Who knew the breakfast cereal was better than sex?
In today’s ‘Things I never knew I needed to know’ news, it turns out that family favourite cereal Kellogg’s Corn Flakes were invented for a rather less than wholesome reason.
The classic breakfast bowl was in fact created to stop people masturbating.
John Harvey Kellogg (who sounds like a total RIOT btw) was a rather uptight US physician who was vehemently anti-sex and, in particular, anti-self love.
Kellogg literally wrote the book on reasons not to masturbate. ‘Plain Facts For Old And Young’ was published in 1877 and detailed 39 symptoms of those afflicted by the dreaded M word including acne, epilepsy and mood swings.
In fact, the good doctor was so averse to sex and sexuality that he never consummated his 41-year marriage to wife Ella, instead adopting his six children.
He believed a healthy diet was the key to curing this ailment and while working at Battle Creek Sanitarium in the US he developed a new anti-wanking breakfast for the patients – Corn Flakes.
Sorry Dr. Kellogg but ‘Better Than An Orgasm’ is a hard sell for any product, let alone Corn Flakes. Even Crunchy Nut only go as far as ‘ludicrously tasty’ and everyone knows they are about a million times better.
According to Mental Floss, he developed the idea with his brother Will who mercifully suggested adding sugar to the rather plain cereal. You can imagine how well that went down with laugh-a-minute John…
Jokes aside, a bowl of toasted corn in the morning was by far the least extreme of Dr Kellogg’s 'cures' for masturbation. For men he recommended threading silver wire through the foreskin to stop erections, while women were to have their clitorises burned with carbolic acid.
Wow, what a guy.
What would you rather have: a bowl of cereal or an orgasm?