Kellogg | Snap, Crackle, Pop | 2

Summary

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Podcast Summary: Legacy – Kellogg | Snap, Crackle, Pop | Episode 2

Hosts: Afua Hirsch & Peter Frankopan
Date: December 4, 2025
Episode Theme:
This episode of Legacy dives into the legacy of John Harvey Kellogg and his brother W.K. Kellogg, tracing their journey from radical wellness reformers to cereal inventors whose names are now synonymous with Cornflakes and breakfast culture. The conversation explores how diet, health, sexuality, race, advertising, and the evolution from “wellness” to ultra-processed food intertwine in the legacy of the Kellogg brand.

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1. From Sanitarium Startup to Wellness Empire

[01:17–05:53]

• The Kellogg brothers' early roles at the Western Health Reform Institute, which became known as the Battle Creek Sanitarium.
• Afua: "When J.H. Kellogg took it over, it wasn't quite the glamorous spa retreat that it would later become... The living conditions are Spartan, to put it mildly." [03:44]
• The sanitarium was initially dire—"only eight of [20] patients are paying anything," poor food, reused bath water, moldy rooms.
• Under J.H. Kellogg, it was rebranded as the "sanitarium," adding the word to the English language and shifting focus to a holistic "360-degree wellness retreat."
• Massive growth: By peak, cared for 700 patients, employed nearly 1,000 staff ("helpers"), and drew high-profile visitors (Booker T. Washington, Henry Ford, Eleanor Roosevelt, Sojourner Truth).

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2. Kellogg’s Health Theories: Fads, Food, and Chewing

[05:53–13:33]

• Emphasis on preventive medicine, eating well, exercise, fresh air, and whole grains.
• Adoption of Horace Fletcher’s theory of extreme chewing (40 times per bite). The infamous “Chew, chew, chew” Kellogg song.
  • Afua: “Did we mention it sounds a little bit like a cult, Peter?” [08:14]
• Early forms of what would become wellness/mindfulness: focus on being present while eating.
• Obsession with “auto-intoxication”—the idea that undigested food poisons the body, advocated for frequent enemas.
  • Afua: “Usually it's half a liter. He is using 14 liters of liquid per minute through his patient's bowels. Yeah, he doesn't really do things unless he's going to do them to the extreme.” [11:00]
• Kellogg promoted a strict vegetarian diet, discouraged protein, banned spices and sugar.
• Advanced ideas: Women’s health and clothing reform (opposed corsets, promoted breathable fabrics) and exercise (developed early treadmills and gymnasiums).

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3. Cereal: Born from Blandness and Purity

[13:33–18:46]

• Motivation for cereal: To create convenient, healthy, and bland foods that wouldn’t “excite passion.”
• The brothers invented “flaked” grain cereal with specialized rollers—precursors to Cornflakes.
• Debate between J.H. (wanted bland, unsweetened cereal for health & “moral” reasons) and W.K. (saw the business potential in sweetened, palatable cereal).
• The blandness of cereal is directly tied to Kellogg's notorious obsession with controlling sexuality.

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4. Masturbation, Sexuality, and the Dangers of Enjoyment

[18:46–25:48]

• J.H. Kellogg’s crusade against masturbation, which he saw as a major health risk causing everything from blindness to constipation.
  • Afua: “J.H. Kellogg is kind of obsessed with masturbation and it's a big part of his practice. Why are they so obsessed with masturbation? We'll find out after the break.” [19:57]
• Belief that bland food would suppress sexual urges; this drove the original Kellogg cereal ethos.
• Kellogg and his wife practiced lifelong abstinence despite being married for 41 years.
  • Afua: "It's pretty unusual, in my experience, Peter, for people who are Christian and are married to abstain from sex throughout their entire marriage." [25:48]
• His bestselling book, Plain Facts About Sexual Life, crusaded against “solitary vice” (masturbation), wildly popular at the time.

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5. Extreme Anti-Masturbation Measures

[27:53–29:44]

• Battle Creek imposed rigid controls: mechanical restraints, bandages, even carbolic acid for girls and circumcision without anesthesia for boys—both aimed at discouraging sexual feelings.
  • Afua: "Basically, he's traumatizing people's genitals. He's trying to make your genital area associated with pain and trauma so that you won't want to go anywhere near it. I mean, that is barbaric." [28:53]
• A culture of self-denial: Kellogg’s approach to health, food, and sex, with direct parallels to today’s extremist “longevity” or wellness fads.

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6. Race, Eugenics, and the Complicated Legacy

[31:14–34:44]

• J.H. Kellogg was a “raging eugenicist,” obsessed with “race suicide” and hereditary improvement.
• Contradictions: Outspoken racism, yet Battle Creek didn’t segregate patients/students and had Black medical staff.
• Afua: “It's such a shame that somebody would use their outside-the-box thinking in other ways... to promote so many ideas that were very destructive, not just on race, but also on sexuality.” [34:44]

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7. Cereal’s Commercial Takeoff: From Health Food to Sugar Bomb

[36:50–41:09]

• W.K. Kellogg bought the rights to the flaked cereal, shifted from wheat to cheap corn, and invented Cornflakes ([39:29]).
• He sweetened the cereal and launched massive, innovative marketing campaigns (colorful boxes, wax packaging, prizes in the box, sexualized advertisements).
  • Peter: "W.K. Kellogg invents the wax type package that maintains the crispness and the flavor, but it's also very distinctive... you get the logos right, and Bob's your uncle." [41:09]
• Cereal companies used sexualized imagery (e.g., “housewives wink at the grocer”) and child-targeted campaigns—tactics that established modern food advertising.
• Tidal wave of imitators; Battle Creek became the “cereal city.”

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8. Processed Breakfast, Public Health, and Sugar Addiction

[43:40–48:48]

• Cereal and milk (often for lactose-intolerant children, ironically) became the default breakfast despite questionable nutritional benefit.
• Rising concerns about sugar content—today’s cereals (even “healthy” ones like Special K or All Bran) far exceed recommended sugar intake.
• Afua: “Now scientific research is pointing to breakfast cereals like Kellogg's as a major culprit for the over consumption of added sugar in the American and in generally, I think the western diet.” [45:07]
• Powerful advertising and branding means even health-conscious families can't always keep kids away from sugary cereals—"my daughter's got a really close friend who... immediately asks for Cocoa Pops because she's not allowed them at home." [48:21]
• Cereal advertising shaped how processed foods are marketed to children and families globally.

