HEALTHY REASONING: Are You Using Your Teeth To Dig Your Grave?

By Allan Jones
Pride Health Columnist

As a music promoter, I have the opportunity to interact with many artistes and musicians. One artiste, who impacted me greatly and who became a close friend, was the late, great, lead singer for the reggae group Culture, Joseph Hill.

This Rastafarian reggae legend would often times tell me how many people were using their teeth to dig their graves.

What he was saying, and which holds true today, is the fact that the food we eat is one of the greatest contributors to ill health, sickness – and even death.

Green bananas (or figs as some eastern Caribbean countries call them) are still customarily being cooked in the skin.

Why? The sad part of this whole situation is that many Caribbean and African restaurants do not want to hire someone to peel the bananas, or the myth that the skin adds iron to the meal. This iron argument is not true.

What is true is that bananas are intensively grown on farms, and to keep the level of pests down, the bananas are aggressively sprayed with pesticides which can be still be, in its active form, on the surface of the bananas when we pick them up at the store.

It is possible that many of the unexplained cancers and other illnesses many of us are suffering, are the result of chemicals being ingested into our body through the banana cooked in the skin.

And not just the banana that will soak up the chemicals, but all the food or provision that is cooked in that pot, like the dumpling, yam, coco, eddoes etc.

As consumers we need to tell the restaurants that continue to serve bananas cooked in the skin that you will stop supporting them until they start cooking peeled bananas.

I have seen many individuals sit down to eat, and without even tasting the food in front of them, they reach for the salt shaker and cover their meal with salt. You ask why, and they will tell you the food tastes better.

Many of them recognize the consequences of a high salt (sodium) diet, like high blood pressure, stroke, kidney disease, heart disease, and stomach cancer, but they continue anyway.

Salt or sodium is a vital nutrient and is necessary for our body to function, but our average daily consumption exceeds the maximum recommendation.

I have been to restaurants, including a lot of non-African and Caribbean mainstream chains, where as you taste the food it “zings you” because there is so much salt.

What puzzles me is why do we tolerate it?

We do, and we get high blood pressure, which leads to diabetes, which leads to kidney damage, eventually to kidney failure, then dialysis, then death….it is so sad…

Take the advice of Bob Marley, and “get up stand up for your rights” to safe food. Get to like your food “fresh”. In time you will get used to it. Get used to it because you are prolonging your life.

We like apples that are bright and shiny. This sheen is not natural, but brought on by the wax coating placed there by the marketers to make the fruit look attractive in the store, and entice you to buy it.

So we buy it, sometimes wash it, even though washing cannot remove the wax. We eat it unpeeled and take in all the wax on the peel.

Based on the information available, there is still uncertainty over whether the wax is harmful or safe. I suggest that if there is some doubt, opt on the side of caution and peel your apples before you eat it.

While we exercise caution when choosing what we eat, we need to recognize that different ethnicities have different susceptibilities and propensities for certain diseases.

It is obvious then, that the one size fits all approach, which we now have, cannot work, we desperately need a diversity approach to health care in this diverse and multicultural community of Canada.

The individuals running for political office need to put health care on their agenda, particularly the unique approach that’s needed for different ethnic groups.

But while we wait for the politicians to place health care on the agenda, let us stop using our teeth to dig our graves.

Allan Jones is a Health Promoter and Broadcaster. He can be reached at ajones@jjmedical.ca.