SYSK Live: The Kellogg Brothers’ Wacky World of Health

They literally said that. Yeah. So to start this show, usually with the live show, we like to go back in time because we like to treat the audience to a free right in the way back machine trying which unfortunately doesn't exist. It's imaginary. Be quiet, come on, I just need you all to use your imaginations. Okay, like put on your thinking caps or your imagination cap, some sort of cap that will help you get into the way back machine. Maybe close your eyes like this, get

the Lotus post. I don't care, but we're all on the way back machine. Now we're going to ironically go to We're gonna go to America. We came to Australia to bring you back to America in eighteen seventies six. So that's where we are right now. The funny thing is, we don't even rehearse the stuff, can you can you tell? Alright, So it's eighteen seventy six in America where we come from. We're just eleven years removed from the Civil War, the

American Civil War. Uh. Let's see, Thomas Edison had just given us the oh, I'm sorry, Alexander Graham Bell had given us a telephone. Thomas Sayssen was still just a big loser, and he couldn't get the lightbulb to light up. It would still be three years away from that. Jesse James is robbing banks. This is old timey America basically, right. And the whole reason we're in because we want to point out just how terribly horribly people ate back then. I mean they well you'll see. Let me give you

an example for breakfast. If you were sitting down for a normal breakfast, Um, somebody would bring out a whole live pig and butcher in front of you, salt it, and make you eat the whole thing in one sitting. That was just the first quarter too far out. Uh. The potatoes would be um fried in the congealed fat from last night's pig. Um, that actually sounds very nice. They were, well, i'll give you this breakfast. Okay, hasn't changed all that much. All right, there eggs, that kind

of thing. But um, this was what people ate every single day. There was no breakfast on the go. It was heavy breakfast every morning. Granted they were all farming and stuff like that, but still it was pretty heavy breakfast. Even if you lived actually out in the sticks, you may eat a little healthier things like gruel and mush, but number one, you're eating gruel and mush, which it's terrible. And then secondly, it took you hours to prepare this

gruel and mush. So either you were eating really really unhealthy or you were eating um food that took a very long time to prepare. Yeah, so that's breakfast. Uh, we don't even get into lunch, but it's probably more the same. But I found a dinner listed online from Delmonico's in New York City, And granted this is a very fancy sort of celebratory dinner that was planned out for a politician, but this is how that went down. First course, a raw oysters, a choice of two soups

and order and a fish course. That's the first course. There's a course in course. There's four courses in the first course. The next course saddle of lamb, which I don't even know what it is, but it makes me sad. Filet of beef alright, not bad, followed by chicken wings and peas and also lamb chops with beans and artichokes, because you know you need some veggies in there. I guess that makes a healthy What came next. What came next was a casserole terrapin on casserole all of Maryland,

which is turtle you can and that's Australia. Saying that I figured you guys would be like, yeah, we eat turtle all the time. Uh So that's the next course. Then you have a zorbet and you're like, okay, well that's the end of the meal. No. No, that is to cleanse the palate before the roast course comes out, which was I'm not lying, which was canvas back duck

and quail. And then finally you get your dessert. Hey, the creamed ice creams, whipped cream, jelly dishes, bananimous pastries, petite fours liqueurs, and then a little fresh fruit at the very end, because why not. And in between courses they would smoke cigarettes to keep from puking everywhere, and then they would finish the whole meal off with a big fat cigar, and then they would die. So there

was actually a Walt Woodman. The poet Walt Woodman called something called dyspepsia, which is um constipation diarrhea, and by the way, settle in for a lot of poop talk in this episode, constipation diarrhea somehow both at the same time, uh, indigestion um just basically wanting to die because you ate so much. That was called the Great American evil. This pepsia was, or the Great American stomach ache. Because everybody ate so terribly. Everyone just walked around going like, good

to meet you. How's the stockmar could tune today? It was just like everyone felt terribly all the time. Yeah, but it wasn't unusual. It's just how people ate. Everyone just figured this is how you eat. You eat nine courses of of meat a meal is that and you feel like crap afterwards. So in the midst of all this flatulence, in Michigan, a state in our country, there were two brothers born who would go on to revolutionize health and diet. Um going to do a lot of

weird stuff too. But there were decades and decades ahead of their time in many many ways. And their names were John Harvey and will Keith Kellogg. And for the Kellogg brothers, that's awesome. And if you're thinking, did these guys just fly across the world to talk about cereal? We did. But it's also about poop and masturbation, believe it or not, and in religion, and somehow all of things is coalesced in this kind of strange story. And

oddly they coalesced around the Seventh day Adventist Church too. Yeah, you guys have that here? Yeah? Are there any members here? All right? Probably we're gonna make fun of it a little bit. I just wanted to make sure that's good natured ribbing tops goons level. So the brothers, the brothers Kellogg, John Harvey and Will Um, they didn't like each other very much, even though they spent all of their life together.

Practically Um John Harvey was the older one by eight years, and he was abusive to his younger brother and just about every way an older brother could be. As they were growing up, and then once they became adults, John Harvey hired Will so that he could abuse them further into adulthood pretty much, and he did things like um like, John Harvey would ride his bike, which is very unusual at the time to ride a bike just for exercise, but he would make Will jog alongside him and take dictation,

because that's what a jerk does. That's only half of it. He would also uh, he was obsessed with his poop, and he would go into use to to go number two or I don't know what you call that here? Is it number two? Okay? Oh? Really the the universal language, so comforting number. He would go into take number two, have a little brother come in and take notes about his stools, and keep a log. Keep a log. I don't even mean that, oh boy, keep a log log

a poop log. So they didn't get along. John Harvey was a jerk, and he was not paid well later on when they actually worked together, his little brother never got a formal title. So it should come as no surprise that later in life the two brothers would go on to countersue one another time and time again and basically not speak to each other. It's very sad, sad and interesting. Yes, that should be the name of our show. So the I like that. It's a good idea. Maybe

they'll be um. So John Harvey and Will Kellogg were raised in a little town called Battle Creek, Michigan, and Battle Creek, Michigan became the seat of the Seventh Day Adventist Church, and Seventh Day Advantism grew out of something called Millerism, which was a religious movement that was formed around a guy named William Miller. Appropriately enough, and William Miller had a knack for incorrectly predicting the second coming of Christ, like he was really good not being accurate.

