It is a common for people to ask themselves at Bars “What is your poison?” This is when a drink is about to be offered and your poison is expected to be alcoholic. The point of interest in this jocular question is that people acknowledge that we habitually ingest poisons. Food toxins are usually ingested in minute quantities; unbeknownst to the ingestor i.e we eat small quantities which we are not aware of and our body is usually able to detoxify / cope with it.
Unfortunately, our modern day diet has changed all that. We now eat large portions of unwholesome substances everyday! We live in a world where the amount of toxins we take in daily far exceed anything this planet has ever seen before. Our body is designed to process, metabolize and clear toxins naturally is unable to cope. We therefore have an explosion of diet related diseases.
It is said that a toxin can be a chemical which occurs naturally or in synthetic form. The three white toxins that we are considering today are a bit of all. White Sugar is a chemical, white salt occurs naturally and white flour is synthesized from wheat. If you eat the foods prepared with these toxins occasionally or sparingly, then your body will not be overwhelmed with handling them, but if you eat them habitually in large portions; they will overwhelm your system. Some people write about seven, some five white toxins. I am writing about three because of their ubiquitous nature in our environment.
White Salt: It is amazing the role salt played in the enslaving of parts of Africa. It ironic that this substance that was exchanged for whole human beings is totally unnecessary in our diet! If you do not eat another pinch of salt in your life; your body would not miss it. White salt is made up of sodium and chlorine, a compound called sodium chloride. Sodium is implicated in contributing to blood pressure thereby unhealthy for people with high blood pressure. The attraction of salt to humans is the taste. It is important to note that we humans are victims of over sabi! I say this because all other animals on this our planet Earth do not add salt to their food, only humans do. If you feed monkeys or chimpanzees human food as a regular diet; they develop hypertension! Now that we have acquired the taste for salt what do we do? I am as guilty as you are. It is difficult to eat saltless food. Fortunately, a lot of traditional meals have no-salt-added foods as a major component. I will explain.
Pounded yam, Yam or Plantain flour, Gari, etc are all no-salt-added foods. It is the stew or soup that contains salt. The vegetables soups are high in potassium which naturally balances the sodium in salt. You can compare this to white rice, Potatotes (especially as chips or fries), etc, which are salt-added foods. You can make a deliberate effort to reduce your salt intake by not adding salt to foods like white rice, boiled yam,etc. You can imagine the amount of salt you would have ingested over a year of eating salt-added rice. You can also titrate the amount of salt you put in your food by making sure that you do not over salt your food. Foods are habitually over salted and as long as it does not go to the extreme, most people do not notice.
White Sugar: If white salt is difficult to eliminate from the diet, white sugar is not. We are fortunated to have a lot of alternatives to white sugar. Molasses is extracted from sugarcane. It is rich in minerals and nutrients which have been removed from refined sugar like iron and calcium. It also has a low glycaemic index (regular readers of this column know what the G.I index is all about). Pure natural honey is another good alternative (will do a full article on honey soon). Pure natural fruit juices like pineapple juice are also very good for sweetening drinks, herbal potions, etc. Sugar feeds bacteria in the body.
White sugar is sucrose and it stimulates your pancreas to produce plenty of insulin to handle its metabolism. The insulin inturn encourages the depositing of fat in the body. A high sugar diet and the effect of the sugar in the blood stream precipitates insulin resistance (also known as Syndrome X) which preceeds diabetes. Drinks are a deadly sugar trap. We are swamped with a wide variety of over-sweetened drinks. Water is still the best liquid to drink!
White Flour: To produce white flour; bran is removed from wheat, it’s six outer layer is removed (thereby making it lose 97% of its fibre), as well as the embryo (which contains 76% of its nutrients) and it is bleached with toxic chemicals.
Enriched flour is worse! The synthetic vitamins used are coal tar derivatives. White flour products stimulate a rapid blood sugar response (i.e. they have a high glycaemic index). We all know the implications of this with the diabetes explosion that we are now experiencing. One of the chemicals used in bleaching the flour alloxan ia also toxic to the pancreas, thereby further increasing the susceptibility to diabetes from white flour products. White flour is low in fibre and bad for the colon. The implicated conditions include irritable bowel syndrome, ulcerative colitis and a predisposition to colon cancer in susceptible people. Traditional breakfasts are by far healthier e.g. corn meal, beans, yam, etc. If you are one of the white flour food addicts (pastries, bread, etc), you can start to reduce by trying to eat them twice weekly only and then occasionally. Help your body to cope!
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