Was cornflakes invented as an anti-masturbation food?

Had John Harvey Kellogg not had strong feelings about masturbation and sex, considering them detrimental to physical, emotional and spiritual well-being, your favourite breakfast might have never been invented. The physician himself abstained from sex, never consummated his marriage, adopted all his children instead of fathering them, and slept in a separate bedroom.

And, if sex was bad, masturbation was much worse, reports Mental Floss about the good doctor. "If illicit commerce of the sexes is a heinous sin," Kellogg wrote, "self-pollution is a crime doubly abominable."

Kellogg's solution to all this was a healthy diet. He thought that meat and certain flavourful or seasoned foods increased sexual desire and that plainer food, especially cereals and nuts, could curb it. While working as the superintendent at Michigan's Battle Creek Sanitarium, he hit upon afew different healthy eating ideas.

Among the things he invented were oatmeal and cornmeal baked into biscuits and then ground into tiny pieces, which he named Granola. He also developed a few different flaked grain breakfast cereals — including corn flakes — as healthy, ready-to eat anti-masturbatory morning meals. He partnered with his brother Will to make and sell them to the public. Will had less interest in dietary purity and more business sense than his brother, and worried that the products wouldn't sell as they were. He wanted to add sugar to the flakes to make them more palatable, but John wouldn't hear of it. Will eventually started selling the cereals through his own business, which became the Kellogg's Company; the brothers continued to feud for decades after.

It wasn't all dietary for Kellogg; he was also in favour of harsher punishment to keep boys from masturbating. One of the things he wanted in place was threading of a silver wire through the foreskin to prevent erections. For girls, he advocated — and sometimes employed — an application of carbolic acid to the clitoris to burn it and discourage touching it.