Nutrition and health

Sama Hoole

@SamaHoole

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1h

Julius Caesar's accounts of invading Britain, 55 BC, include observations about the Celtic tribes. One detail stands out: they ate enormous amounts of butter. The Romans found this disgusting. Civilised people used olive oil. Butter was barbarian food. The mark of primitive Northern tribes who didn't understand proper cuisine. Celtic Britons didn't care. They churned butter, ate butter, cooked with butter, and exported butter to other tribes. Butter was wealth. Butter was medicine. Butter was what kept you alive through British winters. The Romans, eating their "civilised" olive oil and grain-based diet, noted that the Celts were significantly larger and stronger than Mediterranean peoples. Taller. Broader. More physically capable. Fast forward to medieval Ireland. Bog butter. The Irish buried firkins of butter in peat bogs for preservation. Some of it aged for years before consumption. Archaeologists find 2,000-year-old butter in Irish bogs today. Why butter? Because it was calorically dense, nutritionally complete, shelf-stable, and didn't require cooking fuel in regions where wood was scarce. Fast forward to Victorian England. The stigma against butter intensifies. Not because of health concerns: those came later. Because butter was associated with rural poverty and "backwards" farming communities. Upper classes used it minimally. Progressive doctors recommended against it. Butter eating was vulgar. Then margarine arrives in the 1870s. Invented by French chemist Hippolyte Mège-Mouriès as cheap butter substitute for the French military. Made from beef tallow and milk. Margarine was modern. Scientific. Progressive. Better than primitive butter. By 1900, margarine manufacturers were adding yellow dye (originally it was white) and marketing it as healthier and more hygienic than butter. The campaign worked. Butter consumption declined among educated classes. 1950s: The anti-fat crusade begins. Butter becomes "artery-clogging saturated fat." Margarine becomes "heart-healthy spread." The Celts, eating butter by the pound, were barbarians. The Irish, burying butter in bogs, were primitive. Your great-grandmother, cooking with butter, was killing herself. Modern you, eating seed oil margarine, are being healthy. Except the Celts were healthier than the Romans. The Irish had better bone density than their colonisers. Your great-grandmother lived to 90 without heart disease. And you're on statins at 45. The stigma against butter wasn't new. It's been around for 2,000 years. It just kept changing its justification. First it was cultural superiority. Then it was class distinction. Then it was scientific progress. Now it's health guidelines. The pattern is consistent: Butter eaters are doing something wrong. Regardless of outcomes.  

The Celts knew better 2,000 years ago. Shame we forgot. 

LDS Model for men

 

Clint Teeples

@TeeplesCY

The Latter-day Saint Model Offers a Clue to America’s Quiet Crisis Among Men

A growing number of American men are struggling quietly.

They are working, but without much sense of meaning. Connected digitally, but socially isolated. Present in their families, yet uncertain about what is expected of them. When asked whether their lives feel purposeful or worthwhile, a sizable minority hesitate.

That picture is no longer based on impression or intuition. It is increasingly reflected in the data.

In a nationwide survey conducted by the Sutherland Institute, between one-fifth and one-third of men reported serious difficulty with mental health, fulfillment, or their sense of purpose. Many of these men are easy to miss. They are employed and have families, yet about 30 percent report having no one they can talk to. What separates them is not ideology or income, but the presence of durable anchors in their lives. Men with strong ties to family, faith, and community are far more likely to describe their lives as meaningful. Those without them are far more likely to drift.

For years, the national conversation about boys has focused on attitudes and identities while paying less attention to institutions. Boys are encouraged to be resilient, expressive, and self-directed, even as many of the structures that once helped cultivate responsibility, belonging, and purpose have weakened or disappeared.

Richard Reeves, a social scientist and policy analyst, has documented this pattern in detail. In Of Boys and Men, Reeves shows that boys are falling behind in education, men are disengaging from work, and male despair is rising.