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9. Final Thoughts: Legacies Contradict and Endure

[48:48–end]

• J.H. Kellogg lived to 91, but his legacy is a contradiction: foods once designed to suppress pleasure and promote health are now marketed using pleasure, desire, and even sex—while harming public health.
  • Afua: "It was rooted in health, it was rooted in wanting people to eat healthy foods... Fast forward to a world in which those foods are not healthy on the whole. And they're also marketed in many cases in ways that are adjacent to sex." [48:48]
• Cereal as a metaphor for 20th-century capitalism: global, instantly recognizable, shelf-stable, and, ironically, part of the obesity and health crisis it was meant to cure.
• Kellogg’s legacy in “wellness” is surprisingly resonant, as society swings between puritanical denial and self-indulgence.

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Notable Quotes & Moments:

• On the Sanitarium’s branding:
  • "This is a kind of 360 degree wellness retreat, something that has a huge legacy if you look at all of the spa retreats and wellness weekends that are proliferating in our world." —Afua Hirsch [03:03]
• On Chewing Discipline:
  • "Chew, chew, chew, that is the thing to do. Did we mention it sounds a little bit like a cult, Peter?" —Afua Hirsch [08:14]
• On Extreme Enemas:
  • "Usually it's half a liter. He is using 14 liters of liquid per minute through his patient's bowels… he doesn't really do things unless he's going to do them to the extreme." —Afua Hirsch [11:00]
• On Anti-Masturbation Crusade:
  • "Kellogg actually believes that masturbation directly leads to health problems. He thinks not just the blindness that you were told about when you were young, Peter, but also constipation, hemorrhoids, bladder infections, fissures, uncleanliness of the organs." —Afua Hirsch [23:19]
• On Legacy’s Paradoxes:
  • "Foods are not healthy on the whole... and they're also marketed in many cases in ways that are adjacent to sex. It’s such a fascinating story about these in some ways quite strange and fundamentalist ideas and how they’ve evolved to become the quintessential story of modern capitalism, consumerism, and truly global." —Afua Hirsch [48:48]

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Key Episode Timestamps

• 01:17 — Origins of Battle Creek Sanitarium & Kellogg brothers
• 03:03 — Rebranding the sanitarium and roots of wellness culture
• 05:53 — Rapid growth, celebrity visitors, 360-degree wellness
• 07:44 — Horace Fletcher and "chew, chew, chew"
• 10:05 — Scandalous enemas and digestive obsessions
• 13:33 — Food, exercise, and body/purity reform
• 16:19 — Mechanization of food: cereal as “pre-digested” and intentionally bland
• 18:46 — Cereal, sexuality, and debates over sweetening
• 19:57 — The anti-masturbatory roots of breakfast cereal
• 25:48 — Kellogg’s abstinence and extreme anti-pleasure ethos
• 27:53 — Mechanical and surgical anti-sex “solutions”
• 31:14 — Eugenics, race, and the contradiction of Kellogg’s legacy
• 36:50 — Commercialization of cereal: sugar, packaging, and marketing
• 43:40 — Public health consequences, advertising to children
• 48:48 — Summing up the Kellogg legacy: contradictions and global reach

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Summary Flow

The episode masterfully weaves medical, cultural, and business history, examining Kellogg as both a wellness pioneer and repressive zealot, and tracks how bland health food morphed into a global ultra-processed sugar brand. It explores issues of bodily autonomy, advertising, eugenics, and capitalist contradiction—leaving us to wonder what “healthy legacy” should actually mean.

For those who haven’t listened:
This episode is a sharp, entertaining deep-dive into how eccentric Victorian health fads and anxiety about sex and race shaped not only breakfast tables but also global advertising and health. The hosts constantly balance the bizarre with the prescient, and provide fascinating, sometimes disturbing, context for one of the world’s most everyday brands.

Transcript

[Peter Frankopan]

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[Hannah Berner]

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[Peter Frankopan]

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[Afwa Hirsch]

Up and open the door.

[Hannah Berner]

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[Peter Frankopan]

Delivery available for select devices [e-mail] terms apply.

Hello and welcome to the second in our series on Kellogg's. I'm Peter Frankenhaud.

[Afwa Hirsch]

I'm AFWA Hirsch.

[Peter Frankopan]

And this is Legacy, the show that explores the lives, events and ideas that have shaped our world and arts, whether they have reputations that they deserve.

[Afwa Hirsch]

This is kellogg's episode two, snap, crackle pop.

[Peter Frankopan]

Afraid that's got to be the best subtitle we've had for any episode we've had.

[Afwa Hirsch]

We got to give some props to our producer Dan, who came up with Snap, Crackle Pop. It was staring us in the face. I don't know why we didn't see it. Peter. This is the fun of Kellogg's. Like, everybody knows something about Kellogg's.

[Peter Frankopan]

So we left you at the end of last episode with John Kellogg, who had been a very diligent young man. He'd qualified as a doctor. He was very interested in disease. He'd had a Seventh Day Adventist upbringing in the Midwest. But he's on the point of making himself extremely famous, isn't he?

[Afwa Hirsch]

He's also come under the influence of the whites, who are big figures in the Seventh Day Adventist Church in the Midwest. Ellen White has experimented on herself with.

[Peter Frankopan]

I'd say that AFW.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Sanctioned Seventh Day Adventist way. When I say experimented on herself, I mean through vegetarianism and abstinence from sugar and caffeine. And she has presented the idea of creating a health institution based on this newly developing philosophy that the Seventh Day Adventists advocate called sectarian health. And the leaders of the church, including her husband James White, who's one of the elders, agrees. Constructing something that's initially called the Western Health Reform Institute.

[Peter Frankopan]

And John Harvey Kellogg, or J.H. kellogg, comes back from his adventures in more mainstream medicine to become the institute's medical superintendent. And his brother, W.K. kellogg, becomes the bookkeeper. And one of the first things they do is to change their name. They use the word sanatorium, which today sounds incredibly archaic and not a place where anyone's going to have fun. But in the days of the past, it was to try to think about a connected to your health. And as you said last time, Afro, it's not just about physical health. A lot of this is to do with mental health too. And so Changing the Latin word from sanatorium, a place where you'd restore your health to sanitarium. And as a result a new word gets added to the English language.

