John Harvey Kellogg, MD: Health Reformer and Antismoking Crusader

JOHN HARVEY KELLOGG GREW up in Battle Creek, Mich, the son of a family of small shopkeepers and devoted Seventh-Day Adventists. When John was 12 years old, James White, the principal founder of the church and publisher of the Adventist monthly, Health Reformer, invited the boy to learn the printing trade. Ellen White, James' wife and the new denomination's cofounder and prophetess, had begun writing extensively on health and hygiene. John eagerly read her writings and those of other popular health reformers who advocated temperance, vegetarianism, and the use of natural remedies.1

In 1872, the Church sent him to study at the reform-oriented Hygieo-Therapeutic College in New Jersey. After 5 months, Kellogg felt the need for more conventional medical training and enrolled first at the University of Michigan Medical School and then at Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York City, where he received an MD in 1875. He later studied surgery in London and Vienna, qualified as a surgeon, and performed 22 000 operations in a career that lasted until he was 88 years old.

Kellogg became Editor of Health Reformer in 1874, and in 1879 he changed its name to Good Health. He held his editorial position until his death 69 years later. During that span of time, he also published some 50 books on various aspects of healthy living. Kellogg's system of “biologic living” advocated vegetarianism, regular exercise, plenty of fresh air and sunshine, drinking 8 to 10 glasses of water a day, and abstinence from alcohol, tobacco, tea, and coffee.

In 1876, Kellogg agreed to become superintendent of a small reform medical institution run by the Adventists, the Western Health Reform Institute, which then housed 20 patients. By the turn of the century, he had expanded it to accommodate 700 patients and had renamed it the Battle Creek Sanitarium; by the 1920s, it housed 1200 patients, including prominent industrialists and politicians. Kellogg invented a range of exercise equipment for the use of these paying guests.

To improve the patients' diet, Kellogg developed, patented, and introduced a variety of new foods, including Granola and Corn Flakes; he also invented peanut butter, artificial milk made from soybeans, and a variety of imitation meats. His younger brother, Will Keith Kellogg, later built a successful company to market his brother's cereal creations; in so doing, he transformed the average American's breakfast. Kellogg company profits were initially fed into the Race Betterment Foundation, which John Harvey created in 1914 to publicize and promote eugenics; later they flowed into the W. K. Kellogg Foundation.

John Harvey Kellogg was an early member of the American Public Health Association and served on the Michigan Board of Health from 1878 to 1891 and from 1911 to 1917. In 1922, he proudly listed the latter credential on the title page of his book Tobaccoism, or How Tobacco Kills, a sustained assault on the physiological, pathological, nutritional, eugenic, moral, and economic devastation caused by the “tobacco habit.”2 This book contributed to the anti-tobacco campaign of the 1920s that led to a bill introduced by Senator Reed Smoot in 1929 to bring tobacco under the regulatory purview of the Pure Food and Drug Act—an effort officially endorsed by the American Public Health Association.3 In the end, however, Congress failed to act and Americans continued their unhindered and unregulated consumption of cigarettes.