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What this is, and who is writing it.

I am a physical chemist. I spent a career studying how materials break down — why a thing that was strong yesterday fails today, and what the failure tells you about what was really going on inside.

Then I spent five years discovering that my own body was breaking down, for reasons no one could explain to me.

At sixty-six I was doing everything I had been told to do. I followed the dietary advice every authority endorsed — the official, universal, entirely uncontroversial advice about what a healthy person eats. And I was heavy, exhausted, foggy, and in chronic pain. Everyone agreed, including me, that this was simply what age looked like.

At seventy-one I am not. The weight is gone. The pain is gone. The fog is gone. I run three miles most mornings, I do demanding technical work, and I have more energy than I had at fifty.

The difference was not willpower. It was not a supplement, a program, or a secret. It was that I finally turned the same instrument on my own body that I had spent forty years turning on everything else — and found that the map I had been handed was wrong.

I wrote a book about it. Butter in My Coffee is the investigation: how the dietary advice that governed American eating for seventy years was built, who profited from it, and what it did to the people who trusted it. It is not a diet book. There are no recipes and no meal plans. It is an argument, with the evidence attached.

This newsletter is where the investigation continues.

Because a book has to close, and an investigation does not. New research keeps arriving. Old claims keep deserving a second look. And there is a great deal — mechanisms, history, the occasional public argument — that did not fit between two covers.

Here is what you will find:

The chemistry, explained plainly. What the substances now dominating our diet actually do in the body, and how we know.

The history and the money. How the advice got made, who it enriched, and why it has been so hard to correct.

The reasoning out loud. How to tell a strong claim from a weak one in a field crowded with both — including the claims I make myself.

And one thing more, which is the part I care most about: I audit my own rules in public. I am currently taking apart a stack of supplements I have taken for years, to find out whether I still need any of it. I do not know the answer. When I find out, I will tell you — including if it turns out I was wrong.

What you will not get from me. A protocol. A supplement to buy. A meal plan. Or the claim that what worked in one body will work in yours. I am a single subject, and I have been careful, throughout, to keep the line between what I observed and what I merely believe explains it.

I am not selling you a way to live. I am showing you what happened when one man stopped taking the rules on faith and started checking them.

If you have ever been told your body is failing because of your age, your genes, or your character — and suspected the explanation was a little too convenient — you are in the right place.

Where to start:

If you want the argument, read the book.

If you want to know how a man trained to diagnose complex systems spent forty years failing to diagnose himself, start with The Trait That Saved Me Nearly Killed Me. It is the piece I would hand you first.

Either way — welcome. I am glad you are here.

— V. E. House, PhD