We must implement mandatory education about proper nutrition and health

[Idilinaa]

This kind of post is steeped in phrenology, looksmaxxing culture, and outdated racial pseudoscience. It’s exactly the kind of brain rot I would strongly advise Somalis to steer clear of. There’s nothing empowering about reducing people to aesthetic ideals rooted in unscientific nonsense.


On the topic of health and nutrition i shared this with @Shimbiris recently:

Improving the physical well-being of Somalis is essential to building a more functional, resilient society.

There are already studies highlighting major issues , for example, many Somali women suffer from vitamin D deficiencies due to limited sun exposure from clothing. That’s just one angle. We need to promote healthy, sustainable habits that prioritize long-term mobility, strength, and mental clarity , not just aesthetics.

But I also don’t want us to import the toxic fitness/body-image culture that’s taken root in the West extreme diets, harmful drugs, and disorders like anorexia, bulimia, and bigorexia. A lot of today’s so-called “health” spaces are actually pipelines to body dysmorphia, self-harm, and even nihilism.

We should be proactive in regulating harmful content online , especially lookism-based content and toxic communities that push young people into dangerous mental states.

For example, this study spells it out clearly:

When Help Is Harm: Health, Lookism and Self-Improvement in the Manosphere - PubMed

How do online communities impact men's health? How does hegemonic masculinity harm men's health? In this paper, we analyse an online looksmaxxing community that receives 6 million unique visitors per month and is aimed at men seeking to improve their appearance. We qualitatively analysed 8072...

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Third, we argue that the community subjects users to masculine demoralisation, wherein they are seen as failed men and encouraged to self-harm. Drawing on masculinities theory, we argue that looksmaxxing and similar self-improvement communities harm the health of the men who participate in them.

If we think long-term and take a holistic, community-first approach , not just in health, but in environment, education, culture, historical research, economics, and governance ,we can steer Somali society in a direction that’s self-sustaining, balanced, and future-ready. We can go in a different direction to the global trend.

We’re in a unique position , Somalia is decentralized and ethnically cohesive enough that grassroots ideas can scale faster than they would elsewhere.