Kellogg, John Harvey (1852-1943)

US food reformer and surgeon. During the 1890s he set up a laboratory to develop more nutritious foods. Joined by his brother, Will, they developed a dry wheat flake that soon became very popular as a breakfast cereal; they developed a rice flake and a corn flake and set up the Sanitas Food Company to produce and sell these new products. By 1906 Will gained the exclusive rights to sell the products under the name of W K Kellogg.

He was born in Tyrone Township, Michigan. 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, 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 became superintendent of the Western Health Reform Institute which had been 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. He was also much in demand as an expert surgeon and would donate his fees to the sanatorium for indigent patients. He set up the Battle Creek Food Company and developed other health foods such as coffee substitutes and soybean-derived milk. 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.