The Hundred Year Diet: America's Voracious Appetite for Losing Weight

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SEX, INDIGESTION, AND WEIGHT LOSS

IN THE MID-1800S, WHEN AMERICA WAS EMERGING AS AN URBAN, INDUSTRIAL, CAPITALIST society and a new science called nutrition was in its infancy, health, sex, morality, and God all became bundled together in unexpected places, including at the dinner table. This rapidly changing world produced a bumper crop of reformers, including abolitionists, temperance seekers, feminists, and religious leaders. Each of these groups held different views on different topics, but one thing they agreed upon, for a period spanning about 60 years, was diet. To be specific: a spare, vegetarian, alcohol- and salt-free diet. That is not to suggest that every agent for change was a vegetarian teetotaler, but the majority at least paid lip service to the idea. Before America became Fast Food Nation, Low-Carb Nation, or even Fat- Free Nation, it was Ascetic Nation, which established a strong foundation for later food fads and gimmicks to build upon.

The equation that a meager and meatless diet resulted in a sound mind and body gained tremendous impetus in 1832, when America experienced its first widespread epidemic: cholera. The popular lecturer, writer, and Presbyterian minister Sylvester Graham, an advocate for temperance and chastity, used the disease to illustrate how a debauchery-filled lifestyle and diet could lead to illness and death, citing as evidence the lascivious ways of cholera-stricken prostitutes in Paris and homosexual young men in India. This made sense to his numerous followers. Cholera, after all, was widespread in urban areas. It had entered the country in New York City via steamship from Europe and was traveling up and down the eastern seaboard. Cholera appeared to be a disease engendered by the Industrial Revolution; it followed commerce and traffic congestion along the new railroad tracks. Unknown at the time (and not to become common knowledge for decades) was the rudimentary fact that cholera was caused by a tiny, comma-shaped bacterium that flourished in and spread via contaminated food and water supplies.

An intense fellow with sunken cheeks, thin lips, and a hawklike beak of a nose, Graham was suspicious of the Industrial Revolution's effects on the food supply--including the increasingly common use of food additives and bleached white flour in mass-produced breads. Graham, a crusader for an old- fashioned and natural way of life, believed that diet and social issues were closely intertwined. If what you ate--or didn't eat--could make you feel better, he reasoned, then certainly your diet could make you (and America) morally better. As correspondent J. M. Bishop stated in a New York Times article of the time: "It tends toward a purer spirit in man, ridding the mind of evil thoughts and evil temper, and the body of vicious and ungovernable impulses."

Graham's ultimate mission was to save souls from what he deemed the most serious problem of all: the evil torment of gluttony, which he believed led to sexual excess, violence, and masturbation. Early in his career, Graham wrote: "Treat your stomach like a well governed child; carefully find out what is best for it, as the digestive organ of your body, and then teach it to conform to your regimen."

Graham reasoned that if foods weren't particularly palatable, people would be less likely to eat to excess and misbehave. A Graham diet, therefore, eliminated that beloved staple of the American diet--meat--along with alcohol, coffee, tea, and flavor enhancers such as salt, pepper, and spices. Skeptical of mass-produced, bleached white flour and uncomfortable with the concept of yeast--which, because it fermented, fed on sugar, and multiplied, he (correctly) regarded as a living thing--Graham created an alternative that would become his legacy to culinary history: the unleavened, unsalted, whole-wheat cracker meant to be consumed only after becoming stale. In other words, the graham cracker.