So he had some followers and he said, yea, brothers, on October ancestors, sorry, on October eighteen forty four, God will come back again. The world's going to end, and it's gonna get real. It's goodies level. He didn't say that though, and October twenty second, eighteen forty four, came in it and um, nothing happened. And as followers went, you get one more chance, one more Miller, what's it

going to be? And Miller said April eighteenth, and they said, all right, we'll give you till then April eighteenth came in win. They said, that's it. We're done. Millerism is done. We're gonna name this April eighteenth, eighteen forty four, the Great Disappointment with like the G and the D capitalized, which I think they were trying to send William Miller

a message about so Millerism crumbles. However, Millerites would go on to say, you know what I like kind of the vibe of what we got going on, Miller's out, why don't we just reform Under the leadership of the Whites, Ellen White and her husband sort of gathered everyone together and reformed as a as a new band to tour the world called the Seventh Day Adventists. They got the band back together they did in the eighteen sixties, but without the lead singer I know which Actually I was

lead singer in a band like that once. No, No, they broke up and reformed without me. Of what I was saying, it's not worth cheering. Don't cheer for that band I was. I was gonna ask if you were going to clarify that, because you just had a little bit of glory there for a second. I got a cheer after all these years yeah, but look at you now, that's right where those guys take that? Sarah's greatest fan. That was the name of this stupid band. All right, so what was it? I'm not okay, you can listen

to the episode. So Ellen White, what she did was connected religion to personal health and a very kind of well not weird, but it was. No one else was quite doing what she was doing. No, no, she um she said. So your body and your soul are intertwined. So if you really take care of your body, you're also taking care of your soul as well. And if you do that, then uh, it will it will be easier for you to get into heaven. It's one thing we haven't told you about Seventh day Aventists. What they

believe is that there's a finite number of slots in heaven. Basically, it's like a zero sum game getting in. If you get in, somebody else didn't kind of thing. So so getting into heaven is obviously very important. So you can get into heaven more easily if you eat vegetarian, if you avoid um vices like um making the saints cry, I think is what you guys call it here, What do they teach us in person whanking You want to see clear of whanking? Yeah, I mean fried food, greasy food,

winking pickled foods, which is that's just crazy. Surely somebody spoke up and was like, even olives. She's like, are all lives even pickles? And they're like I think so, And she's like, yea, even all of the no pickled food. And they said, what does this have to do with God? Again? Uh hates pickles, That's what I heard. Ladies. You should not wear binding corsets, you should not wear wigs, you

should not wear tight dresses. Someone just went wo wigs because that led to the physically destructive self vice of masturbation and the less lonely and more fun vice of excessive sexual intercourse, which is to say, any intercourse not for procreation. And that's it. Like if you weren't making a baby, then you just don't do it. So this was the this was the town, This is the community that the Kellogg brothers were raised in, and Um. From a very early age, John Harvey kind of proved himself um,

kind of a sharp adventist. He caught the eye of the whites, who hired him as a devil's apprentice. Which was a printer's apprentice. I don't know why they called it that um. And then in very short order he ended up becoming the editor of the monthly magazine and Battle Creek, Michigan, the Health Reformer, which on his editorship came out strongly in favor of olives and repealing the band on it. But he caught their eye, is what

I'm trying to say. And and the Whites had they were actually followers of another guy named James Caleb Jackson. I don't believe he was actually a Seventh Day Adventist. He was into health himself. He was a health reformer and he opened a spa or what you would call like a health spa in New York in the eighteen fifties. And Ellen White and her husband went and visited this place and they were just struck. They were like, this is it. This really dove tails in with like this

whole idea of like treating yourself really well. We should open one of these in Bentle Creek. And they did, They opened the Western Health Reform Institute, and it was a total flop right out of the gate. Yeah, it was. They didn't do it right. They served it's basically where you would go to eat really creddy tasting food and have quack doctors give lectures. And it was, like you said, it was not popular. People would go and I get out,

but they wouldn't come back. But the important thing is is they kind of stole that original idea from James Kalb Jackson, because he's going to come around later again. So, uh, this is where John Harvey. They were like, the writings on the wall, we need if we want this thing to succeed. I think we need like a real doctor to actually run this thing. And so young John Harvey was there, the riding was on the wall. They saw how bright he was and he was going places. He

was interested in medicine and health. So they paid for him as his parents, is it okay if we send your son to medical medical school, your oldest son, And they said, yeah, just don't send Will, poor Will Will. It was kind of a jerk too, but John Harvey went to medical school for real, became a real doctor, and returned to Battle Creek, Michigan in eighteen seventy six and was appointed director of what would become the Battle

Creek Sanitarium. They changed their name and They chose sanitarium because at the time, Santa tori ums were places where you went like to die when you had tuberculosis. And they're like, well, we really want to distance ourselves from that. We're going to change the O to an A and I think that will really get our point, like scratching that out, writing it and being like, yeah, you think as you will. See. John Harvey Kellogg was not the best businessman ever um. Nor was he the best doctor ever.

