28 Facts About Sylvester Graham

Sylvester Graham was an American Presbyterian minister and dietary reformer known for his emphasis on vegetarianism, the temperance movement, and eating whole-grain bread.

Sylvester Graham's preaching inspired the graham flour, graham bread, and graham cracker products.

Sylvester Graham was born in 1794 in Suffield, Connecticut, to a family with 17 children.

Sylvester Graham's father was 72 years old when Graham was born and his mother was mentally ill.

Sylvester Graham's father died when Graham was two, and he spent his childhood moving from one relative's home to another.

One of his relatives ran a tavern where Sylvester Graham was put to work.

Sylvester Graham was often sick, and missed a great deal of schooling.

Sylvester Graham worked as a farmhand, cleaner, and teacher before deciding on the ministry as an antidote for his poor health.

Sylvester Graham entered Amherst Academy in his late 20s to become a minister, as his father and grandfather had been.

Sylvester Graham withdrew from school a year later, because his histrionic manner was scorned by his fellow students.

Sylvester Graham studied theology privately, and in 1828 began working as an itinerant preacher at the Bound Brook Presbyterian Church in Bound Brook, New Jersey.

In 1830, Sylvester Graham accepted a position at the Philadelphia Temperance Society.

Sylvester Graham left six months later to focus on preaching health.

Sylvester Graham taught himself about physiology and apparently arrived at his own conclusion that meat was just as much an expression of and spur to gluttony as alcohol was, that they corrupted both the body and soul of individuals and harmed families and society.

Sylvester Graham's belief was influenced by the book Treatise on Physiology by Francois-Joseph-Victor Broussais, published in Philadelphia in 1826, that claimed what people ate had enormous influence on their health.

Sylvester Graham's interest was captured by the books written by the German chemist Friedrich Accum, called Treatise on Adulteration of Foods and Culinary Poisons, in which he denounced the use of chemical additives in food and especially in bread, and Treatise on the Art of Making Good and Wholesome Bread.

Sylvester Graham was strongly influenced by the Bible and Christian theology in his own idiosyncratic way.

Sylvester Graham believed that people should eat only plants, like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and believed that plague and illness were caused by living in ways that ignored natural law.

Sylvester Graham believed that adhering to such diet would prevent people from having impure thoughts and in turn would stop masturbation, thought by Sylvester Graham to be a catalyst for blindness and early death.

Sylvester Graham believed youthful masturbation was dangerous to children's health because of the immaturity of their reproductive organs.

Sylvester Graham published his first book in 1837, Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making, which included a history of bread and described how to make Graham bread.

Sylvester Graham neither invented nor endorsed any specific product, nor did he receive any money from their sale.

Sylvester Graham influenced other Americans, including Horace Greeley and John Harvey Kellogg, founder of the Battle Creek Sanitarium.

In 1850, Alcott, William Metcalfe, Russell Trall, and Sylvester Graham founded the American Vegetarian Society in New York City, modeled on a similar organization established in Great Britain in 1847.

Sylvester Graham died of complications after receiving opium enemas, as directed by his doctor, at the age of 57 at home in Northampton, Massachusetts.

Historian Stephen Nissenbaum has written that Sylvester Graham died "after violating his own strictures by taking liquor and meat in a last desperate attempt to recover his health".

Russell Trall, who had visited Sylvester Graham, noted that he had strayed from a strict vegetarian diet and was prescribed meat by his doctor to increase his blood circulation.

Trall wrote that before his death Sylvester Graham regretted this decision and "fully and verily believed in the theory of vegetable diet as explained in his works".