Graham's theory that pure water, bland food, temperance, and chastity could prevent cholera (and other diseases) was partially correct and widely accepted. But there were other frightening problems with our mid-19th- century food supply and eating habits. Lack of refrigeration meant that food spoiled quickly, and the chemical "preservatives" added to prevent (or more likely conceal) spoilage--such as formaldehyde and borax--caused chronic and widespread gastrointestinal pain and, occasionally, death. And then, for the nonreformers, there was overeating. Until the early 20th century, carrying around a few extra £ds was considered a badge of financial success and good health. People didn't even think about losing just a little bit of weight. Proper meals often contained as many as 10 courses. A typical breakfast for male private-college students in 1830 consisted of two servings of meat, bread, potatoes, pickles, eggs, toast, hotcakes, biscuits, and butter. And it wasn't only the young and the wealthy who ate with abandon; the middle and working classes had access to a cheap and abundant food supply that placed a heavy emphasis on meat. By 1870, Robert Tomes, writing on the typical American diet, noted: "The national stomach is kept in a constant state of active assault. This overstrains its energy, and produces that malady so common with us which the doctors call atonic dyspepsia." Dyspepsia (a term used to describe a combination of intestinal problems, including stomachache, constipation, and flatulence) and indigestion were major health complaints of the day, problems that were likely intensified for corset-wearing women.

Grahamites who had found relief from their digestive problems by following Graham's vegetarian, whole grain, and essentially sound if painfully boring diet had their testimonials published in The Graham Journal of Health and Longevity. One enthusiastic (and typical) Graham follower wrote: "I lived as other folks live, suffering most severely in the stomach. I was always fond of the fattest kinds of meats and richest gravies. In June 1836, I commenced living on the Graham system ... and sir; from this mode of living I experienced the most happy effects. My health began immediately to improve. I would add that I find fewer occasions for drink than when in the habits of using meats and other excitable foods or condiments." The writer doesn't mention any loss of libido (drinking less alcohol and eating fewer calories probably had the opposite effect than the one Graham intended), but as far as he was concerned, Graham delivered the goods. He no longer suffered from indigestion.

The reverend also had his detractors. When he made a speech at Boston's Marlborough Hotel, the first American "temperance house," police had to intervene when local butchers and bakers, who understandably were not loyal Grahamites, rioted. Journalists nicknamed him the Peristaltic Persuader. When, in 1837, he wrote a series of Lectures on the Science of Human Life, the works became the textbooks of a new generation of social reformers, even if some of them, like Mary Gove Nichols and other early feminists, held beliefs antithetical to his own. (It is easy to understand why women's- rights activists were Graham supporters. He was one of the first to hold lecture groups for women only, the main purpose of which was to discuss issues of female anatomy and health. He spoke in favor of brushing the teeth daily and bathing weekly, new and pleasant concepts. His followers could pick and choose: Feminists could throw out the chastity but keep the anatomy lessons, diet, and bathwater.)

The one thing most of Graham's followers (including Susan B. Anthony, Horace Greeley, Amelia Bloomer, Mary Gove Nichols, and Amos Bronson Alcott, educator and father of Louisa May) seemed to agree on was diet. The young, urban, and educated began to follow Graham; soon, university students successfully demanded "Graham board," or vegetarian, meal plans in their dining halls. Graham hotels and boarding houses opened in New York and Boston; shops that sold Graham diet provisions were early versions of today's "health food" stores. Grahamites were youthful, affluent, and, as a result of a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, thin. Today a marketing executive would strive to reach this demographic--the alpha group admired and imitated by others.

Graham died in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1851, at the age of 57, of "a feeble condition ... and many deviations from the system he so advocated" according to an obituary, leaving behind a financially secure widow, an 18- year-old son, and a married daughter. His writings and lectures began widespread dietary reforms that still reverberate in demands for pure water and "whole" foods and in the vegetarian and vegan movements.

And so there was much real and perceived good to come from changing the way America ate--and a lot of money to be made.

WHOLE FOODS

James White, an elder in the newly formed Seventh-Day Adventist church, was a direct descendant of Peregrine White, the first child to be born among the Puritan colonists who came to America on the Mayflower. In 1846 he married Ellen Harmon, an 18-year-old prone to visions and a convert to his church.

Ellen and her identical twin Elizabeth were born near Portland, Maine, in 1827. The girls were 10 years old when a schoolmate threw a rock at Ellen, hitting her on the nose so forcibly that she was knocked unconscious and languished in a critical condition for more than 3 weeks. Her face was badly scarred; she could breathe only through her mouth for the next 2 years; and her ability to concentrate was so diminished that she dropped out of school. Her days were spent resting and performing mundane chores.