Really no, but it was important to him that. I mean, he said, I'll come back and I'll run your your your joint here. But aside from the religious principles, which I'm down with, it needs to be a medical institution. I want the science to be good and that's kind of one of my requirements. And then he went on to um not follow good science for a lot of his career. Yeah. He also said, my younger brother Will has to come on for my own personal reasons, and Will came on as the head of HR very quickly

instituted all of Fridays at the sanitary. I love that olives bit it doesn't do very well. However, this is when things started to flourish. They really did it, right, This place was super lux very nice. They figured, hey, let's give him better food and make people want to come here and have marble floors and banana trees and the lobby and palm trees and just it would be today what you would think of as like a super deluxe kind of health resort spa. Right. Yeah, And like

like you said, it flourished. They went from like this house basically to a four story structure in just a few years, and then um, a few years after that, they built it into like a fifteen story, huge, enormous structure. And at this time in the US, if you had like a ten story building in a major city that was the pride of your city. They built a fifteen story huge complex into a health spa UM in in Battle Creek, Michigan, which would be like building the same

thing in Gunda Windy or something like that. Right, is that a good example? All right? We do our research here is anyone from Gunda Wendy. Yeah, Gondo Windy, Sorry, I knew he's pronounced uh so in order, And it's kind of like it would be today if you wanted people to really take a note. It really helps of celebrities pay attention to it, and they did. People like Amelia Earhart went there, President William Howard Taft, Thomas Edison went there. I guess he was still working on the

light bulb. But maybe he did that. Maybe he did that there. Who knows. Uh. Johnny Weissmuller, who played Tarzan in the movies, he had a knack for going into the dining room and doing his Tarzan call is sort of like ringing the dinner bell. I guess. And it was a big deal. Like people took note. But Middle America they still weren't on board. They called them battle freaks. They thought it was completely weird because you know, this was the eighteen seventies. After all. It was not the

time to talk about soy milk and vegetarians. It was a time to eat a saddle of lamb while you're writing a cow that you were then going to eat after you ate the lamb. Yeah, that was what was done, and wash it down with some turtle. So when you went there. But I got no problems with turtle. You would eat turtle, Uh, don't judge me. Um, would you eat penguin? No? Someone just gasped, gasping, yes, No, nobody. I wouldn't eat kangaroo once you've laid with the kangaroo,

tough to tough to imagine eating it. And I found that out either in either sense of the word. I think you couldn't eat the kangaroo after that, all right, I'm already lost. Well and I got us all right. So the sand they called it the Sand. The sanitarium, Uh, like you said, it was huge. There were more than a thousand employees there. They had physicians and nurses, masseuses, baker's bell hops, waiters, orderlies, attendants. It was like a

really super deluxe place where you would be examined. I believe every patient for a while at least was treated personally by Dr John Harvey Kellogg. Yeah, each each person who came through, and we're talking tens of thousands of people a year, um was seen by John Harvey Kellogg and he would give them each like a personalized regimen to follow. And a lot of this stuff was like real common sense things that what we think of his common sense now, like go get some exercise, Um, a bike.

Would would it kill you to get on a bike? Fresh air, sunshine, um. That was one of the first lectures would it kill you to get on a biker? Right? Ten a m in the East Lobby. Quit quit smoking, um, stopped drinking, cut out the caffeine, which is madness. Um. Just just common sense stuff that we think of his health that really kind of originated out of this area. Yeah, out of this era, yeah and area. So things are going pretty well. Common sense treatments and also really crazy

crazy gizmos and contraptions. You can look these up online when you get home. Do you have Google here? But we call it googly goot. You totally do love your accents so much. Really, and you know what I even did. I changed my maps voice to a female Australian to drive me around Wine Country and it really was just a cherry on top. It's very lovely. I'm gonna go home and least me like, who's that? What happened down there? Get rid of her? But on the robot voice, that's Sheila.

Good one. Thanks. Josh is in rare form to night everybody, look out, look out Sydney all right. Uh. One was called the kneating machine, like as in bread kneading, and they would treat you like a loaf of bread dough. You would lay down, and I had these mallets that would grind into your body, and people would turned cranks and things, and it was all in an effort to get you to poop. That was everything. So we we've got to tell you a little something about John Harvey

Kellogg and his medical views. He subscribed strongly to this idea and now discredited theory called auto intoxication, and auto intoxication says that sure you poop. We all poop, Like the book says, everybody poops, but none of us are really good at pooping. We don't poop quite enough, and a little bit gets behind each time, and as it builds up, that left behind poop poisons the rest of your body. And this results in things like diabetes or high blood pressure or stroke or like getting hit by

a bus. Whatever. It all comes back to the poop you're not getting out. So everything walking in the sunshine, riding a bike, would it kill you? UM, quitting smoking, UM, the needing machine, and all the other machines that he came up with. All of it was to get that extra little poop out of you and get the toxins associated from that. You better. You used to be saying poop and getting the toxins associated with that poop out

of your body. That's right. Uh. He also invented something called the electric light bath cabinet, which sounds like an Elton John album, but it's not. It was basically an early version of the tanning bed. If you look this thing up, it's a huge box that you would sit in that kind of came up to your neck and

had a nice little seat. Inside was lined with mirrors and the light bulb, remember, had just been invented, so they had no idea about wattage and there was just light bulbs everywhere that would I think the quote is that would boil the toxins, I'm sorry, boil the poisons out of the pores of the body. And he believed in light, uh not only sunlight, which does make sense,

but light bulbs curing you. So he would fire up light bulbs all over the place and said, it'll cure gout, It'll cure typhoid, scarlet, fever, diabetes, OBCD, scurvy, gets strit us in constipation, because why not light bulbs some of these things that like, this guy must have made a mint on these machines because you could find them outside

of the sanitarium too. There's actually a couple that were on the first class Gymnasium on the Titanic, which means some of John Harvey Kellogg's weirdo contraptions are at the bottom of the sea and the Titanic with some skeleton on the needing machine, like police, can I just ride a bike? It's like your chance for riding a bike is long from what else did he had? He had the electric bed, which sounds like a lot of fun to be, the foot foot vibrator, which also sounds lovely.

And then our favorite machine, our favorite machine, the colonic machine. You guys are familiar with colonics. Has anyone ever had a colonic? Just left just like that? Yeah? Good one. Uh. I've actually had a couple of calonics before I have, and they're like, it's it's hit or miss. I can tell you. Sometimes you get off of the clonic machine, you feel like a million bucks. Other times you're like, you know what it means to feel gray? Miss? Yeah, when it's when it's a miss, it's a bad mess.

