This is the operational claim that connects the mechanism to the regimen: that clearing the colon and shifting its bacterial population prevents the absorption of intestinal poisons, and so prevents the diseases that autointoxication was said to cause. Kellogg set out the program in Colon Hygiene (1916). The endpoint is mechanism-only; the status is refuted insofar as the claim depends on the autointoxication-absorption mechanism that experimental work in the 1910s undermined and that the profession abandoned in the 1920s (Whorton, 2000). The narrower, separable point that dietary fiber affects bowel transit is not what is refuted here; what is refuted is the specific therapeutic claim that bowel clearance prevents systemic disease by removing absorbed toxins. Whorton notes that the same fear drove a commercial market in anticonstipation foods and colonic-irrigation devices, of which the Battle Creek program was a clinical instance.