The Breakfast Cereal - an Antidote to Lust

Did you have cereal for breakfast this morning? Better have something different tomorrow.

The breakfast cereal (made from wheat, rice and corn) is a relatively modern feature of the human diet. It’s quick and convenient, but that’s not why it was created.

It was to stop your impure thoughts.

It all began with one woman - Ellen G. White, the co-founder of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church in the 1840s. She claimed to have had over 2000 divine visions that decreed the abstinence of alcohol, tobacco, spices, tea, coffee, and meat.

These new commandments for a puritanical vegetarian diet had nothing to do with animal welfare, or indeed human health. It was all about sex, especially masturbation, that most heinous of sexual activities. This was the diet would help control those “baser passions” that were so offensive to God.

White set up schools and medical centres across the US and beyond, including the Loma Linda University and Medical Center in California. She also established her famous “sanitariums”, the equivalent of a health resort today.

Naturally, products were required. The path to purification doesn’t come without a business opportunity, and in stepped fellow Adventist Dr John Harvey Kellogg. Kellogg became director of the Battle Creek Sanitarium, and knew just what people needed to dampen down their impure thoughts. Cornflakes.

In 1898, he and his brother William Keith produced the first cornflake. It was William who founded the Battle Creek Toasted Corn Flake Company in 1906, later renamed the Kellogg Company.

Kellogg’s was a hugely successful enterprise so naturally had its imitators. Before you knew it, a slew of companies and their cereals crowded the industry. Many of these cereals were wheat-based, refined, and supplemented with copious amounts of sugar.

All this coincided with industrialisation. Industrialisation meant urbanisation and therefore many mouths to feed, mouths of people who were too busy working in factories or being captains of industry to grow their own food. In dietary terms, nothing epitomises the transition from a rural to urban way of life as much as the breakfast cereal.

Before industrialisation and the Victorian era, it was the norm for rich folk to eat a large but late breakfast which kept them going all day when they were out hunting or whatever they did in the country. This was a very substantial meal, consisting usually of cold beef, fish, cheese, eggs and even steak.

 As the Industrial Revolution advanced, breakfast retreated. Breakfast was becoming a hurried, marginalised affair. A gap in the market was emerging, and what better way to fill it than with quick, cheap cereal.

Despite brisk competition, Kellogg’s remained at the forefront of cereal productivity. In 1924 they gave us the unforgivable All-Bran. This was followed by Rice Krispies in 1928 and Bran Flakes in 1952. We were introduced to Frosties in 1954 and Special K in 1959. Sensing our lust (as it were) for yet more sugar, Kellogg’s introduced Coco Pops in 1960 and, arguably, their pièce de résistance, Crunchy Nut Cornflakes, in 1980.

By 1976 only 18 per cent of people were eating a cooked breakfast, with 40 per cent instead having cereal and 25 per cent having only toast or a roll.

So, can anything that is so refined and sugar-saturated have any redeeming features? No, frankly. Breakfast cereal advertising often makes much of the fact that cereals are commonly fortified with vitamins and iron. Indeed they are, because the heat treatment and refining process required to manufacture cereals means that most of the original nutrients of the natural whole grain (and there aren’t that many to start with) are lost.

Eating a bowl of cereal is similar to eating a bowl of sugar. These carbohydrates play havoc with your blood sugar levels, and do not leave you satisfied for long. Protein-rich foods, on the other hand, are highly satiating. In studies, a diet consisting of 30% protein has been found to markedly increase fullness, and to lead to less desire to eat.

It does this by influencing your appetite hormones. It suppresses concentrations of ghrelin, the hormone secreted in your stomach that stimulates appetite by acting as a hunger signal to the brain.

So if it’s a healthy, satisfying breakfast you’re after, make it a cooked one, the sort we ate before the Industrial Revolution. A cooked breakfast is essentially a high protein breakfast, which is undoubtedly the best way to start the day. Evidence supports this. When set out to ascertain just what type of breakfast made people feel more energised, they found that subjects reported higher energy from a high protein, low carbohydrate diet.

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Agriculture began about 10,000 years ago. Before then, our hunter-gatherer ancestors had little experience of eating cereal grains. So, for over 99 per cent of human history, whatever we ate in the morning it certainly wasn’t a bowl of cereal.

Considering that eggs, bacon, sausage and beef constituted the standard pre-industrial breakfast of the day, the success of the Adventists in overturning an established culinary institution was quite a feat.

Evidence for whether they succeeded in reducing reckless lust is not available. But don’t risk it.

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