It's not fun. Yeah. So, and I don't think we mentioned this whole four bottel movements a day thing that he had he went to Africa on a safari. This is the level of science this guy was operating at. He went to African safari and saw guerrillas whooping four times a day, and he literally said, well, they seem happy we came from them. I don't. Actually, he probably didn't believe that at all, but we all know now

that we did. And he said, so that's what we should all shoot for as humans, is for a day. And if you need a little help and the kneeding machine isn't doing it, and the light isn't boiling it out of you, then just have a seat on the calonic machine and hook yourself up to the spigot. Yes, turn on the water and see what happens. Water moves things along great. Uh. If not. It was followed by a yogurt treatment. You would eat half of the yogurt

and the other half. Seriously, he would shoot yogurt up people's butts. I never did that. I have I have principles and rules. Draw lines places daw. I drew a line right through the yogurt. He had a little the little fruit on the side though that let's call the parfet machine, right so uh. He actually had a couple of patents for this thing, for the clonic machine. The first one, I don't know what that said, but we looked up the improved patent because we were like, sure,

why not see what he got wrong? Uh? He said for the improved version he wanted an irrigating apparatus particularly adaptable for colonic irrigating, sure, but also susceptible for other irrigation treatments. So I guess after the people got on he was like, well, we could water the lawn while we're at it. There's a fire in the kitchen. It's just going to waste. You're in You're in the movie tonight, Did I get you? I didn't realize it was such

a classy city. And and also the the improved patent called for one where you could actually measure the amount of liquid entering and exiting the body, So before that it was just a wild ride. And one of them, one of these colonic machines, had multiple spigots on it, which meant you could fit more than one person on it a time. And I gotta tell you, having done calonics before, you do not want anyone anywhere near you

are in the same room. Even you do not want to look over while you're getting a chlonic at somebody else getting a chlonic because you don't want to connect with another human being like that. Yeah. No, so it must have been some Melton John. It sounds like fun. So um. I don't know about you guys, but uh, I think this is going pretty well so far, so good, okay,

good good good. Well, then we have bad news because that means we have to take a message break, but we also have good news because we're not reading an ad. We have something very special. Yep. We have a fellow, a local guy named Alex Sfton who you might recognize in a second, who's going to come on out and help us and we will be right back right after these messages my out in podcast land. It's time for your fabe shorty. Stop we the chalk shoe chals stop

you sh no, thank you Alex? Yes, wow, oh man, that does not happen everywhere everybody. Uh and we're back. Yeah man, that was amazing. He was one of the one of the early jingle writers that sent one in. He was number seven and he wrote us and said, uh, I live in Sydney and how about if I come up on stage and do that in front of people, and we said, that's a great idea, one of the greatest, wonderful. Wow, I really classed this show up, like eight chokes, poop

and wanking everyone. Let's get back to it. So, so one of the things about John Harvey Kellogg is, yes he had some weird contraptions, and yes he um he did weird stuff with yogurt, but there was some things where he was actually pretty ahead of his time. Like we said, what we think of as health like was cutting edge and was brought to America and the world by guys like this, and in particular mostly by John

Harvey Kellogg. Um. One of his earliest books was called Tobacco is Um, and in it he writes about how tobacco is really bad for you. And this is at a time when people didn't think that way. No doctors would literally smoke while they treated right, They'd be like, I have good news, you're pregnant, so I'm gonna need you to move to camel lights during yeah, during the term. Let me look at your chart, right, you have lung cancer. I don't know what to say. I do too, everyone

does the sittle of lamp. It was a crazy time when people just thought it was normal to do that. But he was the anti tobacco train way way early. He was one of the first doctors, especially in the United States, two champion probiotics, and obviously with the yogurt acidophilus um eating the yogurt that is, and gut flora, and people just didn't know about this stuff. People doctors at the time tried to treat disease, not prevent disease.

It was just accepted that. They didn't call it healthy eating. They just called it eating and dying. That was the progression. You get to your fifties, maybe your sixties, and you get diabetes or heart disease or stroke and you just keel over dead. And John Harvey really, to his credit, was like, wait a minute, I think if we take care of our bodies, you could live longer. And they

said who are you, which confroned him. He also he was actually so when you went to the Battle Creek Sanitarium, one of the things they had was food, and he actually came up with a substantial amount of food. He's one of three people listed as an inventor of peanut butter, which I mean you can like die with that one and be pretty happy. Um. He invented a lot of nut based meat substitutes, which today it's like, how many

can you find to those at the grocery store? A lot like to furky, it's not nut based, but you get what I'm saying. Um, what else did he come up? Oh, I've got one. Remember how you weren't supposed to eat or drink caffeine. He had a coffee substitute that was made from toasted grains and molasses with no caffeine. So you wouldn't drink it. You would throw it in somebody's

face when they served it to you. But that's what you would get for coffee in the mornings at the sand So you're having a great show, thank you, So are you? Guys? All right? This next section we're gonna call sexy time. Oh no, it's really bad and awful. It's actually the antithesis of yeah. And this this next part is tough, everyone, but we all got to get through it together. Hold hands with your neighbor if you want. This is tough. But here goes again. Not for whanking

very much against it, wrote about it a lot. He was obsessed with poop and masturbation. Wrote about it in a book called Plain Facts for the Old and Young, about half of which were facts maybe, and this is one of the things he wrote about how to kick the habit. So before Chuck reads is I want to point this out. This is coming from one of the most famous, most revered physicians in the world. Okay, bear that in mind when you're listening to what he's about

to prescribe. A remedy which is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision. The operations should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic. That's the correct response. You're right, they pass, they pass the test. You're all right, Sydney. As the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases, the soreness, which continues for several weeks

interrupts the practice. And this had not been previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed. So I fucking update this for a minute. If you catch your son whyanking, I think, as you call it, um, you would take your son to the doctor. To be circumcised without anesthetic as punishment. That's why he just recommended in that past. So it's all been kind of fun. But this guy is a monster. Yeah, oh yeah, we forgot to tell you. This is where it takes a

really dark turn. Another method of treatment consists in the application of one or more silver sutures in such a way as to prevent erection altogether. The foreskin is drawn forward over the glands, and the needle to which the wires attached has passed through from one side to the other. After drawing the wire through, the ends are twisted together and cut off close. It is now impossible for an

