(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- America’s health-care system may be suffering all sorts of indignities, but the wellness industry is doing just fine. More than half the adults in the U.S. take a dietary supplement, and about 20,000 spas offer uncounted treatments, from colonics to cupping. Wellness has become a multibillion-dollar antidote to a bruising medical establishment.
Most accounts of the origins of wellness as an idea, a movement, and a marketing effort go back to the 1970s, when Americans took to yoga, meditation, and carob chips. But before Deepak Chopra and Dr. Oz and Goop, there was Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. In 1878 he opened the Battle Creek Sanitarium, the Canyon Ranch of its time, and began promoting his rules for “biologic living,” a near-religion then. He treated executives, celebrities, and presidents at the San, as it was called; his most devoted followers were known as the Battle Freaks. He sold them special foods, unusual treatments, exercise machines, books, and albums. For 60 years, Kellogg—prescient and kooky—was the most famous doctor in America.
His life’s work was intertwined with that of his younger brother, Will, who helped run the San before starting the Kellogg cereal company. Their dramatic, poignant family saga is well told by medical historian Howard Markel in The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek (Pantheon Books, $35). Jealousy, mistrust, and meanness strained their relationship: They sued each other over the cereal company (Will prevailed); took credit separately for shared accomplishments; and, Markel writes, spurred each other on to greater success than they might have otherwise achieved. They were estranged when John died in 1943 at 91. The San couldn’t survive without its charismatic, narcissistic founder, and his contributions to the wellness movement were lost, an omission Markel hopes to correct with this book.
Many personal accounts at the end of the 19th century include bouts of indigestion, constipation, diarrhea, and dyspepsia, and no wonder. Whether they were wealthy or not, Americans overate, consuming huge amounts of animal fat, salt, and sugar. In the backwoods of Michigan, where the Kelloggs grew up, people ate cured pork with salty canned vegetables and sweetened canned fruit for lunch and dinner; at breakfast they consumed ham or bacon and potatoes fried in congealed fat from the night before. The average woman didn’t live past 41, and the average man only made it to 39.
John Kellogg, gregarious, intelligent, and obsessed with cleanliness, eventually made his way to medical school in New York, thanks to support from the Seventh-day Adventist Church. When he returned to Michigan, he took over the church’s small health center and converted it into a secular temple to wellness with a suitably dignified name. (He created the word “sanitarium” from “sanatorium,” a facility for long-term illness.) As Markel writes, he “knew that this institution had to be an attractive, modern, luxurious, worthwhile destination for those wealthy enough to seek such commodities.”
At its peak, the San employed 1,000 people, cared for as many as 10,000 patients a year, and farmed 400 acres of vegetables and fruit. The place had its own dairy, canning, and food manufacturing facilities. Eventually Kellogg added a resort with 20 cottages “reserved for the most wealthy of the worried well.” Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and John D. Rockefeller were regulars. To garner publicity, Kellogg invited Harvey Firestone, J.C. Penney, Alfred du Pont, and the composer John Philip Sousa, among others, for free treatments, prompting some to say that his medical specialty was “diseases of the rich and famous.”
Kellogg’s rules for a biologic life make him sound like Michael Pollan—eat grains, nuts, fruits, vegetables, yogurt, and soy milk. Meat and sugar were forbidden. So was masturbation. Smoking was a death wish, obesity a “definite health hazard.” Kellogg warned of the dangers of a sedentary lifestyle, advocating regular, vigorous exercise, plus massage, enemas, fresh air and sunlight, spirituality, laughter, sleep, and lots of pure water. He came up with an early, less-edible version of peanut butter and a fiber-rich mix of grains he called granola. He sold psyllium as a laxative (hello, Metamucil) and treated Richard Byrd with acidophilus soy milk—a probiotic—after the admiral’s 1929 expedition to the South Pole. Kellogg also made his own very popular exercise albums with a brass band. Cue Richard Simmons.
Kellogg promoted some dubious ideas as well: Food should be chewed down to its atomic level; his patients should have four odor-free bowel movements a day; and women should receive pelvic massages, from him, a treatment whose medical purpose no doctor since has been able to explain. The benefits of electrotherapy exercise beds, vibrating chairs, and mechanical horses now seem a little suspect, too.
Kellogg spent his last years building and running a second sanitarium, outside Miami; he’d left the San after it was forced into receivership during the Depression. Kellogg’s legacy might have been more enduring had he not left his entire estate to his Race Betterment Foundation, which promoted eugenics. And some of his recipes might still be on the market if he hadn’t alienated the brother who could manufacture them. “Many of his sounder concepts of wellness remain sage prescriptions written out millions of times each day,” Markel concludes. Yet when most people hear Kellogg, they think corn flakes.
To contact the author of this story: Susan Berfield in New York at sberfield@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Emma Rosenblum at erosenblum2@bloomberg.net.
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