How to keep healthy the easy ways! Written by Bunmi Darling…

 We live in a society which is very image conscious; it is not acceptable to be overweight or voluptuous (voluptuous is the new word for fat) or even “big boned”…

As Africans or people of Africa pedigree, we love our food, in fact in Africa, we celebrate food. Food brings us together as a people and of course this is so for everyone around the world. We need food to survive, we need food to grow, we also need food to stay alive. However most of us eat more than we should. For instance, when we cook, we favour meat in our soups instead of Chicken.

No doubt our foods are high in fat contents and that is because when we cook we are mostly generous with our ingredients such as Oil, meat etc… There are better ways to reduce our fat intake in foods. For instance, if you are a lover of Vegetable oil or anything greasy, you could try using Olive Oil instead of Vegetable Oil. The beneficial health effects of olive oil are due to both its high content of mono-unsaturated fatty acids and its high content of antioxidative substances. Studies have shown that olive oil offers protection against heart disease.  

 In fact, turn on to any food/cooking programme on TV and chances are you’ll find the chef du jour dousing his dish with a few bottles of it. It’s not just marketing propaganda either; for over 5000 years olive oil has been a part of Mediterranean and West Asian diets. And its benefits have been scientifically proven, made evident by the fact that Mediterranean’s have amongst the lowest incidence of CVD (cardiovascular disease). This is thanks to its high monounsaturated fat and oleic acid content. Olive oil is very well tolerated by the stomach. In fact, olive oil's protective function has a beneficial effect on ulcers and gastritis. Olive oil activates the secretion of bile and pancreatic hormones much more naturally than prescribed drugs. Consequently, it lowers the incidence of gallstone formation. I do realise Olive Oil is one of the most exorbitant Oils in the market, however, all is not loss, you could try buying Olive Seeds and grow them in your backyard or Garden…

Another healthier option is to use Palm Oil for cooking (3 tablespoon for Stews) and it is not a secret that Palm Oil gives our dishes that extra flavour and also has it benefits - in South Africa an estimated 250 million preschool children are vitamin A deficient. Perhaps more disturbingly, an estimated 250,000 to 500,000 vitamin A-deficient children become blind every year, half of them dying within 12 months of losing their sight. Vitamin A Deficiency or VAD is the leading cause of preventable blindness and is a public health problem in low-income families in Southeast Asia and Africa.

To combat the Vitamin A deficiency, scientists in South Africa have developed a banana-flavoured spread fortified with red palm oil to reduce VAD in rural areas. The new spread substituted the regular peanut butter and jam sandwich for trials in a school feeding programme in Cape Town, and the results were more than encouraging. Just two teaspoons provide up to 76% of a child’s daily recommended allowance, more than 4 times that of their regular sandwich in the current feeding programme.

Nevertheless, there is not much difference between Olive Oil and Palm Oil in terms of their health benefits and antioxidants - let’s look at palm oil. Red palm oil has been a staple in West African diet for over 5000 years, and more recently widely consumed in Asia. Interestingly, in countries where palm oil figures prominently the incidence of CHD is much lower. This has even been proven in various scientific studies. Both olive and palm oils share one component in common: monounsaturated oleic acid. Olive oil contains a greater proportion, around 70%, compared to palm oil, which averages 42 to 53%.

We live in a society which is very image conscious; it is not acceptable to be overweight or voluptuous (voluptuous is the new word for fat) or even “big boned” as some of us like to call it. Here in the UK, if one is “big boned”, you might not get a job as a lot of employers attach fatness to being greedy and lazy… Thus to prevent such, it is better not to over-eat and if you enjoy your food as I do, try exercising…

As an adolescent, Friday was a day I never look forward to at home, this is because my mother would buy a Basket full of Vegetables and instructs myself sister and I to single handily take out the stems from each of the Vegetables, it was not a pleasure picking out dirt’s and stems from Vegetables such as Soko, Tetete, Gbure etc… As it was tedious and it put me off eating Efo Riro (traditional Vegetable Stew)… My mother loved Efo or Efo Riro, as she believed it was healthy. Yes, vegetables are healthy to eat, but not the Nigerian style. When we cook Efo Riro, we cook it for more than twenty minutes and by this time the antioxidants found in Vegetables which are meant to be good for us would have been killed off by over cooking…

Another way to make our Vegetables healthy for us is by juicing… Vegetable juicing is critical to good health because it is an important source of raw food. Each of us needs raw foods every day, and juicing is an excellent way to make certain you receive large quantities of such raw foods. Fruit juicing is certainly good for you, but it has one disadvantage over vegetable juicing: fruit juice tends to increase insulin levels when consumed.

 Vegetable juice does not raise insulin levels like fruit juice. The only exception to this would be carrot or beet juice which functions similarly to fruit juice. Nevertheless, fruit juicing is certainly better for you and your children than drinking soda, which is a very bad idea. Vegetable juice is one of the most perishable foods there is and ideally it would be best to drink all of your juice immediately. However, if you are careful you can store your vegetable juice for up to 24 hours with only a moderate nutritional decline.

You can do this by putting the vegetable juice in a glass jar with an airtight lid and filling it to the very top. There should be as little air in the jar as possible because it is the OXYGEN in air that will "oxidize" and damage the juice. Think of a cut apple turning brown when exposed to air. It's a good idea to use an opaque container to block out all light which would also damage the juice and then store it in the refrigerator until about 30 minutes prior to drinking since ideally the juice should be consumed at room temperature.

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