Preston Kellogg, was initially a Baptist, but then he became interested in the Seventh Day Adventists, which were at the time essentially an apocalyptic cult. One minister, William Miller, had interpreted the Bible in such a way, especially the Book of Daniel, to. To predict that Christ would return to earth between the years 1843 and 1844. And guess what, Peter? When 1844 came and went without the end of the world, they were devastated. That period is known in Seventh Day Adventism as the Great Disappointment. And it might sound crazy, but there was such a belief in the imminent apocalypse that it had a direct impact on the attitudes that parents had towards their children. So John Harvey Kellogg was. Wasn't sent to school. His father's mindset was, if the world is about to end, why would I waste any of my money or time educating you when there's no future to be educated for? So this wasn't just theory or esoteric scripture. It was a real belief that the end was about to happen. And as a result, things like health, education, quality of life.
- [12:56]
Peter Frankopan
It's interesting how many of the people who passed the Atlantic did have very fundamentalist religious views, you know, right from the beginning. So Anabaptists, Puritans, the people who settled the United States you know, the first celebration of Thanksgiving wasn't about getting the biggest turkey you could and stuffing yourself full. It was about rejecting European commercialism and the fact that people were moving away from God. So they were fundamentalist believers. They read the Bible incredibly carefully, so they would work out every time a day or a week or a month or a year was mentioned. That calculation that William Miller had was based on his careful analysis of saying that this is when the second Coming was going to arrive. And that great disappointment, of course, shocks people. So you get Seventh Day Adventist churches and Baptist churches, they get burnt afterwards by people who are angry that Jesus Christ hasn't come back because this is what they've been promised. But as you said, if you think the world's going to end, why bother with school? And quite frankly, why not sit back and have some fun? That Seventh Day Adventist movement is about a particular kind of fundamentalism. Not just about your beliefs, but how you should live your life. And one of those areas, Aphrodite, is about ideas about science in general, but about medicine in particular.
- [14:11]
Afra
It's really fascinating because, you know, some of these Seventh Day Adventist ideas that were very mainstream in the movement then seem quite extreme now, but others have aged pretty well. So in a way, I think you could describe some of the Seventh Day Adventist ideology as something we would probably now call wellness. And by that I mean they were blending their spiritual beliefs with these ideas about health, using natural remedies, rejecting mainstream science. And I think that this makes sense in the context of the time when mainstream medicine was pretty barbaric. So this is an era when doctors in the conventional sense are using amputations, bloodletting, they're deliberately inducing diarrhea, they're offering potentially fatal drugs. It's a very violent form of medicine. And in that sense that the Seventh Day Adventists were looking for a different approach, something that's now often described as sectarian medicine. And this was all about using natural remedies to bring the body back into balance. They boiled all health problems down to an imbalance with one of six things in the body every air, diet, evacuations, sleep cycles, exercise, and peace of mind. So, again, these are things that I think now, if you were to look at any wellness influencer on Instagram, you might expect to find a similar emphasis. But when I say they advocated natural remedies, I mean things that seemed natural to them.
- [15:38]
Peter Frankopan
You've written about body as well. You know, on your substack, on More British Than Ever, you quite often talk about how people conceptualize Their own bodies, but also those of others. Why is there a sort of particular sanctity that fundamentalists or Seventh Day. Is it Adventists or Adventists? Adventists. We cater for everybody.
- [16:00]
Afra
We can cater for everybody American, Peter. I think we can tolerate either.
- [16:07]
Peter Frankopan
We can call them something particular that fundamentalists have about the controversy how they see their own body purity, their own body form. I mean, it's very interesting. I'd never crossed my mind that one could see this is kind of what wellness is all about too. It's a very similar kind of idea. Is it about a sort of a puritanism about how you think about yourself and your body?
