#21: Cornflake Quakery

OK, so this next one is a popularly circulated rumor that is kind of true and kind of not true. What is true is that John Harvey Kellogg had a lot of ideas and opinions about diets; he thought that basic, unexciting foods had a wide variety of health benefits, among them being that they tempered certain urges that he thought were unhealthy in excess.

However, the notion that the cereals that the Kellogg Company is now famous for—especially cornflakes—were invented specifically to make people stop having sex altogether is based on a 2012 Mental Floss article. Cornflakes were supposed to be healthy and easy to digest, but who’s to say they weren’t also created with another reason in mind?