You and I Are Too Old to Believe That an Ad Slogan From the 1940s is Good Nutritional Advice
Too Old for This Sh*t: How to Take Your Life Back from an Ageist Society
The real reason for breakfast is to keep you from masturbating
I’ll explain myself in a moment. Stay with me here.
You HAVE to eat breakfast, ‘K?
MOST IMPORTANT MEAL OF THE DAY, ‘K?
Bullswocky.
Pure, unadulterated BULLSWOCKY.
I espoused this, too, until I did my research.
Research is a funny thing. So often what becomes gospel started out as a marketing campaign. Here’s my favorite online nutritionist
from her recent post:
She writes:
‘Breakfast is the most important meal of the day’ was an advertising slogan created in 1944 by General Foods, makers of the breakfast cereal Grape Nuts, based on no evidence whatsoever.
Still, it was catchy and memorable, so it got picked up by nutrition experts who decided to run with it and are still out there running with it down through the decades.
Just to underscore her point, this article explains it further. Cereals were supposed to suppress our need to masturbate. No, really. Please, don’t take it from me:
Like any food trends, the marketers wildly advertised cereal turning people into cereal enthusiasts. These over-sugared and over-processed corn cereal was (sic) the solution to every problem. The success of corn flakes inspired Grape Nuts, which actually contains neither grapes nor nuts. Grape Nuts was developed by C.W. Post after a stay in Kellogg’s sanitarium. He believed that cereal formed with glucose or “grape sugar” is an excellent source of fiber and provides your day’s whole grains. In fact, early ads claimed Grape Nuts could cure alcoholism or even prevent malaria. Kellogg’s corn flakes were marketed as ‘anti-masturbatory’ morning meals. Kellogg strongly believed that red meat increased sexual desire, you see. Reverend Graham and Dr. John Kellogg denounced that an un-sexy cereal could curb one’s sexual desires. (author bolded)
You cannot make this sh*t up.
Yet here we are, still espousing this idiocy as though it’s gospel. Too many nutritionists are just as guilty of perpetuating the nonsense.
In a world where men’s sperm counts are dropping along with fertility rates (I’m not sure this is such a bad thing) in the Western world, Mother Nature’s revenge for plastering Her with plastics, apparently, and who can blame Her?
So I guess if we’re to believe that eating cereal will suppress our sexual urges, that combined with dropping fertility rates will sure take care of overpopulation. Certainly if we keep eating the kinds of pure bunko sold to us and our children as “nutrition” we’ll expire a lot sooner.
Look. In a world where some folks seriously consider drinking bleach because the Orange Pumpkin said it would cure Covid, should we be shocked?
About those “healthy” breakfast cereals?
Here’s what Healthline has to say about our breakfast cereals and all the claims that the FDA lets them get away with.
From the article:
Breakfast cereals often have misleading health claims printed on the box — yet are filled with sugar and refined grains.
Anything that says Count Chocula is not likely to be your body’s best friend ANY time of the day.
I don’t eat breakfast cereal, which for the most part is simply awful food if you buy from General Mills or Kellogg’s. You can’t even trust that fat old white liar on the labels of Quaker Oats. These days Quaker Oats products can even offer you a new ingredient: salmonella.
That’ll start your day with a bang.
Most “healthy cereal” is stripped of nearly all food value and loaded with so much sugar as to give an elephant a heart attack, as the Healthline article above shows.
Besides, I thoroughly enjoy masturbation. There’s that. I have to wonder if my ability to achieve a great many more of them later in life is in direct proportion to the fact that I stopped eating breakfast cereals decades ago.
I can see a business opportunity there for some enterprising soul.
These days, the big boys like General Mills are on the warpath. Of course they are. To make sure we’re still eating crap for breakfast despite what we know it will do to our bodies, they’ve put real money into disinformation campaigns which puts Dr. Kellogg and his anti-red meat sentiment (which is being rebirthed as a far right conspiracy these days, go figure) back to bed to wake up just in time for lunch.
Look. In today’s Internet world, if you and I are dumb enough to be fooled by such blather, we deserve what we get. I believed the breakfast lie, too, because my folks did.
