African Food and Your Health

Healthy African foods abound. Apart from adding oils and too much salt to cook, African meals are generally quite nutrient dense, and contain a lot of fibre and antioxidants. This may explain why cancer is not as common in Africans as in the Western world.

African food meals will usually include stews made of tomatoes, red bell peppers and other peppers, and onions as major constituents. Onions are natural antioxidants, while bell peppers and tomatoes are major super foods that contain huge amounts of antioxidants and phyto-chemicals too.

Salt and Oil Content in Cooking

 

You should always strive to make your foods and meals more heart-healthy. Make your food your medicine, not your enemy! Stop eating with our eyes, because you will really only be digesting with your stomachs. The body is looking for vitamins and minerals that it needs for proper functioning and good subsistence.

Take for instance, a single takeaway portion of an African dish of rice and beans with meat stew and pepper sauce. The dish was found on average to contain as much salt as 30 times the amount of salt in a packet of crisps! Now look at the main constituents of this meal. One packet of crisps is bad enough, let alone 30!

That balanced meal would have been turned highly unbalanced with the amount of salt and oil content in it. The beans would have been cooked with a lot of palm oil or palm kernel (which contains up to 80% saturated fat). The rice would have added salt in it. The meat pepper would also have been cooked with more added fats and oils, and salt!

A study carried out in 2011 in Britain reported that black people of African descent living in Britain are three to four times more likely to have high blood pressure than the white population.

Salt is really an acquired taste for humans. Babies do not know what salt is. Therefore, you can adjust your taste buds to lose some of the acquired taste. It probably won’t happen overnight, but taking a step in the positive direction is bound to have serious effects on you health and reducing your risk of contracting many of the lifestyle diseases.

“How do I not cook African foods with oil or with salt?”, you may be asking. Healthy cookware can help you, they enable you to cook without oil and you don’t need any salt either.

Fats and oils, and salt, are some of the biggest culprits of lifestyle diseases. You don’t have to change the foods you like to eat or to stop eating your African foods you were brought up with, you just don’t need the added oils and excessive salt to cook. It makes more sense to change your eating habits before getting one of these diseases.

In summary, African food delicacies are mouth-watering and appetizing, but care must be taken to cook them in a healthy way and retain nutrition in them. Adding too much salt and oil in cooking can turn African foods from healthy to worrisome.