- [16:29]
Afra
Yeah, it's a curious mix of quite progressive thinking and quite fundamentalist thinking. So this is an era when basically, until now, most Christians, most people from European backgrounds, conceived illness as a punishment for from God. So illness was a reflection on sin. One of the ways of treating illness was to kind of purge sinning and repent of one's sins. Plagues, diseases were explained by God visiting his wrath upon humanity for all of their wrongdoing. The SDAs had a different approach where they actually thought of illness as something being out of balance of somebody not being in their natural state of, you know, one of these elements being being out of whack and that you could actually cure it through living in a healthier manner or addressing the thing that was out of balance and restoring it to balance. Now that I think is quite a progressive idea. You know, seeing the body as a holistic system, that there are kind of delicate balances at work, and that the way we live can create these imbalances is actually a very modern idea. The way they sought to address those imbalances could be quite weird, frankly. One of them was hydropathy, which was a big, big fad at the time. And that's basically about water cures. Now, again, I think we would recognize that water does have healing properties and there's lots of treatments and therapies now that involve water. I mean, if you go to my gym, there's a sauna, steam room, a cold plunge and a jet stream swimming pool. It's a really nice gym, actually. But, you know, this idea that, you know, dunking yourself in freezing water and then going in a steam room, is.
- [17:57]
Peter Frankopan
Your gym run by someone and they try to recruit you.
- [18:03]
Afra
You know what I had, I actually hadn't thought about that, but that, you know, what my friend who I go to the gym with was saying the other day that there is something of a cult about this gym There's a really long waiting list. People kind of go there just to feel like they can go there. You know, there's a lounge where you can work and they spend all day just enjoying the experience of being part of this clique. It is a weird thing. And I do go there to train. I go there, I work out. In fact, before we recorded this, I went to the gym. I was in and out within an hour. But it is. And I think if you look at gyms and wellness in general, there is lots about it that feels kind of cultish. At least these guys actually like took the time to build a whole church around it, you know what I mean, and create a kind of doctrine that connected it with their religious beliefs. Whereas now a lot of these wellness ideas are very nebulous, some kind of spirituality without defining what that means.
- [19:02]
Boost Mobile Announcer
Boost Mobile is now sending experts nationwide to deliver and set up customers new phones. Wait, we're going on tour? We're delivering and setting up customers phones. It's not a tour, not with that attitude. Introducing store to door switch and get a new device with expert setup and delivery. Delivery available for select devices purchased@boostmobile.com Hannah.
- [19:17]
Afra
Burner are those the cozy Tommy John pajamas you're buying?
- [19:21]
Paige Desorbo
Paige desorbo they are Tommy John and yes, I'm stocking up because they make the best holiday gifts.
- [19:28]
Afra
So generous.
- [19:29]
Paige Desorbo
Well, I'm a generous girly, especially when it comes to me. So I'm grabbing the softest sleepwear, comfiest underwear and best fitting loungewear.
- [19:37]
Afra
So nothing for your bestie?
- [19:39]
Paige Desorbo
Of course I'm getting my dad Tommy John. Oh, and you of course it's giving.
- [19:44]
Afra
Holiday gifting made easy.
- [19:46]
Paige Desorbo
Exactly. Cozy, comfy, everyone's happy. Don't wait. Shop Tommy John's biggest savings ever and get 50% off site wide@tommyjohn.com comfort.
- [20:05]
Peter Frankopan
It's funny if we, if we've been recording this five or six years ago and we were talking about people being sort of out of kilter or losing confidence in mainstream medicine, you know, most people would think, you know, it's a tiny little subset, but I think that the pandemic and a few other things before MMR has triggered a kind of reaction that's not completely dissimilar to the idea that modern medicine is somehow there are too many experts or it's a conspiracy or it's about trying to sell you things and in a way that kind of helps frame what we're talking about here in the late 19th century where the Kellogg's when One of their children dies, they become even more skeptical of mainstream medicine. They begin subscribing the fact that even our publications called the Water Cure Journal and Herald of Health Reforms, Practitioners of Hydropathy, as you mentioned. It shows that there are people trying to say, look, there must be a different way of doing. It's a combination of religious beliefs, suspicion, a bit of being excluded, thinking that the world is run by elites and you're not getting benefits. In a way, I think it's sort of easier to understand that there are people like this building communities, thinking about different ways of bringing up their children and living that perhaps we would have been able to connect with a few years ago because our own experience is modern medicine.
