Mental Floss racconta di come John Harvey Kellogg, medico avventista del settimo giorno inventò i celebri corn flakes come parte dei suoi sforzi verso la promozione di una dieta vegetariana equilibrata.
Secondo le intenzioni del suo creatore tale dieta sarebbe stata un rimedio per curare, tra le varie cose, la masturbazione, vista ai tempi da molti medici come un comportamento patologico.

In his 1877 book Plain Facts for Old and Young: Embracing the Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life, Kellogg cataloged 39 different symptoms liable to affect a chronic masturbator, including general infirmity, defective development, mood swings, fickleness, bashfulness, boldness, bad posture, stiff joints, fondness for spicy foods, acne, palpitations, and epilepsy.
Kellogg’s solution to all this suffering was a healthy diet. He thought that meat and certain flavorful or seasoned foods increased sexual desire, and that plainer food, especially cereals and nuts, could curb it—an idea proposed in the mid-19th century by Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian minister and eponym of the graham cracker.

I corn flakes non furono l’unica innovazione alimentare introdotta da Kellog.

Another of Kellogg’s health innovations, developed to clean out one‘s guts of impure materials, was an enema machine that ran water through the bowel and then followed it with a pint of yogurt—half delivered through the mouth and the other half through the anus. Unlike his granola, this invention didn’t really catch on.