I hadn't thought of Corn Flakes as a serious thing. The Victorian era hit a pinnacle of prudishness. Masturbation was considered a disease - Onanism. It required physical and mental ailment treatments and cures. So I went looking for that reference to Corn Flakes and found a mentalfloss.com article. Here are excerpts:
John Harvey Kellogg was a physician who cataloged 39 different symptoms of a person plagued by masturbation, including general infirmity, defective development, mood swings, fickleness, bashfulness, boldness, bad posture, stiff joints, fondness for spicy foods, acne, palpitations, and epilepsy.
Kellogg’s solution to all this suffering was a healthy diet. He thought that meat and certain flavorful or seasoned foods increased sexual desire, and that plainer food, especially cereals and nuts, could curb it. While working as the superintendent at Michigan’s Battle Creek Sanitarium, he hit upon a few different healthy eating ideas.
Kellogg developed a few different flaked grain breakfast cereals—including corn flakes—as healthy, ready-to-eat, anti-masturbatory morning meals. He partnered with his brother Will, the sanitarium’s bookkeeper, to make and sell them to the public. Will had less interest in dietary purity and more business sense than his brother, and worried that the products wouldn’t sell as they were. He wanted to add sugar to the flakes to make them more palatable, but John wouldn’t hear of it. Will eventually started selling the cereals through his own business, which became the Kellogg Company; the brothers continued to feud for decades after. Masturbators who enjoy cornflakes can probably attest that the sugar was a good idea, since Kellogg's cereal doesn't really have its intended effect.