[Afwa Hirsch]

I don't really know much about sanatoriums, Peter, but I think they were places that were basically for soldiers who'd been wounded to be nursed after battle. So I could see why they wanted to change it. And by changing the name is so often the case when we kind of invent new language, we're trying to invent a new concept. And this is a kind of 360 degree wellness retreat, something that has a huge legacy if you look at all of the spa retreats and wellness weekends that are proliferating in our world. But when J.H. kellogg took it over, it wasn't quite the glamorous spa retreat that it would later become. In fact, it was in quite a mess, Peter.

[Peter Frankopan]

At the beginning it's a dire financial straits because it's a startup, it's a new idea. And how you convince people to come and to spend time and money there at some of this sort of hospital, you know, you can see why it might be tricky. And the institute only houses 20 patients, only eight of those are paying anything. And the living conditions are Spartan, to put it mildly. The food is bland. That's partly deliberate.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Not sure if that's going to change much, but we'll come to that.

[Peter Frankopan]

Last time. There's a reason why it's bland. And it's not just about your health. There's very little entertainment, the doctors are very impersonal, the rooms are mouldy and they're sparsely furnished. And worst of all, during periods of water scarcity, patients have to bathe in water that's previously been used by other patients. And as one lady puts it, we're all being dipped in the same gravy that we have been since 1876. And I think that's something. You can see why people wouldn't be hugely enthusiastic about it.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And you can see why Kellogg felt like he had some work to do, because his vision for this place is not just a health facility, but a place where you come to learn how to be healthy as well as to come for treatment when you're sick. So he's thinking about how this can be a place of preventative medicine, of all round wellness, ultimately something that we really would now recognize as more like a spa retreat.

[Peter Frankopan]

Well, not just that. He soups it up and upgrades it so it becomes something heading towards luxury. Two decades later, it becomes known by the turn of the century, it becomes known as the University of Health, a mixture of a spa, hotel, restaurant, university and Hospital. By 1900, recreational facilities are added at nearby Gogwack Lake, and several farms are contributing hundreds of acres of land that provide the sanitarium with sources of milk, of eggs, of fruit and vegetables. And so, a bit like we spoke about last time, eating healthy, living healthy and getting your body back in a good position is something that at the time seemed revolutionary and then in the course of the 20th century we probably lost sight of. But it sounds very voguish and very 21st century now.

[Afwa Hirsch]

There's a huge emphasis on food from the beginning, which will make sense in the. In the later story, they build a canning plant in 1896 so that they can preserve some of their farm produce to make it last longer. And it's massively scaling up the number of people involved. So during its peak in summer, the sanitarium is caring for 700 patients and employing nearly a thousand staff whom they call helpers. And its fame is spreading thanks to Kellogg's vision for the Battle Creek Sanitarium. It's becoming a destination for the wealthy, the famous people like Booker T Washington, William Howard Taft, Henry Ford, Warren G Harding, Amelia Earhart, John D Rockefeller, the list goes on. And some of them are quite surprising. Sojourner Truth, the famous abolitionist, previously enslaved women is one of Harvey's personal patients.

[Peter Frankopan]

So Roald Armandson, the polar explorer, I mean, who'd have thought Eleanor Roosevelt didn't look like she was going to be turning up on my bingo card for who do you go to wellness retreat? But you know, so it's a kind of celebrity hangout as well.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And you can see why later they add towers, 15 storey edition with luxurious lobbies and dining rooms. And it's really somewhere that people come not just for the treatment, but to be part of this story. And this is all down to J.H. kellogg himself. He has some really distinctive ideas. And as he pioneers this Battle Creek sanitarium, he gleans more and more into his view of what health means. So just let, let's just look at a couple of the kind of signature ideas at Battle Creek. One of them comes from a health guru called Horace Flesher, who believed that many people's health problems could be traced to their poor chewing discipline. Now, I don't know if you've heard.

[Peter Frankopan]

About this, I've got a friend who does that who talks about how you need to chew for 22 minutes or, you know, they take forever to finish a meal. And when they're chewing, they don't talk. So it's not my favorite person to have people with.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And again, it's kind of merged with wellness mindfulness, this idea that you should be present while eating. You should chew your food till it's basically liquefied in your mouth. And the flesher idea is that you should chew each bite 40 times. You're essentially a friend of mine pureeing.

[Peter Frankopan]

It who you are as well in your mouth.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And to encourage people to do this, they even come up with a Kellogg song. Chew, chew, chew. That is the thing to do. Did we mention it sounds a little bit like a cult, Peter?

[Peter Frankopan]

I think that, you know, but cults are very successful. You know, everybody has a cult element to the lives that they do. It might not be in a middle of Michigan or surrounded by other people chewing their food, but it could be the football club you're part of. It could be where you go on Friday nights with your friends. You know, everybody wants to belong. And what Kellogg's genius is that he, he does two things very well. First, he works out how to tell a good story and how to sell a good story. You know, that's part of it. You don't get Eleanor Roosevelt, Amelia Earhart, giving up their weekends and coming to see you in a day. We're getting to, to this health farm takes time as well as money. But he's also very keen to spot these fads, as you mentioned, Alfred, so he can see what's coming. He's basically a marketing genius. I mean, one of the other things he comes up with is auto intoxication, which I don't have any friends who try me on that one. Do you have an auto intoxicant buddy?

[Afwa Hirsch]

Well, again, I think autointoxication has been discredited, but the thinking around it is still, in my opinion, very visible in contemporary marketing. So auto intoxication was developed by EL Metz, a Russian chemist at the Pasteur Institute in Paris. And essentially the idea is that poison or toxins from undigested food in the intestines seep into the body through the intestine walls and cause illness. The idea is to make sure that food is not staying in your gut for any prolonged period of time. One of these is by having a bowel movement after every meal. And because laxatives are not really part of this worldview, there's another way to make sure people's bowels are mo around a lot.

[Peter Frankopan]

And, and Kellogg has hundreds of different kinds of enemas. You know, he believed, probably more than most people, that you need regular washing out because that will get rid of, you know, your poisons, your dirt, your excrement. And there are plenty of people who love that sort of stuff.

[Afwa Hirsch]

I'm going to get a bit personal. Have you ever had an enema, Peter?

[Peter Frankopan]

I. You know what I was thinking as you asked, That I would say, why should I answer? But I don't feel embarrassed to say I never have.

[Afwa Hirsch]

No, but I don't think there should be any shame around it. I mean, it's quite. It's still a quite a popular treatment.

