My African Lifestyle-Family History et al 2017

I am back on this topic of lifestyles. Growing up is a story full of stories. A festive occasion such as Christmas meant the kitchen and dining table being full of goodies. Since we reared goats at our backyard, we were assured of huge chunks of goat meat that displaced each other for space in the soup pot and stew. Those were the days of the Jollof. Not today’s emaciated jollof. Chicken adorned the table in either fried form or in the soup. The pestle wailed as fufu was pounded on a daily by the minute basis. The oil of the stew on white rice was enough to assuage the desertification of the throat. Coca-Cola and Fanta fought for a place on the table before descending into the bottomless pit of your stomach. Let me inhale the imaginary aroma from those days and lick my fingers one last time in memory of those days.

Now, on a daily basis, it was either rice, kenkey, banku, porridge, rice water, “eko3gb3mi” and the occassional fufu. Notice these foods are heavy in carbohydrates. The Fanta and Coca-Cola heavily rich in sugar.
Fast forward to our days in the university or high school. Note we went there as boarders. Notable in our diet was Gari, another Ghanaian staple. Now since you were striving to make ends meet, how often did you eat fruits? How often would you eat a gargantuan portion of leaves aka salad like a goat? You ate to survive. Even the shy girls, smuggled the food into their dorms or cubicles to eat in peace faraway from the questioning looks of hungry passers-by.
Enough. Now consuming all this unhealthy food without enough exercise (what about the walking?) would sure lead to some health problems sooner or later.
More often when someone dies, the cause of death is shrouded in secrecy. There is the fear that if the cause of death is known, somebody might awaken the corpse.
If and I repeat if we do not know the cause of death and you gag us from asking, are you doing us good or harming us? I strongly believe if we know our family history and know what is hereditary and know certain causes of death, we can begin to live a healthy lifestyle early. Then again we are all not the same. Some will be short and others will be tall. Some will smoke out their lungs like an African second hand locomotive and still live long with no problems while others will attempt and come up with a host of problems. Others will drink with the tenacity of a Humvee but live long while you who consume like a Corolla Hybrid will depart early. It is because our genes are different. Our DNA is different. Our metabolism is different. Even we have different names. Therefore we need to know who we are and what is good/bad for us.   We need to know so we do the right thing. We need to know so we can educate our children.  We can educate ourselves and together with our General Physicians find a way to at least live healthy and prolong our lives.
Today, we are losing a lot of young ones
I dare to ask. What is the cause?
I don’t have the answer but i can assure you of one thing : live a healthy lifestyle!
Eat right and Exercise.
I love you.

Seasons Greetings!
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