The Curious Disappearance of Protein from Breakfast

Is there anything more pure, more wholesome, more American, than corn flakes with milk in the morning?

A rushed bowl of cereal or two every morning is the quintessential breakfast, though it hasn’t always been this way.

Believe it or not, this is mainly due to a famous doctor’s irrational fears of both animal protein and sexual intercourse.

The Decline of Breakfast

I’ll admit I’m not a breakfast guy. I’m generally not hungry when I first wake up and prefer to just have a cup of coffee before I get on with my day. But weekends are a different beast.

On my days off, I’ll more often than not eat an epic breakfast later in the morning. Omelettes, bacon, grapefruit… maybe even a Bloody Mary if I’m feeling particularly hedonistic. This custom of bigger breakfasts on weekends is followed by many people in our culture and traces back to the traditional full breakfast of the United Kingdom.

The classic morning meal of the British Isles is epic in every way, generally consisting of eggs, bacon, sausage, fried vegetables, and leftovers from the night before. But this is a tradition that has been slowly dying out for more than a century.

A Low-Protein Diet?

These days, everyone knows about low-fat and low-carb diets. The former is kind of like the “Apollo Creed” of the diet world: it’s crude, it’s in your face, and it’s most people’s odds-on favorite. But in the other corner is the low-carb diet, the “Rocky Balboa” of nutrition. He’s not as well known, but he’s a feisty fighter and is supported by a small and vocal minority.

On the other hand, very few people are for a “low-protein” diet, but it hasn’t always been this way.

Sure, sure, many vegans/raw foodists/fruitarians are forced to defend their necessarily low-protein diets, but the only people who take them seriously are themselves. (T. Colin Campbell, the legendary author of The China Study, has notoriously pulled a scientific faux pas by indicting all animal protein because he found that isolated casein protein causes cancer in rats… D’oh!)

Although most of us believe that protein is a net positive, low-protein diets have cycled in and out of our culture for as long as food fads have been around.

The Weird Rise of Breakfast Cereal

Believe it or not, the popularity of breakfast cereals can be traced to several high-powered vegetarians in the late 19th century.

First and foremost are the Kellogg brothers, John Harvey and Will Keith, who invented wheat flakes and corn flakes. The Kelloggs were Seventh Day Adventists, a religion that advocates vegetarianism. They also worked at the Adventist-owned Battle Creek Sanitarium, a health resort in Battle Creek, Michigan.

The good news is they preached the importance of sleep and physical exercise. But after that, things start to get weird.

You see, the Kelloggs believed that animal protein was the root cause of all the diseases that afflicted their patients and that it led to sexual deviancy. So their patients were placed on vegetarian diets and instructed to chew each bite 100 times in a process known as Fletcherizing.

The omission of meat from the diet was supposed to cause the patients to abstain from all sexual activity. John Harvey seemed to be particularly terrified of sex and never had any children of his own, even though he was married.

The sanitarium’s regime also included phototherapy (electric light baths) and vibrotherapy (vibrating chairs), but perhaps most notorious is its emphasis on colon cleansing. All patients received several enemas each day, starting with water and ending with yogurt–yes, friggin’ YOGURT!

Instead of being denounced for its quackery from the start, the Battle Creek Sanitarium became nationally-renowned and many famous people traveled from far away to get their yogurt fix. Henry Ford, Amelia Earhardt, and President Warren G. Harding were all patients at one point.

Lucky for the Kelloggs, the fame that their sanitarium achieved helped to bring their cereals into the limelight. Many other former patients, first and foremost C. W. Post, all tried with varying success to start their own cereal companies out of Battle Creek.

After the Great Depression, most people could no longer afford the expensive therapies found at the Sanitarium, and they eventually ended up selling the building to the Army during World War II, but the breakfast cereal craze they started has only strengthened over time, with untold millions now starting off each morning with a bowl of refined grains covered in sugar and doused in skim milk.

Campbell’s Rats

As I mentioned before, very few people fear protein the way they fear fat or carbs, but I wanted to finish this analysis of macronutrient scaremongering as completely as possible.

The small minority of people who are low-protein proponents tend to single out animal protein as being inherently unhealthy. But until they can produce better evidence than T. Colin Campbell’s rats, you’d be best off ignoring their hysterics.

Although the traditional breakfast of eggs and bacon has declined due to the absurd fear of fat, the coincident rise of breakfast cereal consumption is the result of a couple of quacks who succeeded in getting a lot of high-powered people on board with their nutrition dogma.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a pound of bacon to fry up.

Tagged as: battle creek sanitarium, kellogg brothers, nutritionism, protein