erection to occur. You held a book and the slight irritation thus produce x as the most powerful means of overcoming the disposition to resort to the practice. Monster. Yeah, he was a monster, Okay, And I know he was doing this in the back room. I disagree. We have an ongoing dispute about this. I was wanking. I think he never did. I honestly think he never ever ever did in his entire life. I think he wanted to, but I don't think he did. Um women didn't get

off the hook. He knew that they masturbated too, so he had it no, no, no, get out of the way back machine man, come to the future. It's okay he uh if. And if you were on the fence about John Harvey prepared to tip over? Um, he had an easy solution for that. Just throw some carbolic acid on the female genitalia or junk Isn't think about that next time you eat corn flakes. We'll get to the ceial. Trust me, that's coming. He had some other really stupid

ones to like tying your hands together. That's like the three stooges remedy actually makes it a little easier to be honest. He was away off face. I don't know about you could still you could still get the job done. What else, Oh, here's one. He built a sort of an underwear contraption with a cage on the front that went around your genitalia, and just in case you could not be stopped, he built a literal prison around your genitalia.

So that means that, um that John Harvey Kellogg invented the tanning bed apparently, peanut butter and the in the box justin timber Lake rolling over in his grave in the future. Yeah, he's alive for now, he's doing quite well. He eats a saddle of lambid day, all right. So that's a bit of the dark side of John Harvey. Uh, it gets even darker because he was also a eugenicist, right, You've heard us talk about this some on the show.

If you don't know what that is, it is sort of this insane belief of racial purity to like the nth degree, to where he thought like, not only white is right, but you should, we should have a pedigree system. And it was it was all tied into like eating in health and stuff too. It was called he actually had a version called authentics, and eugenicists made fun of

him behind his back. He was so out there. Yeah, his whole thing was eugenics plus where you could actually be even more racially pure if you were a vegetarian or you suitured your foreskin, you know, for fun on a Thursday. And like Chuck was saying, like even the eugenicists were like this guy's oh was mine? You heard what he thinks, which is really saying something coming from eugenicists,

you know. Yeah, his eugenic he never did it, but he proposed the Eugenic Registry where he created a pedigree of breeding between people like dogs, to where you could you should only breed with certain types to make the uber race like dogs, which I mean like if that had ever taken whole, can imagine what Tinder would be like the Lord. But apparently to John Harvey Kellogg, it went white people, cocker spaniels. All right, now we're gonna get to cereal finally, thank you, thank you. We all

got through it. You can still hold hands if you want. That's nice. So uh, as far as the Battle Creek Sanitarium goes, in the medicine part, John Harvey had an iron grip on things. As it was coming out of my mouth, Josh is like, he had an iron grip on nothing. I tell you he didn't. He didn't. He had had a stranglehold on the medicine. But he was not a great businessman. He changed, you know, sanatorium to sanitarium, and I was like, hey, what do you think of that?

Check me out. Luckily for him he had a little brother around, Remember young Will, He's still around. He was actually a pretty good businessman and turns out a pretty good marketer. And uh. When John Harvey was trying to search for a breakfast health food which would later become cereal as you will see. Uh, he hypothesized that you know what, if we like get the digestion going before you even eat it, that's even better for poop. Yeah, the poop comes out that much easier. So so they started,

uh with double baked biscuits. They were basically these really hard crackers that they double baked, so they were, you know, already sort of digested. And I don't even think we mentioned that he believed you should choose everything forty times forty times? Can you manage chewing tofurky not? Could it just be like ghosts choose after like you know, it's

like absorbed into my gums. So, as legend goes at Battle Creek, a woman, an older lady, broke her dentures on one of these double baked biscuits, and he was like, this is not good because I don't want to get sued by every old lady or young podcaster who breaks his teeth. Did you get that one? I got implants? All right, thanks appreciate that. Uh. And so they started to grind them up into little little crumbs and breaks up these little biscuits, and that was sort of their

first little version of what would become cereal. Right, that's like the way Kellogg's tells it. The truer story is that they said, we need a breakfast cereal that's, you know, easy on the stomach. What what what does James Caleb Jackson doing at his sanitarium And they went and found out that he was making a cereal called granula, And granula was made from graham powder. It's these little baked, little nuggets um that are not food. You had to soak them overnight in milk or water, your choice to

be able to eat it the next morning. Right, not good breakfast cereal. And they said, let's steal that recipe, and they took James Caleb Jackson's granula and they called their version of it granula, because again, John Harvey was not a very good business fan. So James Keller Jackson found out about this and sued them, and they were forced to come up with a new recipe in a new name, and they came up with granola because again they had a real knack for switching a vowel out

here there. That's the old John Harvey Kellogg trick. And they swapped out the graham flower for wheat flour, and they made something you guys have never been cursed with. We did our research, um, something called grape nuts. Has anyone ever heard of grape nuts? They're like these little tiny pebbles. Yeah, it's like, um, boy, as a kid, if you ever made the mistake of thinking it tastes anything like grapes, if you were wrong, or even nuts,

it's like, yeah, you're right. It's like if you took a rock and a hammer and broke it up into the smallest things that you could and said box, go have sex with a cardboard box, and then whatever that produces is grape nuts. Cereal. It's disgusting. So that is when it's still it's still like a popular cereals still

around today. Yeah, and old folks, Yes, every every kid in America goes through this rite of passage where you know, when you pour a big bowl of cereal, you're like, hell, yeah, honeycombs, I love these things or um uh, what do you call them, like choco pops or something like that. Very cereal, So you pour like a big old bull. You do not do that with grape nuts because they are denser than a neutron star. But you don't know that as a kid, and you pour a big old bowl and

by the time like you realize you're horrible mistake. Your mom's like you already put milk on that. You have to finish that whole thing, finish all that grape nuts, and you have to finish it. You never make that mistake again. It's a it's a bad day when that happened, they should call it large hadron collider cereal. But the thing about grape nuts is grape nuts came out of

