7th Day Adventist Church

John Harvey Kellogg, M.D., LL.D., F.A.C.S.

Man not Naturally a Flesheater

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It is to be noted at the outset that our present mode of life is far from natural. Since he left his primitive state, in his wanderings up and down the face of the earth to escape destruction by terrific terrestrial convulsions and cataclysmic changes in climate and temperature, chilled during long glacial peridos, parched and blistered by tropic heats, starved and wasted by drouth and famine, man has been driven by ages of hardships and emergencies to adopt every imaginable expedient to survive immediate destruction, and in so doing has acquired so great a number of unnatural tastes, appetites, and habits, perversions and abnormalities in customs and modes of life, that it is the marvel of marvels that he still survives.

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Man no longer seeks his food among the natural products of field and forest and prepares it at his own hearthstone, but receives it ready to eat, prepared in immense factories, slaught-houses, mills, and bakeries and displayed in palatial emporiums. No longer led by a natural instinct in the selection of his foodstuffs as were his remote forebears, he finds his dietetic guidance in the advertising columns of the morning paper, and eats not what Nature prepares for his sustenance but what his grocer, his butcher, and his baker find it most to their pecuniary interest to purvey to him. The average man himself no longer plants and tills and harvests the foods which enter into his bill of fare, that is, "earns his bread by the sweat of his brow," but accepts whatever is passed on to him by a long line of producers and purveyors who do his sweating for him, depriving him of the opportunity of earning both appetite and good digestion by honest toil. So he resorts to condiments and ragouts, palate-tickling and tongue-blistering sauces and nerve-rousing stimulants, as a means of securing the unearned felicity of gustatory enjoyment.

Animal Dietaries

Comparative anatomy and natural history give definite and positive information. It is easy to determine the natural diet of an animal by studying its eating habits when in a wild or natural state, because animals are guided by unerring instincts which instruct them to eat and lead them to avoid those things which are not naturally adapted for their sustenance, and which are hence unwholesome for them. 

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Lessons from the Monkey

Even savage man finds it necessary to appeal to his humble forest companions for indformation regarding foods with which he is not acquainted. Dr. Geil, a famous African explorer who visited the pigmies, told the writer some years ago that when he asked the chief of the pigmies, "How do you know what to eat when you visit a new forest?" the quaint little chieftan replied: "When I find a new nut, I put it where a monkey can see it; then I hide and watch the monkey. Pretty soon he picks up the nut, smells it, tastes it, and then if he eats it, I eat it. Yet if he drops it on the ground, I know it is poisonous and don't eat it."

The pigmy has made an important dietetic discovery which the average civilized man has not yet attained. He has found that the safe way in diet is to follow the monkey. He submits his bill of fare to his forest relative, whose knowledge of dietetics he knows to be more reliable than his own, and accepts his guidance.Much more valuable information could be obtained by sitting at the feet of some wise old chimpanzee and watching him eat than by reading many books on dietetics. 

John Harvey Kellogg sought to prove that vegetarians were physically superior by fielding a Battle Creek College football team, which he personally coached. According to a former player, "Brother" Wright, whenever Kellogg's players lost, he railed at them for cheating on their diets and held them captive until one would say he had broken training rules and eaten meat. Wright stated that sometimes a player would eventually lie that he had eaten meat just to get the team released. He described Kellogg's efforts as "a crusade to prove the superiority of vegetarianism." Ellen G. White's condemnation of this approach to proving SDA superiority led to a policy restricting interscholastic sports by Adventist schools.

The 1932 Cauldron reports that after a single win in 1926, “football was found to be unsuccessful at Battle Creek College and was discontinued the next year.” https://www.lostcolleges.com/battle-creek-college

Price increasingly gained attention outside Adventist groups, and in the creation–evolution controversy other leading Christian fundamentalists praised his opposition to evolution – though none of them followed his young Earth arguments, retaining their belief in the gap or in the day-age interpretation of Genesis. Price corresponded with William Jennings Bryan and was invited to be a witness in the Scopes Trial of 1925, but declined as he was teaching in England and opposed to teaching Genesis in public schools as "it would be an infringement on the cardinal American principle of separation of church and state". Price returned from England in 1929 to rising popularity among fundamentalists as a scientific author.[48] In the same year his former student Harold W. Clark self-published the short book Back to Creationism, which recommended Price's flood geology as the new "science of creationism", introducing the label "creationism" as a replacement for "anti-evolution" of "Christian Fundamentals".[49]

Biography

Clark was born in 1891[2] and raised as a Seventh-day Adventist on a farm in New England. His interest in science and religion was first evoked by George McCready Price's Back to the Bible (1916). After years of church-school teaching, he enrolled at Pacific Union College in 1920, where he studied under (the newly arrived) Price. He graduated two years later and replaced Price (who had accepted a position at Union College, Nebraska) on the faculty. In 1929, he had dedicated his work Back to Creationism to Price.[3] Historian Ronald L. Numbers credits this book with the introduction of the name "Creationism" to the movement, which had previously been known as "Anti-Evolution".[4]

That summer, and a number of vacations thereafter, he spent studying glaciation, coming (in the 1930s) to the conclusion that large proportions of North America had been covered in ice for as long as one and a half millennia after the flood — a view that was anathema to Price. In 1932 he earned an MA in biology from the University of California, and on his return updated and enlarged his book, introducing his views on glaciation, and rejecting the common Adventist view, associated with Price, that species were fixed, in favour of one that allowed considerable hybridization. The revised book drew effusive praise from Price.