[Peter Frankopan]

I don't really want anything pumped up inside me, certainly not in that direction. But, you know, I do understand that is from the medical point of view, you know, keeping your colon healthy and making sure that you have proper health everywhere. You know, there are lots of these kind of weird stigmas where people think that some things are unnatural and not to be used by doctors. But enemas are absolutely standard medical procedures. So there's nothing wrong with it, I think.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Well, some, some people contest whether it is healthy to whether our bodies actually want any interference with the process of digestion and bowels processing our own waste. But even if you accept that enemas are completely standard and lots of people do do them, the usual amount of liquid involved in an enema, Peter, is about half a liter. Do you know how much liquid J.H. kellogg advocated using in his enemas? So usually it's half a liter. He is using 14 liters of liquid per minute through his patient's bowels. Yeah, he doesn't really do things unless he's going to do them to the extreme.

[Peter Frankopan]

So Kellogg is kind of very interested with biological living and longevity, but in particular with food. You know, he's in contact with European physicians and scientists and it's the digestive system is something that's really interesting to him. So he encourages people to eat well, very topical today. Whole grains, fruits, legumes, other vegetables. He's been a vegetarian since he was 14 and you know, like some of the other Seventh Day Adventists, he becomes pretty strict on banning spices, sugar, mustard, ginger, cinnamon, in fact, things that are anti inflammatory. So it's a slightly funny one, but he's quite an accomplished gastroenterological surgeon.

[Afwa Hirsch]

He calls this biological living. And as you said, Peter, there's a lot of emphasis on a vegetarian diet, on whole foods, on fresh air. And many of these ideas have aged pretty well. Actually, there are some that are a bit harder to get your head around. For example, he believes in limiting the amount of protein in the diet. Anyone who knows anything about current ideas around strength, wellness, nutrition knows there's a huge emphasis on protein at the moment. And maybe we'll come back to that, because one of the things I take from looking at this history of Kellogg is how faddish our ideas about food and nutrition are. You know, and now I think this emphasis, you should eat, you know, one gram of protein per kilogram of lean body mass.

[Peter Frankopan]

You know, say that again. I need to write that down. What should I do?

[Afwa Hirsch]

I probably got it wrong. I just know you're meant to work out how much you weigh and, and there's a sum that you do to work out how much protein you should eat. And the reason I don't know it exactly is that it's such a huge amount of protein that I should eat. If I followed that with my body weight, that I kind of gave up before I began. But the idea of limiting protein is, is even if you don't subscribe to these huge quantities of protein now being prescribed, a bit difficult to get your head around. But there are other things, Peter, that are weirder.

[Peter Frankopan]

But it's not just about food, right? It's also about healthy living again, in things that sound resonant today. So daily exercise, pure water, fresh air, sunshine, sleep. He's very keen on physical exercise and getting the body to look good.

[Afwa Hirsch]

The sanitarium has a proper gymnasium with equipment that's designed to enhance body movement. It even has an elevated track for runners. In fact, an early version of the treadmill is often attributed to him. He really understood something that now everybody knows, which is that exercise, getting your heart rate up, being active is really important for overall health. You know, this is in an era where exercise had previously been associated with people who were poorer and tied to working the land. You know, being overweight and not having to be active at one point, not that long before, was regarded as a sign of prestige and wealth. This is a really significant legacy for the modern era where actually affluence is about having the luxury of a good balanced diet, access to exercise and cutting edge techniques. These were all ideas that were happening at Battle Creek. And crucially linking exercise, diet, but also how we dress, the kind of clothes we wear, posture. So again, corsets, which were very constricting for women, he believed, rightly, were bad for the female body, interfered with normal functions like breathing. He advocated open weave fabrics that allowed air to circulate regularly. Changing your clothes and your underwear, all things again, that have been completely assimilated are unquestionable in like normal everyday life now.

[Peter Frankopan]

And I think all of these things make him sound very progressive. Afra, you know, he's try to say you need to allow your body to eat things that are useful and good for you. You need to be conscious of your mental health. You need to not be restrictive. And so body liberation, I guess that's what taking women out of corsets is also doing too. He's keen on exercise. So everything sounds like he's going to be very progressive and going to be someone who sets up the wellness movement. But that's not why we really remember Kellogg, who most people when they think of him, will think of a range of different breakfast cereal. So how does that all fit together?

[Afwa Hirsch]

Cereal is the innovation that Battle Creek will always be remembered for. And cereal was a deliberate invention, part of the Kellogg breakthrough. So they were doing all this experimenting at Battle Creek. They were using the kitchens to work out how they could make bland foods from whole grains. Whole grains, because they knew rightly that it was more healthy to eat fiber and natural products, but bland because of ideas we'll talk about in a moment that believe that anything too exciting, too stimulating, too desirable was also bad for your health.

[Peter Frankopan]

So there's like the graham cracker, right? We talked about the graham cracker. How about how that can calm your sexual desires?

[Afwa Hirsch]

There's a sensible element. There's a very puritanical, slightly fanatical, religious element. So just to talk about the kind of mechanics of breakfast cereal, the Kellogg's invented, and I say the Kellogg's because he's working now with his brother, William Keith Kellogg. W.K. kellogg, who starts working at the sanitarium when he's around 20, working closely with his brother. And together they're experimenting on how to roll grains into cereal. So they develop this key piece of technology called rollers. And this is special machinery housed within the sanitarium that includes 8 inch steel rollers that basically takes dough, dries it and flattens it. And they describe it as the secret to flaking mashed wheat. They would take a batch of cooked wheat and then discover that if they ran it through these rollers, they could flake it. And the rollers are kind of not just machines, but almost pre digesters. You mentioned, Peter, that J H Kellogg is actually an accomplished gastroenterologist. He's so interested in digestion and he's interested in how you can kind of outs source digestion outside the body. So he's seeing these rollers as kind of pre digesters machinery that can fragment and pre cook grain so that once it's inside your digestive system, your body has a lot less work to do in breaking it down in its own digestive process. So this kind of extensible digestive system is mechanizing, essentially part of your body's digestive work. Now, for a doctor who can see rightly that digestion is key to a lot of people's health problems and that people are struggling to digest food and that that's often linked to other health conditions, you can kind of follow the logic that the less work we give people's bodies to do by giving them already kind of pre digested food, the less strain it will put on their system. And so they're using these mashed wheat flakes to create a breakfast cereal. Now, the point about the cereal is that it's not meant to be really exciting or tempting. It is meant to very bland. And one of the early arguments the brothers W.K. kellogg and J.H. kellogg have is around whether to sweeten it. Because J.H. kellogg is very puritanical. He doesn't want this to taste good. He wants it to do a job. W.K. kellogg sees an opportunity that if they sweeten this, it might make it more appetizing. Why is JH Kellogg so worried about things being appetizing, Peter?

