Harvey Kellogg Quotes

At one chew per second, the Fletcherizing of a single bite of shallot would take more than ten minutes. Supper conversation presented a challenge. “Horace Fletcher came for a quiet dinner, sufficiently chewed,” wrote the financier William Forbes in his journal from 1906. Woe befall the non-Fletcherizer forced to endure what historian Margaret Barnett called “the tense and awful silence which . . . accompanies their excruciating tortures of mastication.” Nutrition faddist John Harvey Kellogg, whose sanatorium briefly embraced Fletcherism,* tried to reenliven mealtimes by hiring a quartette to sing “The Chewing Song,”† an original Kellogg composition, while diners grimly toiled. I searched in vain for film footage, but Barnett was probably correct in assuming that “Fletcherites at table were not an attractive sight.” Franz Kafka’s father, she reports, “hid behind a newspaper at dinnertime to avoid watching the writer Fletcherize.

seems to be a rule of nutritionism that for every good nutrient, there must be a bad nutrient to serve as its foil, the latter a focus for our food fears and the former for our enthusiasms. A backlash against protein arose in America at the turn of the last century as diet gurus like John Harvey Kellogg and Horace Fletcher (about whom more later) railed against the deleterious effects of protein on digestion (it supposedly led to the proliferation of toxic bacteria in the gut) and promoted the cleaner, more wholesome carbohydrate in its place. The legacy of that revaluation is the breakfast cereal, the strategic objective of which was to dethrone animal protein at the morning meal. Ever since, the history of modern

John Harvey Kellogg’s sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. There

In The New York Times, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg (of the famous cereals) wrote that “the liquor interests are conspirators against the public welfare” since its production used “more fuel than all schools and churches combined.

Like him, Cooper was a proponent of a low-protein, high-carbohydrate diet, believing “The proportions in the menu should be 10 percent protein, 30 fats and 60 per cent carbohydrates. It is impossible to emphasize too strongly that our health and energies depend on our foods.” In 1913, she authored The New Cookery, a low-protein vegetarian cookbook. She’s also responsible for this little ditty: “In many ways, the breakfast is the most important meal of the day, because it is the meal that gets the day started,” quoted in Good Health magazine, edited by none other than Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. After all, Frosted Flakes, they’re GRRRREEEEEAAAATTTT!