Thread by @SamaHoole

Modern veganism traces a direct lineage to 19th century religious health reformers who were absolutely convinced that eating meat made you masturbate.

This is not a joke.
This is not an exaggeration.
This is documented history, and it's spectacularly weird.

Enter the thread 🧵

Enter Sylvester Graham, Presbyterian minister and inventor of the Graham cracker.

In the 1830s, he preached that meat, spices, and "stimulating" foods inflamed the passions and led directly to "self-pollution."

His solution? Bland vegetarian food. Salvation through boredom.

Graham wrote: "A man that lives on flesh, and especially one who uses stimulating condiments... will find it as impossible to govern his passions, as the wind to repress itself."

Basically, steak makes you horny, and being horny sends you to hell.

His lectures drew thousands.

He convinced people that meat was corrupting their souls. The "Graham diet" spread across America.

Boardinghouses went vegetarian. His followers were called "Grahamites" and they were, by all accounts, deeply unpleasant at dinner parties.

The Seventh-day Adventist Church absorbed Graham's teachings and ran with them.

In 1863, prophet Ellen G. White had a "vision" that God wanted people to stop eating meat to achieve moral purity.

She wrote: "Flesh meats... strengthen the animal propensities."

White's influence was enormous.

She founded health institutions and published extensively on how meat eating corrupted both body and soul.

Her writings explicitly linked vegetarianism to sexual purity, following Graham's framework but adding divine authority.

God himself was now anti-steak.

Then came John Harvey Kellogg, a devoted Seventh-day Adventist who took White's and Graham's ideas and industrialised them.

He ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium like a medicalized church that worshipped sexual repression.

He invented corn flakes specifically to be so bland they would suppress sexual desire.

Kellogg wrote extensively about the "dangers of self-abuse" and prescribed strict vegetarian diets as prevention.

His sanitarium banned spices, meat, and anything that might remind patients pleasure existed.

Yogurt enemas were involved. The church's theology became medicalised pseudoscience.

This wasn't fringe thinking...this was mainstream health reform.

Medical journals published papers on diet controlling sexual urges.

Doctors prescribed vegetarianism to cure "excessive venery."

The entire framework linking food, sex, and sin was considered scientific.

By the early 20th century, "moral purity" just became "health."

The theology secularised into nutrition science.

Here's the dark comedy: they were accidentally right.

Modern research shows vegan diets consistently lower testosterone levels compared to omnivorous diets.

Plant-based diets also correlate with reduced libido.

Graham and Kellogg wanted to suppress sexual desire through diet, and they stumbled onto a method that actually works.

So yes, veganism has deeply weird roots in sexual panic and religious extremism. And by pure historical accident, the diet that 19th century zealots prescribed to kill your libido... actually does that.

Sometimes breakfast cereal really is a conspiracy against your genitals. They just had the wrong explanation.

Thanks for reading. I'll be dropping more threads in the next few days, so definitely give me a follow.

In the meantime, check out the article I wrote debunking 14 classic vegan myths.

fitawakening.co.uk/2022/02/24/veg…