- [21:22]
Afra
I just add, before we move back to Kellogg's actual life story, that one of the big ironies for me of studying this is that these Seventh Day Adventists, these colonizers who were taking possession of land, they were kind of making it up as they went along. They were experimenting with all these new ideas. You know, there's a level to which I kind of laud the curiosity of maybe this could be cure that. But the people who they were displacing, these Native American tribes who've lived there for millennia, had an incredibly sophisticated, well developed approach to natural medicine, to using the earth's resources to kind of restoring balance within nature and oneself. And because of the racist ideas at the time that regarded Native Americans as savages, there was no curiosity about their belief systems. There was no willingness to learn from the wisdom that was already present in the land. And therefore these guys are kind of just making stuff up. Now, some of the stuff they make up turns out to have some foundation, but some of it is crazy. It has been completely debunked. And it's. It's just interesting to me how the colonial mindset means that you have to bring your own gaze. You can't learn from what's been there before. You can't credit these civilizations that have been pioneering these actually great ideas for generations. So it's kind of ironic that they came to this place, they saw it as a blank slate and they started creating new ideas when actually it wasn't a blank slate. It was land that had been inhabited for millennia. And there were lots of great ideas.
- [22:54]
Peter Frankopan
We're going to do the native population we need to do, we need to think about Ottoman colonization, the Arab expansions, expansions of China, you know, colonization, because we're talking here in Europe, you know, we tend to think that this is something that is uniquely European, but there are lots of different types of colonizers. And the fact the pathology is always very similar. It's the same kind of idea of how do you layer in ideas about superiority, about your religious beliefs, ethnicity, language, and how do you kind of push things out the way, but also cherry pick for them to blend things together. And, you know, by and large that sort of looks very similar depending where you are. So I think it's important that we expand that global gauge too. But I want to get back to Kellogg gaffer, right? And so he does have a little bit of a golden age insofar as the second coming doesn't happen. The end of the world isn't there. So he's allowed to go to school and he thrives for a couple of years. He does chemistry, biology, astronomy, algebra, all these kinds of things that he hadn't heard about before. He reads Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, Hume, Johnson, et cetera. And he becomes frank, excited by words. And so much so that he often carried a pocket dictionary with him. And during his spare moments, he used to read that like a novel. I got. When I opened my first bank account as a boy, you know, today you get like an iPhone. I got a pocket dictionary for the Midland Bank. Griffin Saver. I had it on my desk throughout my university career.
- [24:19]
Afra
That's so sweet. When I opened my first bank account, I got.
- [24:26]
Peter Frankopan
I got.
- [24:26]
Afra
I don't know if you remember those NatWest pigs. There were five of them. There was like a collection of pigs. And each time you got £10 in your savings account, you got the next pig up. I mean, if you got to 100, you got sir Nathaniel, who was like the don of the NatWest pig. But you started with the baby. I did. I got to Sir Nathaniel and I can remember his name.
- [24:46]
Peter Frankopan
The secret of my academic design was Savers.
- [24:49]
Afra
I'm not sure that is in terms.
- [24:51]
Peter Frankopan
Of my check for definitions. But anyway, it doesn't last long. Kellogg's time in school.
- [25:00]
Afra
No. This also reminds you mentioned Dickens. A little like Dickens, you know, it's these sad stories of these incredibly bright children thriving in school and then being pulled out, age 10 or 11, by their parents who want them to work. And in this case, Kellogg's father, Kellogg Sr. Decided that it was time for his son to help him in his business, which was a broom shop. So instead of studying Hume and Benjamin Franklin, he was now sorting broom corn in the shop, leaning over a workbench, sorting this broom corn 10 hours a day. And actually that also was a formative experience because if you could imagine hunching over workbench, it made his shoulders rounded. And later he would become very interested in posture and how to correct. Even as I'm saying this, I'm saying sitting more upright in my chair, Peter, how to correct some of those problems and thinking about posture in a holistic way as part of wellness. Again, quite a modern idea. But he'd been working in his father's business for a year. When someone else is a man who.
- [25:59]
Peter Frankopan
Spots potential and you know, this is a world where, you know, if you're sorting broom corn for 11 hours hunched over a workbench, it's neither fun and it's backbreaking. I mean, literally, it's tiring, it's monotonous. And so if you have got a keen intellect and ambition, there are lots of opportunities in, in this world that is expanding. So James White hires him as a printer's apprentice at the Review and Herald's publishing association. And for the next four years, Kellogg starts, you know, effectively in the mail room. You know, he runs errands, he gets people drinks, he proofreads, he sets type for the book how to Live and for the magazine the Health Reformer. And he often stays overnight with the Whites. So he kind of sees a different world from his own quite tough, difficult upbringing and sees that there are horizons that are expanding. So he gets really influenced by sectarianism and by the Seventh Day Adventist approach to health and medicine. One of the areas that makes a big impression on him is masturbation.
