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Surgeon, food reformer; born in Tyrone Township, Mich. (brother of Will K.
Kellogg). Born into a Seventh Day Adventist family, he took a course in a
hygieotherapeutic school. He rejected this approach and took regular medical
training, finishing at Bellevue Hospital Medical College (New York City) but
with a thesis claiming that disease is the body's way of defending itself. He
had become editor of the Adventist monthly, Health Reformer (which he renamed
Good Health in 1879), and on returning to Battle Creek, he became superintendent
of the Western Health Reform Institute, which Sister Ellen Harmon White had
already established to promote ideas about health much like Kellogg's. He
renamed it the Battle Creek Sanitarium and began to apply his theories about
biologic living, or the Battle Creek idea, which stressed the role of natural
medicine such as a vegetarian diet and a Spartan spa-like regimen.
He was also
much in demand as an expert surgeon and would donate his fees to the sanitarium
for indigent patients. During the 1890s he set up a laboratory to develop more
nutritious foods; his brother, Will, had joined him and they developed a dry
wheat flake that soon became so popular as a breakfast cereal that they began to
sell it through a mail-order business; later they developed a rice flake and a
corn flake and set up the Sanitas Food Company to produce and sell these new
products. As the food business continued to expand, the brothers became legal
adversaries and by 1906 Will gained the exclusive rights to sell the products
under the name of W. K. Kellogg; John set up the Battle Creek Food Company and
developed other health foods such as coffee substitutes and soybean-derived
milk. Meanwhile, John had fallen out with the Adventist leaders who felt he and
his Battle Creek enterprise had become too big and had drifted too far from the
church; in 1907 the Adventists excommunicated him but he fought to retain
control of the sanitarium and his food laboratory. He wrote over 50 books
promoting his ideas and also founded the Race Betterment Foundation to pursue
his theories about eugenics. Although he would never become as rich or
well-known as his brother, Will, John Kellogg had actually instituted a major
revolution in the human diet.
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