The Road to Wellville

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It began at a place modestly described as the healthiest on the planet: the Battle Creek Sanitarium, home of Dr John Harvey Kellogg – best-selling health writer, first guru of bran and grunt, the Santa Claus of the digestive tract. And yes – of course! – he invented the cornflake, but it was only a tiny element in a veritable encyclopedia of historically comparable yum-yum tummy treats: caramel coffee (caffeine-free), Bromose (to facilitate auto-intoxication), Nuttolene (for interior cleanliness) and seventy-five other gastrically correct, biologically imperious, devastatingly healthy goodies. Dr John Harvey Kellogg's greatest achievement, however, did not come in a packet: it required instruction (and discipline). In 1907 middle America, near the founding factories of the cornflake, his patients were exposed to the invigorating properties of the five-times-a-day enema, the nourishing qualities of protose fillets, beetroot soufflés and okra soup (a diet so rich in bulk that bowels burst to exonerate themselves) and, most important, the restorative effects of relentless self-denial.