[Peter Frankopan]

Well, he's. We talked about this before. I don't know why you're turning the microphone to me for this bit when you, you've done all the digest while you were talking. I think we're probably a couple of months ahead of AI being able to do a mock up of you and me dressed up as the Kellogg brothers, experimenting with the secret flaking mashed wheat machines in the pre digesters. And then the people watching this could, could see us in Battle Creek. So. Okay, I'll tell you why. Well, it's two reasons. Number one, WKH keeps telling his brother that they need to patent this and you need to make money. And there's an opportunity here. And his brother, John Kellogg is, is, is lots of things. He's talented, he's innovative, he's good on fads, but he's not particularly good at business. And his brother, in fact, calls him the best disorganizer in the world. But the real reason, and it comes to me to inform our listeners and viewers the reason why there's the disagreement about sweeten the cereals is about the effect it's going to have on whether men and women are going to increase the rate and frequency of masturbation.

[Afwa Hirsch]

I love how you delayed the word masturbation to the well, I thought, should.

[Peter Frankopan]

I do the host of different Playing with yourself, interfering with yourself. That's what we.

[Afwa Hirsch]

No, masturbation is fine. We know what it is.

[Peter Frankopan]

Masturbation is fine.

[Afwa Hirsch]

This is, this is not. And this is, by the way, not like an embarrassing topic for them. This is kind of the main event. I mean, J.H. kellogg is kind of obsessed with masturbation and it's a big part of his practice. Why are they so obsessed with masturbation? We'll find out after the break.

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[Peter Frankopan]

So like a lot of people of the time, I'm just sort of so concerned I, you know, I don't want my children to listen to me talking about masturbation on the podcast.

[Afwa Hirsch]

So for the record, anyone listening this is not because they're too young, but no, but because they're adults and therefore that makes it even more I'm of.

[Peter Frankopan]

A different generation to you. Afw. No one when the word was mentioned, it was mentioned in harsh tones. We were told we were all going to go blind and that possibly would go to hell.

[Afwa Hirsch]

So but you might have Kellogg to blame for that.

[Peter Frankopan]

Peter, I do have Kellogg to blame. And the book of Genesis, the sin of. But masturbation could begin in some cases. And Kellogg was very concerted about it at a very young age. And he was concerned about keeping children keeping their hands above their waistline. And so there was an idea that this is very popular in 19th century United States and in Europe, the Western civilization, there's a legacy in that one too, was going to hell in a handcart. People were losing morality, they were turning away from the ways of the Lord and that punishment would be rife. And so Kellogg was doing a public service by moving temptation away from people. And if you could do that by feeding them incredibly bland food and controlling their urges, maybe there was a way in which you were being a good Christian as well as being a good scientist.

[Afwa Hirsch]

They didn't see masturbation or just exploring your body as a natural expression of curiosity. They saw it as temptation into sin. And actually it's kind of a two way thing. If you explore your body, you might be tempted into sin and it might lead you down a path that is depraved. But at the same time, the fact that a child might want to touch their own body or explore, they saw as evidence that their parents had sinned. So, for example, Kellogg thinks that children who masturbate or even just touch their genitals are reflecting the fact that their parents had excessive sex during pregnancy or that they masturbated themselves. And that this kind of like sin somehow is engendered in the embryo so that this child is born with this temptation to do this terrible thing. And the reason it's terrible, in their opinion, is because Kellogg actually believes that masturbation directly leads to health problems. He thinks not just the blindness that you were told about when you were young, Peter, but also constipation, hemorrhoids, bladder infections, fissures, uncleanliness of the organs. So I suppose if you adopt this worldview, you could see why you would be very vested in trying to stop your patients. You're doing all this work to ensure their health and holistic well being. You can't have them go off and masturbating and undoing all the hard work. So you have to work out how to stop them before we talk about how they actually did try to stop people masturbating. I think it's worth just exploring Kellogg himself and why he had these ideas. Peter. Because on the surface he is a heterosexual married man.

[Peter Frankopan]

Well, you say on the surface, I'm not so sure. I mean, he Marries ella Eaton in February 1879. She's a seventh Day Baptist. She has a degree in nutrition. Looks and sounds like a match made in heaven. But as far as we know and can tell, they never had sex. I mean, they were completely devoted to each other. They were married for 41 years, but they never consummated their relationship. And I think that was partly because Kellogg felt that sexual intimacy would SAP his vital powers. And, you know, that's quite something. In the meantime, his wife also believed in abstinence and included a purity pledge in a pamphlet called Talks With Girls, written at the end of the 19th century, which encouraged adolescents to stay away from anything that might get them to sin. So, ironically, when they go on honeymoon, he spends some of his time revising a book that he previously published called Plain Facts About Sexual Life.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Imagine spending your honeymoon writing a book about abstinence. The thing that I find so unusual about this, it's not at all unusual for people to promote abstinence or celibacy. In fact, if you go to America now, you'll see all these chastity rings and Christian churches that advocate avoiding any sex before marriage. But crucially, it's sex before marriage. It's pretty unusual, in my experience, Peter, for people who are Christian and are married to abstain from sex throughout their entire marriage. I mean, they never had any biological children, and as far as we know, they never actually had sex. And most Christians believe, you know, even those who are fundamentalists and have very puritanical ideas about intimacy, they still believe it's necessary for reproductive purposes, even if they don't advocate pleasure. So this is really extreme. And there's lots of theories about why he was so appalled by the sexual act, had issues with his own sexuality. But the facts that we know are he didn't have sex with his wife ever. He's. We don't know of him ever having sex with anyone. And he spent a huge amount of his waking life working out how to stop other people masturbating.

