It's shocking that this "health club" never became a cult
Orthorexia and flowy movements, served with a side of racism
Obvious trigger warning for the absolute horseshit that is “clean eating.”
Every generation has their weird diet shit. In the 90s, it was SlimFast and replacing actual food with a can of sludge. In the 2000s, it was abandoning carbs. After that, it was high protein and “clean eating” and girls in matching Gym Shark workout ‘fits. None of this is new. Especially not “healthy lifestyles” based on a rigorous diet and completely unscientific ideas about which foods are good and which are bad and which, when combined, will kill you.
Welcome to the Life Building Guide from the Ralston Health Club, a kind of early Jenny Craig-meets-Blue Apron-meets-The Cornflake Man-meets-A lot of racism.
[A note: All of these images come from screenshots of the 1920 edition of the Life Building Guide, courtesy of the National Archive]
The Ralston Health Club, which wasn’t an actual physical club but instead, a group of people who had initially come together in 1876 to give lectures. The club was named for Ralston, New Jersey.
Not long after giving its first local lectures in New Jersey, the Club published a book. The book (which is actually many books, because they re-published it over and over again), was written by Albert Webster Edgerly. Part diet, part lifestyle makeover, part recipe for disordered eating, it gave birth to a kind of cereal-eating, calisthenics-doing influencer culture that, in other times, might have become a full-blown cult.
Initially, the book was a guide on how to live so that you’d never get sick, even in These Difficult Times. Later, they actually founded a food-production company (in conflict with their earlier promises that they weren’t selling anything but heyyyy that’s capitalism baby) with Purina (yup, of dog kibble fame) and sold a very dry sort of shredded wheat that you could eat any time.
The diet made some real big promises.
The stated goal of its followers included seeking “longer life, stronger life, more life” and a desire to break from the “everyday drudgery” that was giving so many of their square neighbors “Americanitis.”
This lifestyle was called “Ralstonism” and it emphasized eating a lot of fiber, exercising, and personal hygiene. Ralstonites were encouraged to get plenty of sunlight and fresh air, to practice exquisite posture, and to move gracefully at all times. They didn’t fully eschew medicine, but they were recommended to “seek aid from the Natural Laws of Life” when they had a medical issue. Patent medicines were discouraged, as were “adulterated” foods.
Ralstonites followed a super-strict diet that was designed based on the genetic makeup of the participant which was assumed to be Caucasian.
Now, if at this point you’re thinking “surely, eugenics must be about to creep into this,” then yes, you’re correct. Like so many relatively unremarkable upper/middle class white men, Edgerly believed in racial purity and even race-based euthanasia and castration.
This comes from a Companion Book of 1895; by the time they published the 1920 version, the eugenics and racism have been dropped.
What a neat, cool guy. And, in case you were wondering, this is what this Prime Specimen looked like:
Ah yes. The ultimate example of health and center-parted, greasy hair.
Anyway, in addition to the exquisite racism of that guy, the rules of the club were pretty staunch and, unsurprisingly, deeply rooted in Puritanism and Christianity in general. There was a lot of talk about how "each Life-cell has a purpose” that’s ordained by “the Creator.” Cells each needed to be fed for their specific purpose, which meant Ralstonites had to eat the right foods to make “good blood” to feed bones, skin, organs, etc.
The “guide” was full of the expected medical quackery, like this statement about how chewing without eating would “inflame” the stomach:
If you chew gum or tobacco or other thing, causing a flow of saliva in the mouth, at the same time you are causing, in the same act, a flood of gastric juice to the stomach. If the latter is empty, then there is nothing digestible but its own walls, and these are acted upon by the powerful solvent fluids in the gastric juice. The walls become inflamed and very red. Their irritation is not healed for some time after. Food will not be well digested by an inflamed stomach.
Or this little nugget about baked potatoes.
DO YOU KNOW that the baked potato, of course without the skin being eaten, is the FIRST AND ONLY TRUE FOOD on which you can safely wean a baby when the weaning time comes? Nothing takes its place except toasted stale bread and milk whichshould be used occasionally with the baked potato.
To mothers the knowledge of this one fact alone is worth almost the health of the child.
Or this one about how when you mix foods in the gut, it can kill you.
Under the SEVENTH LAW, the eating of both rice and chicken at the same meal will result in the formation of poison in the stomach.
The club also boasted that it had improved millions of lives in its 40+ year history and had even kept people from taking their own lives.
Which like…is really something.
Importantly, this Club did not encourage fasting, nor did it require “members” (i.e. people who bought the books) to go to any specific place or buy any other stuff (until, of course, they started selling tasteless wheat cubes).
Those two elements, honestly, are what kept this a kind of Old Timey Problematic TikTok Influencer Digest (see: the late Jessie Lee), rather than becoming a legitimate cult. Because some of this stuff is C U L T Y:
It’s actually extremely shocking that Edgerly and the Ralstonites never did buy land and create a whole-ass commune, since a lot of their warnings were about how farmland was Very Holy while cities were Extremely Vile and Bad and Sinful. I suspect it’s because they didn’t actually bring in that much money.
Edgerly was truly a Renaissance Man, though, in that he also got into writing books about such important tools as magnetism. Not like magnets because, of course, we still don’t know how those work, but magnetism as in how to “exude charisma as [you] attract and dazzle others.”
Again, the fact that this man never lead an actual cult is honestly shocking and maybe proof of some kind of higher power. And a good reminder that whatever bogus health nonsense someone is selling you on TikTok right now is just another chapter in a long book called Humans Lying To Each Other For Money And Power: Health Edition.
xoxo HBO