Why We Eat Breakfast Cereal: Seventh-Day Adventists

Before the name “Kellogg's” was synonymous with breakfast foods tenuously connected to the Star Wars franchise, it was synonymous with a couple of devout Seventh-Day Adventist brothers who, in the late 19th century, ran a totally-legit-and-not-at-all-questionable sanitarium in Battle Creek, Michigan. The SDA Church already advocated for a strict vegetarian diet, but John Harvey Kellogg, the older of the two, took it a few steps further and argued for total abstinence from all sweet and spicy foods as well, due to his belief that they would “enflame sexual passions.” If his patients could restrict themselves to bland whole grains, he told them, they would be able to resist all sexual temptations, up to and including the temptation to have sex with their own spouses. Other treatments the Kelloggs advocated included yogurt enemas, which I'm absolutely not making up, but kind of wish I were (I guess?).