[Peter Frankopan]

But there's a big market for this stuff. So his book Plain Facts About Sexual Life sells half a million copies, which is enormous relative to the size of the United States at the time. You know, it's huge. People are really interested in human reproduction, in heredity and puberty and so on. But by far the biggest section is with what he calls the solitary vice, the way you can have fun on your own masturbating and talking about the signs of occurrence. How do you stop it? The diseases that apparently leads you to including heart disease, sore throat, headaches, you know, you name it. So all of these things are about Kellogg, not just selling his vision, but tapping into what it is that other people are thinking anyway. So I think that that idea about how sex is a bad thing and you need to feel guilty about it is something that has deep roots in quite a lot of religions. But Christianity has a particularly strong sequence of what, how you should practice your sexuality, who with, under what circumstances, and then it's kind of bad for you. So he's tapping into something that's bigger than just himself.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And he goes to quite extreme lengths to try and stop his patients masturbating. So one big area which we'll come back to, is dietary control. Again, this idea linked to Graham and others, that bland foods that don't excite passion will help you live a life of abstinence. But he gets much more direct and physical in his approach. So he uses mechanical restraints for children and teenagers to stop them masturbating. At nighttime, he bandages the genitals, he ties hands. At night, he uses cages or enclosures to prevent access to genitals. And I think one of the most controversial and extreme measures of is a kind of form of female genital mutilation. He suggests applying carbolic acid to the clitoris, basically an extremely painful chemical cauterization that he thinks will reduce sexual sensation and prevent masturbation for boys circumcision without anesthesia, believing that the pain will discourage future masturbation. Basically, he's traumatizing people's genitals. He's trying to make your genital area associated with pain and trauma so that you won't want to go anywhere near it. I mean, that is barbaric.

[Peter Frankopan]

Well, so can you imagine a weekend with the Kellogg's, right? You're going to get fed healthily, but tasteless food, you're going to have your hand, your hands strapped behind your back. You're going to have potential carbolic acid poured on your clitoris or you'll have forcible circumcision done by Kellogg himself. There's going to be a song that lasts for about 40 seconds because you've got to chew every mouthful for 40 seconds that have the chewing song. Then you've got to go to the gym to go and work out. I mean, I was going to say I can't think of anything worse. But having said that, I've got. I know a few people. I think that's most of that, not maybe all of it. Sounds like an ideal long weekend away.

[Afwa Hirsch]

So that kind of self denial reminding me of. Actually, I follow.

[Peter Frankopan]

Don't name them. For legal reasons, I won't name them.

[Afwa Hirsch]

But you can find them. I follow a few. Longevity.

[Peter Frankopan]

Oh, yes, they love this stuff.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Oh my goodness. Their lives make me depressed. And listen, I go to the gym, I eat healthily. I'm all for maximizing health. I would love to age well. But they take it to an extreme and it's basically like they only eat kind of lean protein, lots of it. They have tons of supplements every day to get all of the vitamins and minerals they think is going to extend their life, preserve their neural and physical health. They go to bed at kind of 8pm there's no caffeine, there's no alcohol, there's no late nights. They kind of get up at 4 to meditate and stretch before it gets light. And I get it, but I kind of.

[Peter Frankopan]

How are they on the sense of humor?

[Afwa Hirsch]

Well, exactly. Like, what is the point of prolonging your life if it's such an incredibly dull life that you're leading? And this isn't, you know, if they were monks or nuns or some kind of religious aesthetics, I would get it more because then you're pursuing a spiritual path where you're kind of shunning the physical realm. But this seems like a purely material ideology. It's all about looking good for as long as possible in the physical realm. It doesn't even really have a spiritual dimension and it just seems like a pretty impoverished way to live. So I feel like Kellogg is alive and well in today's longevity experts. Maybe we should invite one onto the show and see what they make of that comparison.

[Peter Frankopan]

And Peter and always afwa. I've learned that where there's always smoke, there's fire and that there's always a racial element to all of this too. So how does Kellogg and his brother, the idea about what you eat and self control, how does that fit into ideas about eugenics and race?

[Afwa Hirsch]

Well, Kellogg is a raging eugenicist. He is, I suppose, part of a culture at the time where these ideas about race degeneration and the potential to better the race through segregation through selective reproduction are really, really popular. But again, he takes it to an extreme. So the eugenics movement really begins in earnest in the 1860s, fostered by this idea that you can improve the human race by applying the principles of heredity to human reproduction. But it begins to promote these really extreme ideas so that people who have, for example, mental health problems or learning difficulties shouldn't be allowed to have children. And because this is also an era of peak white supremacy, there's this belief that black people are intellectually inferior. And it's kind of taken as a given in the eugenicist movement. So black people are a lower order of the human race in this worldview. And for black people to interbreed, to be in relationships with people of other races and produce offspring and is going to dilute the white race in this worldview. So that's something you can see in so many figures of the time. Many mainstream politicians, we often like to conveniently forget when we're praising their legacy how much they promoted this. Because this isn't just something that ends up informing Hitler or segregationists in the U.S. it's so widespread. But Kellogg was very preoccupied by these ideas. He feared race suicide, the belief that white middle class upper Americans were going to be outbred by these so called inferior races. And by the way, that didn't just include black people, the inferior races in his worldview was also Southern and Eastern Europe, Africans and Asians. And it was a very contradictory worldview because while this is completely undiluted racism, he also had these kind of paternalistic ideas towards other races. So because he and his wife didn't have sex or have any children, they adopted many children, as many as 40. And some of them were of black or Asian heritage. So I can only imagine what life would be like as a, you know, a child of color being raised by the Kellogg's. Not only no seasoning on your food, your hands strapped at night, but also being told that you're from this inferior racial background, you know, that you belong lower down the hierarchy of, of humanity.

[Peter Frankopan]

But I don't want to excuse any of that or put it in the context I think people are listening to this will understand all of that anyway. But you know, on the other hand, in, in some ways at least, Kellogg was quite progressive. And he refused to segregate people based on their skin color at Battle Creek, either as patients or as students. He had good relationships with the black community too. And there were African American physicians and nurses graduating before 1917, which is, you know, at the time, not just being progressive. I think that's unusual that you see that kind of level of tolerance and promotion. So as you said, it's contradictory. So on the one hand he's got these kind of ideas about race suicide and replacement theories that have their own legacies too. But at the same time there are ways in which you can see that he's being quite thoughtful about what it means to be human and try to look past some of the terrible prejudices that are so alive and well at the time and have continued.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And as we said, some very famous African Americans were patients at Battle Creek, including Booker T. Washington and Sojourner Truth. So it is a complex picture. And I think for me, what's so sinister about it is it kind of indicates that eugenicist ideas were just so widespread at the time that they didn't even really stand out. You know, it wasn't something I think made Battle Creek seem out of bounds to people who weren't white, because he was just one of very many powerful white men who advocated these theories while doing other things that were progressive and helpful. And it's such a shame that somebody would use their outside the box thinking in other ways when it comes to health and wellbeing to promote so many ideas that were very destructive, not just on race, but also on sexuality and how to encourage people to have a kind of complete relationship with their body. It's one thing to advocate a health exercise food, but to teach you that your body is shameful or that your race is shameful as the potential to undo all of those other benefits. So we've talked a lot about Kellogg, the man and his ideas, but when we think about Kellogg's now, we're thinking not so much about the individual people involved, Peter, but the legacy that J.H. kellogg and his brother, W.K. kellogg. Bu.