the Kellogg brothers stealing granula from Caleb Jackson. Grape nuts is made by the C. W. Post Company, and c W. Post was a patient at the Battle Creek Sanitarium and he stole the recipe from grape nuts from the Kellogg brothers. What a time to be alive. It really was just steal everything. It doesn't matter, change a letter, it's fine, all right. So they're experimenting. They still didn't have these lovely little flakes that we know as corn flakes for

frosted flakes. They were experimenting with flavor. They were experimenting with like gram flour with wheat flour. Uh. Finally they tried corn and they thought they were onto something with corn. And it depends on who you asked, but either John Harvey, Will his little brother, or his wife Ella. John Harvey's wife found out that if you is that a subway, I think it's an earthquake. Okay? Are we good? Is this normal? Do you guys have earthquakes? Here? It's a

rat parade. Mit ain't as young as out in front. They're all like doing their top path. It's very Jerry leave that in, Yeah, Jerry leave that in? Where was I? Okay? So either La Will or John Harvey realized that one of the key things was to roll it out really really flat. So they were getting there. They were double baking it. They landed on corn. They were rolling it out flat, but it still wasn't quite right. No, so, um,

John Harvey, there was something else we didn't mention. If you couldn't poop and the calonic machine wasn't working, he would just take out part of your colon and surgery. That was another thing he could do. Right. It maybe much too bitch in there, sir, Maybe maybe tossing a

silver suture for free while he was at it. While you were under right, So he was called away to surgery one day while he and Will were experimenting down in the basement in the sanitarium, and Umi was notoriously frugal, so rather than throw away the dough they've been working on that hadn't worked, he just kind of set it

off to the side for later. And when he came back, he found that something had happened, something called tempering, where the dough gets just a little bit moldy, not like you gross moldy, but kind of like this is delicious moldy, right, like the air in the water just kind of spreads evenly around it. And the upshot of all this is that when you bake mold that's or baked dough that's

been tempered, it turns into perfect little flakes. So that's how the flaked breakfast cereal was accidentally discovered in the Battle Creek Sanitarium by Will, who is too cheap to throw away the dough. That's right. So John Harvey was thrilled, Uh not because he wanted to become a cereal magnate. He was like, I'm a doctor, I want this for my patients. Uh, now we can just easily pour this breakfast cereal into a bowl, and for the first time people can eat a very simple, nutritious what we think

is at least as a nutritious breakfast. And uh Will was like, well, I don't know, big brother, he said in his head because he dared not speak aloud. Right, he said, the way I see it, and this is all in his brain now, the way I see it, you don't have to be ill to eat breakfast cereal. I think healthy people might just like a special, little simple breakfast that they can pour out of a bowl.

And he was sitting over there going like this, and Jarvey said, John Harvey said, what are you doing over there? You have nothing, big brother, nothing, pay no attention. Are you thinking about wanking? No? On. So in the end, however, the patent for flaked cereals and Process of preparing same was issued on April fourteen to John Harvey Kellogg alone, not his wife nor his brother, just to him. And

it did pretty well for a little while. It did. Um. They sold something like a hundred and eighty thousand cases in in um. No, I'm sorry. They sold the stuff for about ten years UM, and they sold enough that they were making their money back. They were selling it outside of the sanitarium, but not much, not much. Will figured out that they would probably sell a lot more of the cereal if it didn't taste like so he said, I've got an idea. It's a radical idea, but I

think this might just work. Let's add a little bit of salt and sugar to this cereal recipe. And John Harvey might get out demon salt and sugar are as bad as olives, and uh, he'd had a change of heart about alives by this time, and Will said, no, no, I really I think this is a good idea. And if you stop and think about it, everyone's head like Kellogg's corn flicks, right, how much sugar do you have to put on those things to make them taste decent?

Imagine what they must have tasted like before. What we're all eating is the improved taste version, right, because I can't imagine how bland they were before? And just cry, eating these things so still better than grape nuts, nuts of the worst? Uh, Captain crunch, peanut butter? Do you have that here? Captain crunch? Oh? What you've had? It? Isn't it the best? It's the best sugary cereal. When my wife goes out of town. That's my vice. Like

some guys are like, I don't know. I don't know what guys do when women go out of town their wives. I get cereals, like she'll never know when she comes back, she's like, do I smell breakfast cereal? How could you let me smell your spoon? It sounded dirty for some reason? Oh? Where are we? So, Jerry, Jerry, Okay, I know where I'm sorry. So John Harvey goes out of town. He goes to Europe to do some lecturing and back then.

I guess it takes like a month to go to Europe, in a month to come back, and a couple of months to go on tour and do his lecturing. He's gone for he was gone long enough for a little brother to build a manufacturing plant. Will was like, I hope he doesn't notice the mass production plant that I built while he was gone, with big vats of sugar

and salt. And John Harvey came back and he was really piste off, and he said, you're gonna pay for this out of your own pocket, out of your allowance that I gave you, out of your chief allowance that I give you, and Will was done. He was like, I'm done. I'm tired of you, big brother. I've been working for you and getting abused for all these years. He said, Uh, everyone listening, please note I just made

a friends reference. Do you have friends here? Sure? They called it mates man, which apparently made either means like I love you or you're about to get your ass kicked. I had thus this whole time, have been like, all right, are you howking? Are we fighting? Just hugging, Just hug that's it. That's our motto, just hugging. Wank So the sanitarium.

Will had had enough. The sanitarium actually burned down in n two from a from an accidental uh furnace gone wrong, and Will was like, all right, I'll help you rebuild this because we've all kind of put everything into it. And then after that, I'm really gone, trust me. He was genuinely spineless. Yes, he was, brother, I'm out of here after I help you rebuild the fifteen story sanitarium. But John Harvey actually refused to get on that sugar train.