- [27:02]
Afra
So the Whites are a big deal in this Seventh Day Adventist world in Michigan. As we heard, they publish these kind of health and spiritual related publications. And so now Kellogg is being immersed in this world of sectarian ideas and masturbation is. It's hard to overstate how important it is to that worldview. So in the 18th century, a Swiss physician from Lausanne called Samuel Tissot founded the anti masturbation movement, which is also called Onanism. And Tissot's views were basically drawn from this quite medieval theory which I've read you write about, Peter of Humors, which kind of actually dates back to antiquity. But it's this idea that your bodily fluids must be kept in balance and that if you lose too many of your so called natural juices, this weakens your whole body and immune system and you ultimately become ill. So if you've got an emphasis on not losing fluids from your body, you can imagine that male masturbation is seen as a big problem. It's a waste of bodily fluids and on top of that, they've got this idea that semen originates in the brain, travels to the penis via the spinal column. So every time you lose any semen, you're actually sacrificing a portion of your brain fluid. And if that sounds bad, it is because it causes disease, damage to the nervous system, impaired memory, reduced intellectual capacity.
- [28:26]
Peter Frankopan
You're saying it like that. That is actually true.
- [28:28]
Afra
So just complete clarity.
- [28:33]
Peter Frankopan
You're sure there must be. There must be papers somewhere. There must be conspiracy theorists.
- [28:36]
Afra
I am not advocating any of these ideas. And for all of the male listeners out there who would like to think that their semen originates in their brain, I'm sorry to have to tell you that it has zero connection to your neural capacity. But this was an idea that was very influential at the time. And it's not just men, by the way. There was also a kind of corresponding ideology about the dangers for women masturbating, which was less about the loss of fluids, but more about it compounding hysteria, which is something that many physicians at the time believed women suffered from, that it causes cramps. It could even cause ulceration of the womb.
- [29:14]
Peter Frankopan
So it's no laughing matter.
- [29:16]
Afra
A really scary idea. You can imagine that. An impressionable. It's no laughing matter. Sorry, now I'm laughing. And an impressionable young man who's got the combination of these health ideas, some of which are valid, this religious worldview, the apocalypse looming not imminently, but somewhere on the horizon. And this couple, the whites, who are very influential, who really take him in and are interested in him fulfilling his potential. It really is very formative. And Tissot's ideas, which had originated in Europe, are becoming more and more popular in America at the time that John Harvey Kellogg is growing up. And that's mainly thanks to the works of Benjamin Rush, who was a big medical voice during the revolutionary period. And he also taught that all disease could be linked to bodily energy. And using too much energy, not just through masturbation, but also to any sexual act, could weaken the nervous system and make you susceptible to disease.
- [30:11]
Peter Frankopan
So I said, this is a very literal reading of the Bible. So in the book of Genesis, Onan, his brother, dies, and he has to marry Onan's wife, Tamar. And Onan refuses to fulfill the full sexual role that a husband should play because he doesn't want to have a child via Tamar, because the child would be considered belonging to his brother. So he's. In the verse of the Bible, he spills his seed. And that is the Kind of, if you want to take a view about what sex is or marriage is, I suppose that's part of it. But then this get blended in, as you mentioned, AFWA by Tiso and Rush and others who create a kind of scientific spin off of all of that. So, you know, Rush is very down on the idea of sex altogether. That's the cause of nervous excitement that I think is arguably correct. And that careless sex could result in weakness of your semen production, in painful urination, in tuberculosis, you know, and that's also vertigo, anxiety and death. And that's squared alongside people having 11 children. So there's a lot of different parts trying to have authority by using the Bible, personal control, influence and so on. But it's quite a confusing world. But of course, not surprisingly, bit like the anti vaxx movement. It produces heroes. And you get anti masturbation doctors. And one of those. I'm sorry again, for those who are tuning in for Crunchy Nut Cornflakes. One of the most important anti masturbation doctors. I've never met an anti masturbation doctor. I'm sure there must be people's LinkedIn. Is it on LinkedIn? I'm not going to mess up my algorithms by looking that Facebook in America, pizza. But one of the most famous is Sylvester Graham. Tell us about Sylvester Graham. Let's see if I've ever.
- [32:04]
Afra
Well, if you've ever. This is my experience of Sylvester Graham.
