Michigan, United States 1888. The director of Battle Creek Sanatorium, John Harvey Kellogg, published Treatments for Abuse and Its Consequences, clear data for old and young people. Kellogg was a fervent anti-masturbation activist. He was one of the most serious diseases of the human being: “Pests, war, smallpox or similar diseases have not produced such deplorable results in humans as onanism. (...) Causes uterine cancer, urinary tract diseases, impotence, insanity and mental and physical weakness.” If the treatment did not cure the patients in the hospital, the doctor was clear about why: he masturbated in hiding.

But he also proposed solutions to avoid all the bad effects of masturbating. For young children, the most effective remedy was to circumcise themselves, especially if the operation was performed without anesthesia, and the greater the pain, the less desire they would have to give to sin. For girls, the “cure” was even more correct: chemical ablation by pure clitoral phenol.

Fortunately, Kellogg’s measures were also too extreme for American Catholic society at the time, and had no practical application. But the doctor did not give in to the crusade against onanism and found an indirect way to reduce the malignant voracity of men and women: the diet.

“For the person who feeds on pork, bread and sweet cake, drinking tea and smoking tobacco is easier to fly than having clean thoughts,” he said. I thought that the diet of Americans encouraged lust and that a cleaner diet could also wash away sins. So he decided to change the eating habits of his fellow citizens, and he got it from the next morning, from breakfast, at home. In 1897 he began to produce and market dried whole grains. And in 1906 he laid the first stone of the gigantic grain empire: He founded the Corn Flake Company. Today in the world, 5.5 million packets of Corn Flakes are consumed daily. But humanity has continued to empirically demonstrate that Kellogg's theories about the effects of masturbation have no scientific basis.