He sold the sweetened version to his brother. He actually bought the patent from his brother of the decent tasting version and on February nine six at the age of forty six years old. I'm a little older than that, even he was a late bloomer. Yeah, yeah, when we get it. Will Kellogg founded the Battle Creek Toasted corn Flake Company and became a very, very very rich man. So at this point, John Harvey and Will Kellogg have now gone their separate ways for basically the first time

in their lives. And we're going to take a message break again right here. So Alex, if you will come out one more time, Alex Sexton, everybody, we will be right back right after this messages. He st off with jos trae ah oh together now everyone of you. Nice sport. Thank you, Alex w wow. Uh and we're back everybody, thank you. Kind of it's like we've practiced this or something. You guys are good. So um Will struck out on his own with the recipe that he bought from his brother,

and uh. Now he started selling a hundred and eighty thousand cases of corn flakes in the first year, first year after he separated from his brother, less than the first year, because they separated in February, So in less than a year he sold a hundred and eighty thousand cases, and there's like four or five boxes to a case of corn flakes because they okay, there's like six or seven boxes to a case. Because he put a little salt and a little sugar, and it started to take

the world by storm. But he realized he was never going to um make it a national product unless he took New York, because you know, if you could make it there, you could make it anywhere. So he started something it's pretty good and ever, thank you, I just came up with that. I like that. That should be a T shirt. It should be we should totally license it and get our suit off for it. Uh So he um he started an advertising campaign and he threw

me off. He started an advertising campaign specifically for New York called Wink Wednesday, which was pretty risque actually, especially for will Kellogg, but also for nineteen o six. It was basically he might as well have been asking women to show a little ankle, because he advertised in all the New York papers on Wednesday, when you go shopping, ladies, wink at your grocer, and your grocer will give you

a free box of corn flakes. And you know, obviously people would do anything for free corn flakes, including winking at a strange man not winking. No, no, that was it was a different egg camp. But it was a big deal to give away a free box of cereals. You know, it wasn't There were no You didn't have to enter stuff as your code or anything like that. Just a wink and you get your your free cereal. So it was a big deal. Another few dominoes started

to fall to help this thing really explode. In the nineteen tens, pasteurization of milk finally happened, so it was no longer dangerous to eat cereal. I guess what else did they come up with? Oh like kids like cutting out box tops and mailing them in for sort of creddy prizes. That was a big marketing thing in Battle Creek, Michigan. If you grow up, even like at our age in the nineteen seventies and eighties in America, you knew like Battle Creek, Michigan was an address where they would send

you things. If you sent in cereal, I want a crappy whistle. It's gonna break after three blows. But I got basically because they sent in a box top. That was the whole thing. Uh. They started expanding into new markets in nineteen fourteen, went to Canada. Uh. They started brand flakes in the nineteen fifteens and sixteens. They finally in the nineteen twenties built a plant right here in Sydney, Australia,

right and uh oh, what else? They they invented the little uh those awesome little single serving boxes that are still one of my favorite things because they're like small things. I think the little single serving a cereal box that you can actually open up and eat out of. It's like the pinnacle of human technology. It's pretty good. I love it. Large Hadron collider mini box that you can eat out of cereal. Who knew the large Hadron collider was going to make two appearances I have in a

nineteenth century Kellogg's episode. Uh oh. And the other thing Will did was very revolutionary. During the Great Depression when people were I mean a lot of people are going out of business, businesses were not doing well, or they would just really kind of go down to bare bones, he doubled down on advertising because he thought, I've actually got a pretty cheap, easy to eat food and he made money during the Great Depression. It was remarkable. He

was extraordinarily successful. He founded the W. K. Kellogg Foundation. He endowed it with fifty million dollars is back in like the nineteen tents, just a tremendous amount of money. Now it's worth like nine billion today. Um so he was extraordinarily wealthy. And all of this happened the moment he stepped doubt from his brother's shadow. And his brother didn't like that one bit. So John Harvey said, well, I don't care at all about um cereal myself, but

I really don't like my little brother being successful. So I'm gonna make my own cereal. I'm going to make corn flakes and I think i'll call them Kellogg's corn flakes. Now he said corn flakes with an M, and people like corn flakes or corn flakes, and he was like, yeah, you tell me right. So he made these things and Will was like, well, big brother, I'll see you in court and he sued John Harvey, and John Harvey said, oh yeah, well I'm suing you back because that's the

American way. And they went to court with them dueling lawsuits. And what was that issue was who had the right to use the Killogg name. I mean, what was really a hurt was ego. Let's be honest. They were both named Kellogg. That's part of it. But also John Harvey was like, I'm the famous John Harvey Kellogg. I'm the Doctor Oz of my day. And it was like who is that? He's like, just wait, you'll see it's a sensible reference. Do you know who doctor Oz is? Okay,

r Australia. I was like, wait a minute, did they get that Dr Australia. I'd go to that guy right. So so on the other hand, Will was like, well, wait a minute, wait a minute. Yes, my brother is the most famous doctor in all the land, but I have built this Kellogg's brand over the last you know, couple of decades and I've actually eclipsed his fame. So there's there was like, like you said, a lot of ego at shirt here the family name, but also which

was the more famous Kellogg? And it turns out that the court said lose. He wasn't a good guy either, by the way. He didn't Yeah, he didn't silver suiture things. But yet he was very he was a very unhappy, I'm fulfilled man. He would uh spend a lot of evenings at home kind of longingly looking at the cage that his brother had built around his genitalia and just think, why why did I let him talk me into that? And does anyone have any wirecutters? I don't know about that.

So after these lawsuits, they rarely ever spoke again. And was I mean, really really sad. If you've ever had a good brother or a good sibling, you know how wonderful that is. They were not tight at all. They didn't speak. Uh. If they ever did, Will would make sure he had a witness there just to hear the conversation. Uh. You know, things are really bad when you have like a stenographer in the room at Thanksgiving. Uh. So today most nutritionist agree and obesity experts agree that they actually

had it kind of wrong as far as corn flakes scale. Yeah, so, I mean, the whole reason they made corn flakes in the first place was to aid in digestion, because everybody showed up like, oh, I feel so terrible, and they would feed them corn flakes or brand flakes or whatever. But in doing this and pre digesting the food for the patient by baking it a couple of times, um, they actually stripped away a lot of the actual healthy

stuff from the grain. Right, if you just strip away the outside of corn or of weed or something like that, that's the stuff that allows you to kind of um slowly digest something and keeps your blood sugar from spiking. So back then and today, if you ate something like corn flakes or like any kind of breakfast cereal, your blood sugar would spike and it would crash and you

