The Crippled Colon (1931)

AUTHOR: Kellogg, John Harvey

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

As its title suggests, the book is concerned with “chronic intestinal infections” (v); Kellogg promotes veganism as a remedy for this and for general health. In his short Preface to the 1931 edition, Kellogg explicitly promotes his “new therapeutic procedures,” noting that they are being increasingly adopted by “progressive practitioners” (vi), in which “dietetic measures” have “preëminence in the therapeutic program” (iv-v). These measures invariably consist in abstention from animal food, condiments, sweets, stimulants like tea and coffee, and narcotics like alcohol and tobacco. Conversely, (excessive) consumption of these very items ranges among the most prominent causes of intestinal diseases. “In general, all animal foods encourage constipation,” Kellogg writes. Similarly, “[w]hite bread and other fine-flour products are most unwholesome,” whereas “[a]ll vegetable foods” are to be recommended (239). Specifically, Kellogg recommends “such fruits as apricots, blackberries, cherries, figs, grapes, huckleberries, pears, prunes, raspberries and strawberries, such grains as whole wheat and whole rye, cracked wheat and sterilized bran, and such vegetables as asparagus, beans, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, celery (raw), kohl-rabi, lentils, parsnips, peas and turnips” (241). He is convinced that “[t]he free use of fresh fruits, greens and salads of lettuce, cabbage and other uncooked foods fresh from the garden, is essential to healthy intestinal activity” (241). “Milk” he deems “particularly objectionable in a considerable number of cases” (244). Other foods recommended by Kellogg include: corn meal, oatmeal, raw tomatoes, fruit juices, dried fruit, canned fruit if the other options are not available, rice, carrots, and spinach (244-245). Interestingly, he also writes that “[t]he use of agar-agar is to be most highly recommended” (281).

Kellogg promotes veganism in general, not just as a mere remedy for intestinal infections:

The writer’s personal experience with a low protein, meatless dietary for over 60 years has convinced him of its adequacy and superior wholesomeness. In fact, since man belongs biologically to the great family of primates and is the highest type of this order of animals, it would seem to be perfectly safe for him to make use of the same foodstuffs as do other members of the primate family. None of the big apes are meat eaters. They can be taught to eat meat, as does man, but they thrive much better without it, and in their natural state eat meat only when forced to do so by the absence of other food (260).

Along the same lines, he later adds:

The trouble with the civilized colon is not that it is too long but that it is put to a wrong use. Civilized man has adopted the diet of the dog while having the colon of the chimpanzee. It may be admitted that if a man is to feed on the diet of the dog he ought to have his colon abbreviated. This is, in fact, the only way in which he could avoid a dangerous biologic misfit. But it is much easier to change the diet and the flora than to change the colon. … [B]iology teaches us that man is naturally frugivorous, and science offers no reason why he should have departed from his original bill of fare, to which his nearest relatives, the anthropoid apes, the chimpanzee, the orang-utan and the gorilla, still scrupulously adhere (276).