For all of American history, we have been obsessed with the idea that what you eat is about more than just the purity of the body, it’s about a kind of metaphorical purity as well. For this episode, journalist Zoe Rom, co-host of the podcast Your Diet Sucks takes us through our strange history of clean living movements focusing on quacky 19th century characters and their bizarre and sometimes dangerous ideas about health, as well as the outrageous methods they used on their adherents, men like Sylvester Graham, inventor of Graham crackers, and Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, inventor of Corn Flakes. We discuss the biblical origins of clean living movements, what health food purity has to do with Eugenics, and how these ideas have followed us through the many stages of this nation’s history, manifesting again in the culture and politics of today.

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