Before Goop There Was Graham

Welcome to the Wellness Trap, a series exploring how wellness culture has always blurred the line between health advice and conspiracy thinking.

It’s no secret that shame has long been used to influence behavior. The Victorians even had a name for it: moral suasion—the idea that social pressure and education could be used to shape public conduct.

And to be fair, shame isn’t always a bad motivator. Consider cigarettes. Public policy combined with social shaming around second hand smoke led to a dramatic decline in smoking. Given the health risks, shame in that context wasn’t exactly misplaced.

But things go sideways when shame mixes with misinformation, hatred, or bigotry. When moral panics and debunked studies creep into policy and leave destruction in their wake. Think: religion and homophobia. Xenophobia and immigration. RFK and vaccines.

Merriam-Webster defines shame as “a painful emotion caused by consciousness of guilt, shortcoming, or impropriety.” It’s a tool famously used by religious movements—and increasingly, by the wellness world. And like religion, wellness isn’t just shaping personal choices anymore; it’s shaping public health.

So how did we get here?

Let’s start at one beginning: Sylvester Graham. The guy who invented Graham crackers to stop people from masturbating (the source of all illness and rot in society according to him). As Ruth Engs explains in her brilliant book Clean Living Movements, wellness crusades have historically influenced American health policy. Sometimes the changes were good—like the promotion of hand washing. Other times, they were devastating.

Graham’s teaching focused deeply on “Temperance.” On the surface, reducing your alcohol intake and moderating your diet to focus on vegetables and whole grains sounds reasonable. Even his suggestion to reduce meat consumption makes sense. But dig past that veneer and his advice is thoroughly unhinged. Meat to Graham would make you horny (hence the Graham crackers) and your lust would lead to cholera. As silly as that sounds, it’s not far off from RFK’s ideas about measles—or ivermectin.

This is just one example of how today’s wellness movements echo the past. Another? The heavy emphasis on individual choice, morality, and salvation through diet. Graham tied wellness to purity, calling his followers “Grahamites.” And while he believed his pseudoscientific teachings were original, what he was truly first at was branding. He was the first person to effectively market his diet at scale. From naming his followers to mass-producing pamphlets and pseudoscience, Graham was the original wellness influencer. Thanks to the rise of steam-powered printing, newspapers, and advice literature... well, you could say he went viral in the 1800s.

An excerpt I find particularly offensive on butter from Graham’s works.

As mentioned earlier, one of the most maddening things about wellness influencers, including Graham, is that some of their advice is good... until you understand why they’re giving it. Graham a Presbyterian minister and temperance reformer believed deeply in the power of food as a path to physical and spiritual purity. Less meat? Clean water? Bathing? Reducing alcohol intake? These are all sound pieces of advice. But they don’t make you a good or bad person.

And this is where he went off the rails. He didn’t want you to eat healthy to help your cholesterol, he wanted you to stop being horny which would “imbalance your system” and make you sick. He also believed, if you followed his diet, you wouldn’t get sick. Take cholera for instance, the pandemic of his day. He believed his dietary system could cure cholera.

“King Cholera” images were everywhere during the second great cholera epidemic. I’m assuming it’s this skeletal guy.

Spoiler: it couldn’t. Cholera is cured by antibiotics. Not vegetables (ironically Graham didn’t link “pure water” to cholera’s cure). And before you scoff at the ludicrousness of blaming a disease caused by the bacterium "vibrio cholerae" on your legume intake, America’s current HHS secretary thinks giving kids liver failure through vitamin A overdosing helps boost immunity. Important to note he also recently plugged vaccines (proven to cause adulthood), to the ire of his congregants.

And while the doctors in the 1800s weren't exactly heroes (yes, some did prescribe wine as a cure to cholera), Graham’s opposition to alcohol wasn’t rooted in science—it was moral. His push for temperance wasn’t because alcohol is a toxin, but because he believed it corrupted the soul. Science wasn’t the point. Salvation was. Sound familiar?

Even “modern” wellness’s claim that Big Pharma and modern medicine only treats the symptoms, not the root cause, is lifted from Graham. From his Lectures on the Science of Human Life:

“Everything is done with a view to cure disease, without any regard to its cause, and the disease is considered as the infliction of some supernatural being. Therefore, in the progress of the healing art thus far, not a step is taken towards investigating the laws of health and the philosophy of disease.”

This is from the 1800s—not a wellness influencer’s blog (or multimillion-dollar wellness website). In one passage, he sets the stage for John Harvey Kellogg AND Make America Healthy Again: medicine doesn’t cure root causes, all illness is preventable, and modern science doesn’t really understand health. But don’t worry—he does. Praise be.

The parallels don’t stop there. Women were critical in spreading Graham’s message (he was a fan of traditional wives) and he placed the responsibility of health outcomes on individuals (not systems or wealth inequality). It’s almost like RFK lifted his entire playbook: use women, blame individuals for their illness, give really bad advice on how to deal with infectious diseases.

Source: NY Mag

It’s a grift. Full stop. For all the glorification of “ancient healing wisdom,” we hear very little about the wild ways people used to die. Take Graham, for instance: he died from an opium enema. So maybe—just maybe—not all ancient wisdom deserves a comeback.

All of this to say: the next time guilt or shame starts creeping in, ask yourself—did I actually do something wrong? Or am I just caught in a wellness trap?