In 1938, Clark visited the oil fields of Oklahoma and Northern Texas, where his observation of deep drilling confirmed long-standing suspicions that there existed a meaningful geological column, a position adamantly denied by Price. Clark attributed this column to antediluvian ecologies ranging from ocean depths to mountaintops, rather than the successive layers through deep time of mainstream geology.[5] Despite continuing to point out that he still believed in six-day creation, Clark was pelted with criticisms from Price, who accused Clark of having contracted "the modern mental disease of universityitis" and curried favor with "tobacco-smoking, Sabbath-breaking, God-defying" evolutionists.[6] This led Price to vitriolically and implacably break with Clark,[6][5] who Price would continue to criticize strongly in his 1947 pamphlet Theories of Satanic Origin.[7]

Clark died in St. Helena Hospital on 12 May 1986, aged 94.[8]

Publications

• Back to Creationism, 1929[9]

• Genes and Genesis, 1940

• The New Diluvialism, 1946[9]

• Creation Speaks: A Study of the Scientific Aspects of the Genesis Record of Creation and the Flood., 1949 (2017 Reprint, CrossReach Publications)

• Crusader for Creation: The Life and Works of George McCready Price, 1966

• Fossils, Flood and Fire. Outdoor Pictures. 1968. ISBN 0-911080-16-3.

• The Battle Over Genesis[10]

• New creationism. Nashville: Southern Pub. Association. 1980. ISBN 0-8127-0247-6.

East of Eden

It is possible to provide all essential nutrients except vitamin B12 without using animal foods. On the other hand, it is possible to provide all essential nutrients with a diet composed only of meat. Personal dietary appropriateness including the value of a diet as a source of essential nutrients and its value as a preventative for oneself and one's significant others is the foremost dietary consideration of pragmatic vegetarians. In contrast, the overriding dietary consideration of ideologic vegetarians varies with the particular ideology. Typically, their motivation is a blend of physical, psychosocial, societal, and moral, often religious, concerns.

A continual problem for SDAs who espouse the "back to Eden" ideology is the absence of a non-animal food source of vitamin B12. A vegetarian Registered Dietitian who wrote a column for a church periodical asked me if I thought vegans could derive vitamin B12 from organic vegetables that were unwashed before ingestion. I opined that it would be better to eat animal foods than fecal residues. She agreed.

A perennial assumption among vegetarians is that vegetarianism increases longevity. In the last century, Grahamites devotees of the Christian "hygienic" philosophy of Sylvester Graham (1794-1851) taught that adherence to the Garden of Eden lifestyle would eventuate in humankind's reclamation of the potential for superlongevity, such as that attributed to Adam (930 years) or Methuselah (969 years). I discussed this matter 25 years ago with an SDA physician who was dean of the Loma Linda University (LLU) School of Health. Although he admitted that lifelong SDA vegetarians had not exhibited spectacular longevity, he professed that longevity of the antediluvian sort might become possible over several generations of vegetarianism. SDA periodicals publicize centenarians and often attribute their longevity to the SDA lifestyle. However, of 1200 people who reached the century mark between 1932 and 1952, only four were vegetarians. 10 I continue to ask: Where on Earth is there an exceptionally longevous population of vegetarians? Hindus have practiced vegetarianism for many generations but have not set longevity records. At best, the whole of scientific data from nutrition-related research supports vegetarianism only tentatively. The incidence of colorectal cancer among nonvegetarian Mormons is lower than that of SDAs. 11 A review of populations at low risk for cancer showed that World War I veterans who never smoked had the lowest risk of all. 12 As data accumulate, optimism that diet is a significant factor in cancer appears to be diminishing. An analysis of 13 case-control studies of colorectal cancer and dietary fiber showed that, for the studies with the best research methods, risk estimates for dietary fiber and colorectal cancer were closer to zero.13 A pooled analysis of studies of fat intake and the risk of breast cancer that included SDA data showed no association. 14

A meatless diet can facilitate weight control because it is a form of food restriction. But one need not eliminate meat to maintain a healthy weight, and there are many overweight vegetarians. Surely prudence and selectivity overshadow mere abstention from consuming animal products.

In 1935, Price and Dudley Joseph Whitney (a rancher who had co-founded the Lindcove Community Bible Church, and now followed Price) founded the Religion and Science Association (RSA). They aimed to resolve disagreements among fundamentalists with "a harmonious solution" which would convert them all to flood geology. Most of the organising group were Adventists, others included conservative Lutherans with similarly literalist beliefs. Bryon C. Nelson of the Norwegian Lutheran Church of America had included Price's geological views in a 1927 book, and in 1931 published The Deluge Story in Stone: A History of the Flood Theory of Geology, which described Price as the "one very outstanding advocate of the Flood" of the century. The first public RSA conference in March 1936 invited various fundamentalist views, but opened up differences between the organisers on the antiquity of creation and on life before Adam. The RSA went defunct in 1937, and a dispute continued between Price and Nelson, who now viewed Creation as occurring over 100,000 years previously.[50]