U S medical doctor, inventor, author, and spa administrator who promoted dietary and other health reforms. Kellogg was born into a large family of Seventh Day Adventists in Battle Creek, Michigan, where he grew up listening to the health-reform teachings of prophetess Ellen White. Adventist leaders pushed Kellogg toward a medical career, and he began to study the works of health and hygiene reformers Sylvester Graham and Russell Trail. Later he earned a degree from the prestigious Bellevue Medical School in New York City, where he studied surgery and recent European advances in microbiology and physiology.
In 1876 Kellogg returned to Michigan to take over the moribund Western Health Reform Institute, a health spa run by the Adventists, which he revived to spectacular success. Renaming it the Battle Creek Sanitarium and revamping its health and hygiene programs along the lines of his theories of “biologic” living, Kellogg made the “San,” as it came to be known, one of the most popular and prestigious institutions of its kind in the United States. Thousands, including presidents, business mag¬ nates, and celebrities, flocked to its halls to dine upon nut-based meat substitutes, to exercise vigorously, and to submit to Kellogg’s harangues against meat diets, sexual excess, alcohol, and tobacco. In his spare time, Kellogg practiced surgery, invented new foodstuffs and therapeutic devices, traveled and lectured around the world, published the journal Good Health and Modem Medicine and Bacteriological World, and wrote more than 50 books on health and nutrition.