Reeves points repeatedly to the same underlying dynamic. Boys today are far less likely to grow up with their fathers. Elementary schools are overwhelmingly staffed by women. Religious institutions, once a central source of male mentorship and moral formation, play a smaller role in everyday life. Boys are not lacking encouragement or information. They are lacking sustained contact with adult men and with institutions that reliably connect men to responsibility.

This is not a story of personal failure. It is a story of institutional erosion.

James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits, captures the dynamic succinctly. People do not rise to the level of their intentions. They fall to the level of their systems. When systems function well, ordinary people tend to do reasonably well. When systems weaken, even capable people struggle.

One place where those systems remain unusually intact is within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

The Church’s teachings and practices place strong emphasis on family life, service, and shared responsibility. Family is treated as a central setting for growth rather than a private lifestyle choice. Fatherhood is understood as a meaningful role tied to care, presence, and obligation. Men are invited to serve locally, mentor youth, and contribute consistently to their congregations. These expectations are reinforced not through constant instruction, but through participation in ordinary weekly life.

From childhood through adolescence, Latter-day Saint boys regularly interact with adult men in ongoing, relational ways. They are taught by male youth leaders. They meet with a local bishop who knows their family. They are given responsibilities appropriate to their age and expected to follow through. Service is common. Involvement is expected, but also supported.

The Church’s proclamation on the family states plainly that children benefit from being raised by both a mother and a father, and that fathers have distinct responsibilities within family life. Family, in this view, is the primary setting for moral formation and preparation for adulthood.

That vision is reinforced in the Church’s youth teachings as well. Young men regularly recite a simple statement of purpose that emphasizes faith in Jesus Christ, responsibility to family, service to others, moral discipline, and preparation for future roles as husbands, fathers, and citizens. These are not abstract ideals. They are repeated, practiced, and shared in community.

Taken together, these teachings form a coherent moral framework grounded in commitment to Christ and in covenants with God. Participation requires time, effort, and fidelity. It asks something of those who belong. But it also offers clarity about who boys are becoming and why they matter.

This helps explain why Utah stands out in national data on male wellbeing.

Utah is not distinctive because of geography or economic structure. It stands out because a large share of its population participates in the same religious system, with shared expectations around family life, service, and community involvement.

In the Sutherland Institute study, men in Utah consistently reported stronger outcomes than men nationwide across measures of purpose, belonging, and social support. They were less likely to say they had no one to talk to, less likely to view seeking help as a sign of weakness, and more likely to describe their lives as worthwhile.

Commenting on these findings, Reeves observed that the share of men who say they understand their purpose in life is “a full ten percentage points higher in Utah than the U.S. as a whole,” a difference he attributed almost certainly to the state’s unusually high rates of religiosity and marriage.

Correlation does not settle every question. But the pattern aligns with what this system would predict. Where men are embedded in stable families, surrounded by other men, and oriented toward service and covenantal responsibility, they are more likely to flourish.

One reason the struggles of boys have proven so difficult to address is that modern society is uneasy with the way boys are raised, especially when that upbringing is rooted in commitment to Christ and in binding covenants with God. Strong systems ask for loyalty. They invite sacrifice. They limit choice in the short term to produce stability and meaning in the long term. In a culture that prizes autonomy above all else, that kind of commitment can feel uncomfortable.

So instead of rebuilding institutions, we have quietly outsourced the moral formation of boys to the internet. Algorithms now teach boys what to value, who to admire, and how to measure themselves, offering stimulation without accountability and belonging without responsibility.

The Latter-day Saint system succeeds not because it is novel, but because it does what many institutions no longer attempt: it tells boys, clearly and consistently, that they are needed, accountable, and responsible for others.

The Latter-day Saint model is not the only possible answer, but it is a visible one. Its core elements, intergenerational mentorship, shared moral language, and clear expectations, can be replicated by other communities, religious or otherwise, if they have the stomach for the structure those commitments require.

The data suggests that choosing not to build systems is itself a choice, and it shapes outcomes.