- [32:07]
Peter Frankopan
If one has ever.
- [32:09]
Afra
If you've ever tried to. If one has ever tried to make. You're not about to say an American.
- [32:19]
Peter Frankopan
Euphemism or is that a.
- [32:21]
Afra
You will know about Sylvester Graham? Because it's. No, no, no. I'm being completely literal. So I'm a baker. I am a big baker. I used to run a cake business, something that almost nobody knows about me. And I love finding recipes from different parts of the world and adapting them. But using American recipes is very annoying because they use different measurements, as everyone knows. Even their cups are different cups to our cups. And also they have all these ingredients that you can't get here. And one of those is graham crackers. Now, graham crackers is what most Americans use to make the base for the cheesecake. You know, when you have like a crunchy biscuity base for a cheesecake, we in the UK usually use digestive biscuits, which is probably also very British, and maybe they don't have those in America. Americans use graham crackers. So I remember always being like, what are these graham. Graham crackers? And why can't I Get them only to then go and look into Graham crackers and find myself again down an anti masturbation wormhole. Because Sylvester Graham, who invented the Graham cracker, a little like Kellogg, had an agenda that was rooted in onanism. He believed that overstimulating the nervous system, which any sexual act does, in his opinion, was the cause of all disease. And so the cure was to avoid sex and masturbation, but also to avoid any kind of bodily pleasure whatsoever. So Graham was in pursuit of the blandest foods he could create. He banned grease, salt, condiments, spice, tea, coffee, tobacco and alcohol. He advocated drinking only cold water. And he invented the Graham cracker, which was initially sugarless, flavorless, and a food that you could eat without stimulating your body as much as possible, which is the dream to eat without any stimulation, any pleasure or excitement. And to help you poop. Because in the Graham worldview, the more.
- [34:19]
Peter Frankopan
You poop, just think, anybody who goes for dinner and gets offered an amazing way to live together with their cheese after dinner, your host is trying to say, we want you to have healthy, irregular stools and not to have sex and to calm yourself down. And those crackers, they are flavorless. I mean, but the idea that there's a whole worldview that's spinning out of not just religion and ritual and practice and faith, but into science, into cookery, into baking, into what you should eat because of the fear of sex and the fear of the human body. But I mean, put that in a wider context, Safra, why are people getting so upset and worked up about sex being sinful?
- [35:02]
Afra
What's interesting for me is that this era, they've invented a whole new realm of sinning. So instead of sins being conceived as these kind of violations of the commandments that result in these communal punishments of God visiting down these huge plagues and wars on the earth, this is a very individualized approach towards this in it's your choices. If you're experiencing too much pleasure, indulging too much in bodily pleasure, if you're giving into lust and desire, it's not that there's going to be a kind of bolt of lightning, it's that you're going to get sick. And, you know, this might sound very fundamentalist and foreign, but actually, I think there is so much of this worldview that's still alive and well. So, for example, when I was a teenager in the 90s, there was this whole new generation of advertising that was inventing these chocolate brands and marketing them specifically to women. So in the uk, we had galaxy Chocolate, I remember very well. And Galaxy. The ads were all a woman in a bath with kind of.
- [36:06]
Peter Frankopan
Hang on.
- [36:10]
Afra
Very like modern and glamorous at the time.
- [36:12]
Peter Frankopan
Maybe the Galaxy. Okay.
- [36:15]
Afra
No, but. No, I do remember. Okay. I mean, there were a bunch of them. The flake had. I remember it was very sensual and it was all.
- [36:24]
Peter Frankopan
It was very. Adjacent to sex.
- [36:25]
Afra
Yeah, adjacent to sex. It was kind of like very sex. A lot of these adverts were very sex adjacent. There's a lot of new.
- [36:33]
Peter Frankopan
We've known a Foxy Rabbit. Foxy Rabbit selling caramels.
- [36:36]
Afra
Remember the lustrous.
- [36:38]
Peter Frankopan
I didn't understand what that was all about.
- [36:40]
Afra
Yes, yes. That was a bit literal. There was a lot of leg being draped over bath and kind of bubbles just strategically covering erogenous zones, only barely while a woman ate a piece of Galaxy or Flame.
- [36:56]
Peter Frankopan
Take that, Seventh Day Adventist.