would get ravenously hungry very early. Whereas if you ate like whole grain like gruel or mush, it might have sucked and taken three hours to make, but you would stay full or longer. Um. So yeah, today breakfast cereals poisoned. I guess it's the message of all of this. Ironically, So the sanitarium and Battle Creek was driven out of business eventually for a few reasons. Um, the Great Depression

was a big one. Um. You know, when there's a recession or a depression in the country, the first thing to go still today are these sort of luxury items. And so this hippie dippy like uber lux health spa in the early nineteen hundreds of the nineteen twenties and thirties, it was not like celebrities even stopped going there. That's how bad it got during the depression. Like even Amelia Earhart stopped showing up after a while. Really is it is it too soon for an Amelia kick? Uh? Some

people classed at that awful, awful, mean spirited joke. So yeah, he had to lay offf workers. Uh. Will was getting rich and on Harvey was going broke, well not broke, but he was getting more poor. Eventually he would have to sell off the building itself to the US government. They converted it into a military hospital and Battle Creek though was somehow because of the cereal boom, became the home of breakfast cereal around the world. So there were

one hundred different cereal company. I guess they thought that's the only place you could make it. Like, oh, I guess we gotta go to central Michigan to make serial. Sorry, we want to make cereal. We got to move there. But I mean still today it's still the serial capital of the world. And uh. In his twilight years, John Harvey became very very much eccentric, even more eccentric in

his than his younger days. Yeah he um. He would have like two hour long meals a couple of times a day, end up putting on a lot of weight, and he was a vegetarian. Bear in mind, but during these meals he would have guests and he would say, excuse me, guests, I'll be right back, and you would pick up a pail on his way out, and he would come back with a pail filled with his own poop and he would say, gettle, gettle, whiff of this.

He seriously, that's not a joke. He said that that his stools were as sweet as a nursing baby, well the nursing babies stools, I should say, or that they were no more offensive than warm biscuits. Which if that's true, that's actually kind of worth showing off at dinner. To tell you the truth, I might actually be like, seriously, smell it smells like warm biscuits. I've thrown a lot of dinner parties. But no one like that, not like that. So finally he approached death. And we have to point

out these guys. I mean, they were cookie, but they lived into their late eighties and nineties at a time when people didn't generally live that long. So they were doing something right diet wise. And in three is John Harvey approached death in his late eighties, he started to feel a little bit bad about little brother Will after eight years of being a dick, and he wrote a letter of apology, and part of it said this, I earnestly desire brother, to make amends for any wrong or

injustice of any sort I've done to you. I'm sure you were quite white in regards Sorry Jerry cut that part out. I realized I just said quite white, which he probably meant that too. You're like such a cocker spaniel. Brother. I realized you were quite white and right in regards to the food business. Your better balanced judgment has doubtless saved you from a vast number of mistakes of the sword I've made, and allowed you to achieve great success,

for which generations will come to owe you gratitude. P S. What's it like to have sex? I bet it's great? Right. So he closed this letter and gave it to his secretary, and his secretary took it um and read it and decided not to mail it. Secretary found it just too demeaning to John Harvey and decided that this isn't going anywhere. But John Harvey didn't realize this, so he just sat around waiting to hear back from Will and then died. While you feel bad for this guy, did you forget

the carbolic acid and the white supremacy? No, that means you have feelings that we live in the future. It's fun to judge people who are who lived in the past. So uh. Will eventually did get that letter though, five years after John Harvey's death, when Will was eighty eight, uh, and he was getting you know, on a their and age, he got that letter and finally, at the end of his long career, he realized that he had gotten his

brother's approval. Um. Granted, he didn't get to, you know, say thank you or you're welcome back, but he got this letter. H. The W. K. Collogue Foundation that he started is now a nine billion dollar fund that guides the belief that children, all children have an equal opportunity to thrive. And they do really really good work here uh in the all over the world actually, but especially in the United States. It's a good good organ station. So um. Will Harvey died and like Chuck kind of

alluded to earlier, he wasn't the greatest guy ever. He had that little brother bitterness that only a little brother can have when they have an older brother that they've never resolved their issues with. And so that means that he took it out on everybody else except for John Harvey. So he was kind of a overbearing father and husband. And when he died, his grandson and this is his grandson, right, like like grandkids are supposed to just love their grandparents unconditionally,

not this one. Will's. Will's grandson wrote when he died at age, nobody really shut a tear. Most felt a great sense of relief, as if a heavy weight had been lifted from them family. Am I right, corn flakes? Yeah? But the grandson was like, but I really appreciate the ten billion dollar inheritance. Grandpa right, he can rott in hell, but I really like them on thank you, Grandpa? All right, bring us home. Brother. So if you go to Oak Hill Cemetery in Battle Creek, and a lot of people do, um,

you've been on the tour before hiving to the cereal tour. Seriously, people go to Battle Creek to tour cereal factories. But when you're there, when you're there, some people you can. You can go to Oak Hill Cemetery and you can visit Will Kellogg's a massive burial plot. It's like made a blue slate, it's got black wrought iron fence around it with the iconic Kellogg's k on that which that was his signature. By the way, then Kelloggs that you

see is will signature UM. And it's a it's a pretty big tourist stop in Battle Creek because there's nothing to do in Battle Creek. But what most people don't realize is that years before Will Kellogg bought that burial plot, he and his brother had adjoining burial plots side by side, with little simple tombstones, just enough for names and dates of birth and dates of death. Um. It was weird

for brothers to have adjoining plots. We have a joining plots, but we're friends, so it makes a little more sense. But when people are visiting Will Kellogg's um grave, what they don't realize is that just about ten spots away his original grave site that he had moved from because he hated his brother so much, His brother, John Harvey,

is still buried there. And so when they're visiting Will's grave, just a few steps away, one of the most famous physicians who ever lived in America is buried there in a very simple little headstone. That's right. So even in death, little brother finally is giving his brother the finger, you know. And that's the story of the Kellogg's brothers. Everybody I said, thank you. Yeah he bob by ah Wee said all right.