My parents, who were in their forties when Kellogg was selling his disinformation, believed that farm folk should chow down. I learned to throw back flapjacks, loads of butter, sausage, biscuits and gravy and grits with sugar and lard biscuits loaded with butter and grape jelly like all good Southern farm folks.
And got fat, too. As did my mother, who was once a beanpole.
These days I am rarely if ever hungry in the mornings. If I’m not hungry, I don’t eat. When we don’t eat just because some dimwit said it was breakfast, lunch or dinner, and only eat when the body said it was hungry, and learned to give the body what it was hungry for, we’d likely not be so obese as a nation.
That’s how I keep off the 80-some lbs that I finally lost 36 years ago. When I eat when I’m not hungry, pounds sneak back. When I eat breakfast, for example, I tend to be hungry all day, unnecessarily so.
However what works for me isn’t going to work for all, which is why so much nutritional advice has to be tested against our unique bodies, ages, activity levels and requirements.
That takes work. You and I are worth it.
My friend
, who sent me the story from above, eats once a day, around midday, with his wife. Jim lost a slew of weight and has maintained, largely by sticking to a meat-friendly diet (another thing that terrified Kellogg). That’s a tactic used by more and more people to good effect, assuming we’ve done our due diligence and with the advice of a trained nutritionist.Cross discusses how we can extend our fast, a process that a fair bit of research argues can do us good, by simply skipping breakfast.
You and I are WAY Too Old to still believe old saws that were meant to sell products but were never steeped in any kind of science.
The reason I got so up myself about this topic is that first, I’d already read Cross’ article, and was considering how rarely I am ever truly famished in the mornings.
Then I came across this article featured on Pocket, which is full of material offered as science but not necessarily all of it backed up by science.
Here’s the first paragraph:
We all know how important eating breakfast is for our health; not only can a healthy, balanced breakfast be a nutritional powerhouse that helps you prepare for the day ahead, but eating in the morning has been shown to improve concentration throughout the day, boost energy levels and kickstart your metabolism, among other benefits. (author bolded)
The opening line simply regurgitates eighty-year-old marketing misinformation pitched by a guy who had serious issues with his manly parts and apparently, everyone else’s to boot. The writer allows for some give-and-take, but when someone begins the article with disinformation, that casts the rest of it in doubt.
Besides, she quotes a bunch of nutritionists. Nutritionists had foolishly picked up bad information from eight decades ago. These days I work with one, but she works for the VA. The VA is notoriously behind the times so I read Maria Cross, back that up with my own research and work with a nutritionist who bases out of Natural Grocer.
Then I put all that information into the faulty blender that is my brain and come out with something resembling a food plan that works for me. For now.
Look. I come from the crowd that danced until closing time at the disco, then went with same said crowd to International House of Pancakes and dropped ten thousand calories of pure carbohydrates, sugar and salt and called it a healthy breakfast.
I thought nothing of pouring an entire bottle of Thousand Island dressing on a cup of iceberg lettuce and calling that a healthy salad, too. That was fifty years ago.
I likely addled my grey matter, but I’m not addled enough to be doing the same things today.
Should you eat breakfast? As with all things, it depends.
Information that was pitched by a seriously sex-scared guy with cereal to sell is not the kind of guidance we should continue to pass along if it doesn’t pass muster with current research.
But that’s just me.
Otherwise, enjoy your Froot Loops. There isn’t one iota of fruit in them, but you can believe the marketing if you like.
Let’s play.
Thanks for reading what I hope was both funny and informative. Always question sources, always check your own thoughts and always ask good questions. Your health depends on it. If this was useful to you please consider
If you know someone who could use this information, please consider
As always, take care of yourself.
I completely agree! Kellogg was a psychopath. I'm not sure the industry is still behind his ideas about sexuality, but they have the public hooked on the narrative that drives their profits.
I haven't been eating until 2pm the last few months, no sugar or wine, but the thing I crave the most is cereals, all of them, from rolled oats to the most worthless boxed cereals like Cinnamon Toast Crunch. 😂 It's ridiculous. I don't indulge in these, but I sure do crave them.