A New Kind of Health Food
The caloric overload wreaked havoc on the nation's collective digestive system. "Dyspepsia", The term coined for the ailment faced by many Americans, is exactly what made health advocates like Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg successful. According to them, Americans were overeating themselves until they were sick, and practitioners like Kellogg who advocated lighter diets found their patients miraculously cured. When vegetarian foods that individuals like Kellogg became not only healthy but also enjoyable to eat, they took the country by storm. Both Post and Kellogg marketed their foods as health foods- aiding in the vitality of the consumer, curing diseases, and delicious to boot.
Postum marketed Grape Nuts as a dish that could fix almost any ailment, from appendicitis to loose teeth. It was claimed to be a food especially good for the brain and central nervous system, and at least one advertisement was targeted towards parents, aiming to portray Grape Nuts as a food highly beneficial for the development of children. Advertisements for the cereal claimed that the human body gained more nutrition from Grape Nuts than any other known food, and the long baking process that the cereal underwent meant that the starch in the wheat was transformed into dextrose, or "grape sugar", and thus the cereal was easier to digest. Ads for Grape Nuts began to claim that the food was "pre-digested".
Unlike Postum, Kellogg's company shied away from claims that their