- [36:58]
Afra
That's all about correcting her guilty pleasure. And the idea, the idea of pleasure, of indulgence, of eating sweet or rich foods or with guilt and some kind of moral sin, which is actually exciting because it's adjacent to sex. It was all bound up in this marketing and this is in the 1990s, and it was incredibly effective. One, I still remember it. And two, I think there's still this idea that if you really want to treat yourself, you really want a guilty pleasure, you kind of curl up with a big bar of chocolate and, you know, I think lots of feminist writers have written brilliantly about the juxtaposition of obesity, of kind of curves, of food choices, of sugar, of weight and health, and blame the idea that, you know, women who eat indulgent foods have themselves to blame for their weight or any health problems and that it's all their own kind of moral deviance. And I think that in the mix of that, a lot of these quite fundamentalist ideas about the ideal abstemious person who is thin and celibate and lives on graham crackers. If that's one end of the extreme, the kind of overweight, sensual woman who indulges in guilty pleasures is at the other end.
- [38:16]
Peter Frankopan
I guess one of the things is that it's important to remind about mortality, life expectancy levels. So you know, that. That I guess if you are living in a world which is dangerous and where people die, you know, get an infection. This is before the age of penicillin, antibiotics. Then the idea that you need to control every factor around you to try to live a. Not just a good moral life, but a healthy one. I suppose that's also why things like Hydropathy become so important. So, you know, you mentioned hydropathy before already about how you can use water in a various set of cures to help you become more healthy. And there's some substance in all of this stuff too. So you can do it through wide variety of baths. You can have hot showers, cold showers, wet blanket wraps, you name it, but they're not particularly enjoyable. So John Harvey Kellogg, he describes when he was sick as a kid. He says, I remember very well how violently I shivered when at the age of 10, I was wrapped in a cold, wet sheet pack. I had that, I think, done to me at school to, to bring out the eruption and an attack of measles. I shall never forget the crude shower bath with which its half barrel tank arranged over a pan with perforated bottom, through which cold water from a deep well poured in frigid streams on my body until the tank was empty because the door to the little chamber in which I was confined stuck so fast that I could not escape. And no one came to my relief until the tank was empty. So that these people try to make sense of medicine, the world around them, trying to be good people, trying to do the right thing. And, you know, it's easy, I think, to laugh, but as you said, some of these ideas are more ambivalent. I think how we see them today.
- [39:53]
Afra
The idea that you can cure your own health problems by making good choices about what you consume is seems kind of like common sense now. So the whites who had this huge influence on Kellogg were trying to solve very real challenges in their own life. Ellen White had had an accident that left her an invalid for much of her childhood and had a lot of health problems. So one of the reasons she was attracted to sectarian medicine was that instead of relying on these male doctors who had these quite aggressive remedies, some of which could actually kill you, this was much more empowering and a way for her to take back control of her own body. So she had experimented with avoiding tobacco, avoiding alcohol, avoiding caffeine, avoiding fatty foods, and found that it had a positive impact on her health. And again, we would recognize that, I mean, if you're having health problems, those are things that it's good to avoid. And of course, being a Seventh Day Adventist at this quite fanatical era, she also combined this quite sensible lifestyle ideology with a prophecy from God which she just received directly, which told her that everyone needed to be vegetarian and combine vegetarianism with lots of exercise and rest, lots of water, and all of these medical baths and hydropathy. Now, vegetarianism is another thing that I think people will be surprised to know has very strong roots in this era because it was one of the ultimate forms of abstinence. And if you think about wanting to eat bland foods that don't excite you, that don't have any fat or flavor or any impact on your digestive system, vegetarianism made sense as a kind of radical idea that seemed very ascetic. And I think modern vegetarianism is connected to many things. You know, climate and animal cruelty and people protesting against industrialized meat production. But modern vegetarianism as we know it has a lot to credit. This Seventh Day Adventist sectarian health movement who was simply trying to shun foods that they thought might create health problems.
- [41:59]
Peter Frankopan
Combined with, I mean, to be honest, spiritualism.
- [42:02]
Afra
And excitement.
- [42:06]
Peter Frankopan
Absolutely don't.
- [42:08]
Paige Desorbo
She would be.
- [42:08]
Afra
Yeah, I can see. I can absolutely see her.
