Today, fad diets are all the rage with people making all sorts of wacky claims in their quest for a magic elixir for better health. But back in the early nineteenth century people didn't give such things much thought; food was just food, at least until Sylvester hit the scene.
Sylvester was a Presbyterian minister who had taken the cloth because he was basically good at nothing else. Like all ministers, Sylvester needed some kind of evil to preach against in order to get his congregation all riled up into a holy frenzy. Unlike other ministers, Sylvester chose white bread as his devil. At the time, white bread was a fairly new concept having only been recently invented. Thought of as being better than traditional whole wheat bread, it was rapidly gaining dominance as the bread preferred by the genteel to shove into their mouth holes. Sylvester wholeheartedly did not agree. He believed that the good old whole wheat bread was healthier, which is scientifically correct, though not to the point that makes what happened next make any damn sense at all. You see, claiming that white bread was just somewhat unhealthier than whole wheat bread doesn’t really make for all that exciting of a sermon, so Sylvester decided to spice it up a little.
According to Sylvester’s rants from the pulpit, not only was white bread unhealthy, it was so unhealthy that it caused people to have excessive sexual desires, which every old timey person knew was definitely not good for you. Even worse, all that bread inspired lust resulted in masturbation, which was the root cause of blindness, insanity, and early death. Well, you can bet your ass this got those old timey people's attention, and so the first fad diet was born. Sylvester, amazed by the power of his own sermon, of course did not take advantage of his new found fame and following. Just kidding, he kicked the crazy up to 10.
Now if you're a minister who has started the first widely successful fad diet, what would you do? If you didn't answer turn it into a cult, you just aren't thinking big enough. Seeing his success with white bread, Sylvester doubled down in every way possible. Not only was white bread unhealthy, but so was meat, spices of any kind, and alcohol. These items had to cleared from the diet to avoid the evils of masturbation, which later grew to the evils of sex all together, which then became the evils of any excitement whatsoever. People ate it up like it was wholesome white bread, and the followers of Sylvester’s diet shifted from annoying jerks to crazed religious zealots who creatively called themselves Grahamites.
Now the average Grahamite was a fairly bland person, what with all the rules limiting excitement of any kind. The most exciting part of their day was the cult ordered daily brushing of their teeth. The problem was it was hard to find food that was bland enough to keep them from getting over stimulated. To help, Sylvester invented the blandest food possible, the Graham cracker. That's right, this staple of your childhood was invented by a man for his anti-masturbation health cult. Of course, the whole thing came crashing down when, despite eating healthy and avoiding sex of any kind, Sylvester died at the not quite venerable age of 57. Just kidding, the cult lasted for another 30 years before finally fading into obscurity.
Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sylvester_Graham_(1794-1851).jpg