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[Peter Frankopan]

There's an irony, as we've spoken about before we started recording, you know, that what starts off as a health movement gives us one of the great threats to modern health because of ultra processed food. And in fact, my favorite Kellogg cereal had to be taken off the shelves because the sugar content, the sugar load was even, even, even 30 years ago, was considered to be semi crazy.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Which one's that?

[Peter Frankopan]

Oh, the popsicles, ricicles, racicles. I mean, I keep looking to see if I can find them, but they're probably on eBay, 100 quid a packet because they're so dangerous.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And I think about Frosties, which I definitely went through a phase of. Do Frosties still exist? They're basically like coated in solid sugar from what I remember.

[Peter Frankopan]

I probably shouldn't reveal too much about my. Okay. Occasionally if I see Frosty somewhere, particularly if I'm in the hotel, I'll definitely tuck some of those away for old time's sake. And I'm fully aware of how bad. But anyway, it's the fact that something that's supposed to be a health food becomes something that is not great for human health. But also the second thing that the key actually driver of this is not John Harvey Kellogg, but it's about his brother and Keith Kellogg working out how to monetize, how to scale through industrial production to turn up the enormously successful Kellogg company that makes Cornflakes, of course is the most famous of all the Kellogg's Bachelor. I'm not sure we've even mentioned them by name yet.

[Afwa Hirsch]

Well, they don't exist yet. So William Keith Kellogg, the younger brother, is a bit of a long suffering character. He's been working at the sanitarium since he was 20. He's incredibly loyal and devoted to his brother. But John Harvey Kellogg treats him mercilessly, expects him to work long hours managing the daily operations, using him as a personal secretary and not always being very supportive of W.K. kellogg's business ideas. Some of which from a capitalist sense really do make a lot of sense. And in 1906, the younger brother, W.K. kellogg has had enough of subservience and being basically mistreated by his older brother. So he strikes a deal. Seeing the potential of the serials that they've created, he pays his brother half a million dollars for the rights to the flakes. And one of the things that he does is move the emphasis from wheat flakes, which as you remember earlier is the cereal they kind of pioneered granose, these wheat flakes. From their experimenting with what they could do with wheat. He moves this into corn. Corn is in plentiful cheap supply due to the changing Midwest agricultural economy. It's only really being used as a fattening agent for livestock. It's a much cheaper ingredient to use. So WK has the idea of switching from wheat to corn and creating.

[Peter Frankopan]

Well, there we go. Cornflakes arrives and WK realizes that while anti masturbatory food products has a market, which maybe was why we were all given them when we were young. I'm just trying to think back. It turns out that if you can brand and sell to a broader audience that you might be a bit more successful. So his, his brother John Harvey is, is anti commercialization. He thinks he's got a semi religious, semi medical mission. But WK Starts to push Kellogg's into become something really successful. And it's so successful that it breeds a whole generation of rivals in Battle Creek becomes the kind of serial city still its name, by the way, of the whole of the cereal industry where loads of companies, 80 companies stand up and go bust trying to do the same thing in the same way. Their own version of health foods. But WK Is a marketing genius. He realizes if you sugar things, if you could get the marketing right, if you can get distribution and industrial production right, suddenly these little flakes can make you quite a lot of money.

[Afwa Hirsch]

The key development is sugar, because J.H. kellogg had promoted this as a bland food with curative properties. W.K. kellogg works out that if you add sugar, you make this tasty. And he is now marketing the product based on simplicity and taste. And sugar is so controversial because it's not healthy. And J.H. kellogg, who really does care about health, knows this. But W.K. kellogg is more interested in how he can create this massively commercial product. And without sugar, there would be no story about cornflakes taking over the world.

[Peter Frankopan]

I'm not sure that's right. AFWA. The sugar is a big part of it. But everybody who thinks of those Kellogg cereals recognizes those boxes. And that is incredibly important. W.K. kellogg invents the wax type package that maintains the crispness and the flavor, but it's also very distinctive. It's very, very easy to pack. You get the colors right, you get the logos right, and Bob's your uncle. And then what WK does is he starts to spend on aggressive advertising. He spends more than a million dollars on Advertising in 1915. And the strategies he comes up are at the time incredibly daring inclusing. And when I, when we read the scripts, when we did our research on this one, when we talked about it was asking housewives to wink at the grocer. I misread that briefly, thinking that that's not what the grocers are doing back. The anti masturbatory was maybe still there.

[Afwa Hirsch]

But I think we can safely say the anti masturbatory message has long gone out of Kellogg's by the time it's being packaged in these wax type boxes with this sugary, tasty, mass produced product is absolutely drawing explicitly on sexualized messages. To sell cereal. You've got the, as you said, the housewives wink at the grocer. You've got the Sweetheart of the Corn campaigns. You've got all of these images that take women and make them look alluring. You're also trying to attract children. You've got games, you've got cutouts. You know, anyone who's ever grown up eating breakfast cereal will still recognize these strategies. You know, the freebies, the little quizzes on the back of the cereal box. These were part of the genius of W.K. kellogg's mother's.

[Peter Frankopan]

Those little toys on the inside, those were jackpot. I mean, they were like catnip. I mean, you couldn't resist trying to get whatever it was that was in there, a card, teddy bear, you name it. But that appeal to mothers and to women was a really important part of it. It's an easy, quick way to have breakfast. And then Kellogg was smart. He paired cereal with milk, which wasn't how corn plates had originally come into being, but milk was being pushed as an important way of improving national health. I mean, you have JFK in the mid, mid 20th century drinking milk to prove that it's safe, that cows hadn't been radiated by US nuclear testing. And so to get a kind of perfect food that was good for you, that was healthy, that was quick and that was cheap was a kind of way of changing the breakfast habits of everybody in the United States. But I'm interested, afwin, in how this, what this looks like for the legacy, what the fact that people have been eating these kinds of cereals for a hundred years have done in terms of the longer term legacies of Kellogg's and cereals.