Ellen's world changed irrevocably in 1840, when William Miller visited Portland. Miller was the founder of a new Christian sect that predicted the second coming (or "advent") of Christ would occur on the specific date of October 22, 1844. The day she would be carried off to heaven in the arms of Christ couldn't come soon enough for the morose and disfigured young girl who had been raised a Methodist. Ellen converted and became a devout Millerite. When Jesus failed to appear on schedule (the "Great Disappointment" of October 22), Ellen--unlike the majority of her cobelievers--kept the faith.

She met her much older and equally devout husband-to-be, James White, through the Millerite church. The certainty that Christ would reappear on Earth (though perhaps not on a determinable date), along with the return to holding Saturday as the Sabbath, the refusal to bear arms or engage in violence, and the belief in the Old and New Testaments as fact, were the original tenets of their faith.

The Whites began to travel the country in an attempt to unify small groups of followers awaiting their savior. In 1863, they were praying with a small congregation in Ostego, Michigan, when, in mid-prayer, Sister Ellen White fell to the ground in the throes of a vision. Meat, alcohol, tobacco, spices, condiments, coffee, and tea were to be eliminated from the diet, she said, which was to be composed only of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains--the essence of Grahamism. And like Graham, Sister White preached that this vegan, temperate lifestyle would lead to a healthy body and soul and a mind free of lustful thoughts. The Millerite diet was for lust control.

White was an avid reformer of sexual appetites. In the following year, she wrote An Appeal to Mothers: The Great Cause of the Physical, Mental,and Moral Ruin of Many of the Children of Our Time. The cause of childhood degradation was summed up in one word--masturbation--a practice she considered to be "an abomination in the sight of God" punishable by death. She describes the world she inhabits as a miserable place. "Everywhere I looked I saw imbecility, dwarfed forms, crippled limbs, misshapen heads, and deformity of every description," she wrote. If only all those poor, self-abusing, overeating souls had a place to go for help.

Two years later, in Battle Creek, Michigan, she and her husband opened the Western Health Reform Institute, which was named after their Adventist magazine, The Health Reformer. The institute ran without a full-time medical professional on staff for 10 years, patiently waiting for the man who was being trained and educated for the job.

COFFEE, TEA, OR ABSTINENCE?

That man was John Harvey Kellogg, born in Tyrone, Michigan, in 1852, just a few months after Sylvester Graham's death. His father, John Preston Kellogg, was a former Baptist teacher and avid disciple of both Graham and White who soon moved his family to Battle Creek, where he founded a successful broom-manufacturing business. He and his wife, Mary, became close friends with James and Ellen White, as well as major contributors to their church. When John Harvey was 12 years old, he became a typesetter for The Health Reformer. A few years later he began his higher education with an eye toward becoming the protege of Ellen White and with a goal of serving the cause.

His medical education was sound; he studied at the University of Michigan and was a Bellevue Medical College-trained surgeon, but he graduated in 1874 not to begin practicing medicine, but rather to become editor of The Health Reformer. Two years later he was named director of the institute. As a well-credentialed professional, Kellogg brought scientific credibility to the Whites' organization. He was also the first in a long line of physicians to write about nutrition with a passion for, and limited knowledge of, the subject.

Dr. Kellogg was an eccentric. Usually dressed in pure white, he raised the bar on Adventist and Grahamite ideologies in his evening lectures, proclaiming, "coffee cripples the liver," "tea causes insanity," "bouillon is a veritable solution of poisons," and "sex breeds evil diseases."

In Dr. Kellogg's world, sexual desire was the primary cause of all of mankind's woes. Like Sylvester Graham and Ellen White, he believed in abstaining from masturbation and sexual activity outside of marriage. He personally practiced abstinence within marriage as well. When he was 28, he married Ella Eaton; they shared a home, had separate bedrooms, and claimed the marriage was never consummated. Over time, they fostered 42 children and adopted many of them.

John Harvey Kellogg with cockatoo friend (date unknown). (Image courtesy of Willard Library, Battle Creek, Michigan)