- [42:10]
Peter Frankopan
I don't know the vegetarianism. And I think she might support Trump. It's true. Lots of Republicans. Well, also Democrats have a very strong temperance movement of, of no alcohol. I mean, you know, that's many time in the U.S. how, you know, you ask for a second glass of wine at a meal and. And people think that you've got a proper drinking problem, which is not how it is in the UK or many other parts of the world. Just saying.
- [42:33]
Afra
I don't know why you think drinking.
- [42:34]
Peter Frankopan
Water, keeping away from fatty foods, staying away from caffeine, staying away from tobacco. You know, there are lots of people who talk about that and they gather people around them because people can see that those have impacts and they have, you know, good outcomes and, you know, throw God in and divine visions and it's all quite compelling. So when she tells Kellogg that he's going to play an important role in the Lord's work, you know, it sounds like it's something that's quite hard to say no to his patrons, people who've been very kind to him. And so when he goes to college in 1872, he realizes that as well as saving money by eating frugally fruits, nuts, vegetables and graham bread, that the way in which you could develop a healthy lifestyle and have a rhythm and a discipline to what you eat, how you live, means that you do quite well. You know, so he does well academically. You know, it seems to him that the way in which he's working, the way in which he's set up, leads to a happy, healthy life.
- [43:34]
Afra
You got to credit these guys. They practice what they preach. You know, they weren't just telling people to abstain while Gorging themselves. They really lived this way. And as you said, there was a lot of discipline and a lot of hard work. And Kellogg, despite having come from this pretty left field religious section, was a hard worker and a good student. And he went to a Seventh Day Adventist school which promoted a lot of these kind of sectarian ideas. But then he decided he wanted to go to mainstream medical college. He went to Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York, which was at the time the best medical school in the United States. And he was proud of having received a real diploma. He called it a real sheepskin, not the bogus paper concerns like the hijo therapeutic documents you could get at the Seventh Day Adventist College got. So even despite his affinity to the movement, he was thinking for himself and working out what was actually the most valuable education to have. And after he completed his medical degree, Kellogg continued to advance his knowledge of mainstream medicine and medical procedures. He spent time taking same.
- [44:42]
Peter Frankopan
Did you do that after you graduated? Afterwards, did you go have a.
- [44:45]
Afra
From a New York practitioner? But he was also, I mean, obviously everywhere everyone spends time in electrotherapeutics. After graduating, he's getting across all of the medical literature, he's reading the journals and keeping up to speed with latest knowledge, but he's also experimenting with all these private avant garde techniques. And he's actually spending a lot of his own money on private instruction from specialists. And the combination. And I think we recognize as. Peter, you know, I think one of the things people now want is a doctor who knows how to do Western medicine and is trained in the conventional way, but also understands more alternative therapies, natural remedies.
- [45:23]
Peter Frankopan
And he's an impressive young man. I mean, so from the early 1880s, he makes several trips to Europe and he is constantly learning. You know, he's extremely curious, he's voracious, he's got a good memory. He's interested in everything from premature births and how to treat neonatal units, how to work with patients with anemia, with pulmonary disease, with cancer, heart disease. He's an incredibly interesting and engaging young man and he's bringing with him his personal background and story, but also blending in how you can take some benefits of things like hydropathy, exercise therapy and radium therapy. And in 1911, he even learns how to use an electrocardiograph and brings one of the first one of those to be brought to the United States. So Kellogg is a man who you think might be someone who's going to make a difference to, I suppose, to American healthcare, to maybe even global health care. You think if we told you this young man was going to go do something very special that would leave an imprint on global history for more than a century? I. I'm not sure whether breakfast cereals and Pop Tarts would be where you'd guess so he's this young man who is making sense the world around him. He's well traveled, he's thoughtful, he's clever, he's prodigiously engaged in learning about things. And he's got this slightly unusual setup of being a Seventh Day Adventist.
- [46:49]
Afra
And now that he's a fully qualified doctor, he's about to go back to his Seventh Day Adventist roots, but to create an entirely new new type of facility that won't just change the world that he's from, but change the world. We'll find out how in the next episode.
- [47:19]
Boost Mobile Announcer
Boost Mobile is now sending experts nationwide to deliver and set up customers new phones. Wait, we're going on tour? We're delivering and setting up customers phones. It's not a tour.
- [47:28]
Peter Frankopan
Not with that attitude.
- [47:29]
Boost Mobile Announcer
Introducing store to door switch and get a new device with expert setup and delivery. Delivery available for select devices purchased@boostmobile.com.