[Afwa Hirsch]

I'm just thinking back as you're talking to my own childhood. So, you know, a little black girl growing up eating Kellogg's cereal with milk for breakfast, number one, completely lactose intolerant, as many black people are. In fact, many people who are not of kind of northern European heritage are quite lactose intolerant. Two, it's basically carbohydrates and sugar, neither of which are necessarily what your body needs first thing in the morning, especially not the sugar. And you know, it took me a long time to realize that breakfast cereal has absolutely no connection to what I nutritionally need in the morning. If you look at that on a macro scale, you can see the impact that this idea of eating sugary carbohydrates with milk for breakfast, the impact it's had on health. So Today the top 10 food and beverage companies with sugar heavy mega brands spend over $6.9 billion advertising per year in the US and many of them are high sugar cereals that hide behind healthier versions of the same brand name. So even as the brands have kind of tried to evolve, like Special K for example, which actually is another very controversial Kellogg's brand that was supposed to be healthier, the reality is these products still contain a lot of sugar. And now scientific research is pointing to breakfast cereals like Kellogg's as a major culprit for the over consumption of added sugar in the American and in generally, I think the western diet. It's now being linked to obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, high triglycerides and hypertension. And world organizations like the WHO recommend sugar intake limits far below the typical American consumption level. So they're saying there should only be 6 teaspoons of sugar per day. Some of these breakfast cereals exceed that in a single helping. Peter.

[Peter Frankopan]

I know, and unfortunately some of the ones I like most, I have to be very careful with my apple Cheerios and the Cinnamon Grahams. Absolutely bankers. But they are really, they are dosing you up with huge amounts of sugar that are dangerous. But the marketing skills that serial companies developed in the 20th century have been fantastic. They're incredibly influential, you know, including biological vulnerability towards sugars, as you mentioned, psychological vulnerability, reaching out to kids through fantasy characters like Tony the Tiger or the Lucky Charms leprechaun to encourage kids to pester their parents. That little toy that's left inside to try to not just be about food, it's about giving a reward for the pestering processes. And that's had an important message too. So too the dual messaging. It's no coincidence that the names of some of these cereals, like Fruit Loops are designed to make them sound like they must be really good for you and really healthy. So some of those things I think have had a long term consequence too in terms of thinking about how marketing agencies worked out their strategies. They've had to change and adapt those because regulators have caught up with them in lots of cases to force them to cut sugar levels and to stop being, stop reaching and promoting advertising to kids.

[Afwa Hirsch]

And Kellogg's has also been at the forefront of this kind of rebrand towards healthier ideals. So for example, in 1984 they launched Kellogg's All Bran which was the beginning of a new era of health claims. Trying to show that these cereals were actually high in fiber, that they could be part of a healthy diet. We talked about special kids. I remember the Special K diet where women were being advised to switch out breakfast and lunch for a bowl of Special K and eat a healthy dinner to drop two gene sizes in. I can't remember if it was a month or six months, but I think it was only quite recently that the Special K diet was officially abandoned as a good nutritional idea, which it wasn't. I've definitely tried the Special K diet at some point in my late teens or early twenties and I look back now and think of the kind of nutritional illiteracy of that idea. But it was a different time when people were much more amenable to marketing and advertising. There was a lot less information available about the harm that some of these ultra processed sugary foods were causing our health. And I think now we're in a situation where people have much more knowledge but are still addicted to some of these products. And also the way they're marketed to kids is so effective that even if you don't want your children to eat, eat them, they still want them. So, for example, my daughter's got a really close friend who whenever she comes to stay at our house, immediately asks for Cocoa Pops because she's not allowed them at home. Her mum is completely adamant that no sugary breakfast cereals should be consumed in their household. But she knows that I keep an emergency stash of Cocoa Pops. So as soon as she comes here, she's, can I have some Cocoa Pops, please?

[Peter Frankopan]

Now, hundreds of thousands of listeners know that Afra keeps Cocoa Pops. I know where I'm coming when I. When I have my Cocoa Pops supply cut out.

[Afwa Hirsch]

No one's perfect, Peter.

[Peter Frankopan]

So look, apple. We've talked about masturbation, we've talked about Seven Day Adventism, about vegetarianism, masturbation, how Kellogg's came into being, and how important cereals have been for advertising as well as for diets. How do we sum up when we think back at Kellogg and his brother, what they did and what they achieved?

[Afwa Hirsch]

Well, John, Harvey Kellogg lived to be 91. The way that he advocated living obviously didn't do him too much harm. He was an aesthetic man. And I sometimes think, what would he think about the legacy that his invention created? Because it was rooted in health, it was rooted in wanting people to eat healthy foods that were bland and stop them having sex. Fast forward to a world in which those foods are not healthy on the whole. And they're also marketed in many cases in ways that are adjacent to sex. So I think it's such a fascinating story about these in some ways quite strange and fundamentalist ideas and how they've evolved to become the quintessential story of modern capitalism, consumerism, and truly global. Because I would challenge you to go to any country in the world. I mean, if there is one, you've probably been to it, Peter, where you cannot buy Kellogg's breakfast cereal. Is there one?

[Peter Frankopan]

Never. I've never ever seen one. And in fact, in hotels, you know, there's little mini packs of cereal. They're kind of genius. They're easy to store, they keep for a long time. Everybody knows what they are never going to get food poisoning if you eat some Frosties or cornflakes. And the marketing genius and the execution of a business owes a lot to getting the logistics right. And Kellogg's, the world they built was unbelievable. I mean, I think that that traces itself back to that young boy hunched over the workplace sorting broom corn, who is watching the world change around him. And Kellogg's in some ways is the kind of story of the 20th century. Maybe the idea that sex is natural, normal, and totally fine. You know, those kind of ideas are moving away from the puritanical. But as you say, we're living in an age where lots of his ideas are surprisingly resonant about how to deprive yourself of pleasure, how to eat and think pure, how to take time off, how to not eat too much sugar, how to eat healthily, how to exercise. A lot of those feel very resonant today. So that Legacy, it's kind of amazing how long it's endured. Anyway, thanks for listening to this episode of Legacy and thanks for listening to our podcast. We hope to see you again soon. I'm Peter Frankopan.

[Afwa Hirsch]

I'm AFWA Hirsch.

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