Ye Olde Cleanse Diet with Zoë Rom of 'Your Diet Sucks'
Summary
Host Chelsea Weber Smith and journalist Zoe Rome explore the history of American clean living movements, tracing how obsessions with bodily purity reflect broader societal anxieties. They discuss 19th-century figures like Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg, whose bizarre health philosophies linked diet to morality and sexuality. The episode examines how these ideas, rooted in religious revivalism and fear of industrialization, evolved into modern diet culture and eugenics.
Topics discussed
Introduction: Purity, control, and the body
Guest intro and the history of health obsessions
Clean eating as anxiety management
Historical female agency through fasting
Anorexia, hysteria, and European asceticism
American religious awakenings and secular revivals
Cholera, germ theory, and moral disgust
Sylvester Graham and the Graham cracker
Adventist diets and pseudoscience
Universal food theories and childhood illness
Formaldehyde in milk and food safety panics
John Harvey Kellogg and the Battle Creek Sanitarium
Kellogg's bizarre medical devices and diets
The invention of corn flakes
Anti-masturbation devices for children
Kellogg, eugenics, and forced sterilization
Modern health panics and political psychology
The myth of 'natural' food and moralization
Individual responsibility vs. systemic issues
Outro, merchandise, and sponsor reads
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