How diet can change your life

My case is a personal testimony of how diet can change your life. Since the age of 3yrs old until very recently, the only thing that has taken me to the hospital is injuries since I was a hyper active boy. Between the Ages of say 10 and 27 yrs, I practically never visited any hospital for any medical condition. I also rarely caught a cold or any other form of disease. My friends also get amazed at my ability to withstand feeling cold when they are fully loaded with a number of sweaters when I chose to remain in a T-shirt. There was a day that as young adults, we went for an outing to Ngong Hills, some real famous hill range south of Nairobi. On this particular day it decided to rain for over 5 hours as we climbed the hill and descended later. We got so cold that we had to play soccer as a way of keeping warm. The next day, I was the only one who was able to move around as the rest spent their whole day in bed to keep warm and avoid getting sick. What do I attribute this to? I believe strongly to the food I was brought up eating.

My Mum is a strong believer in cooking traditional meals where the only artificial ingredient she would add to the food is salt. She believed in boiling everything first then later frying the food by adding a little oil and tomatoes and onions to taste. Our stable diet at home was

1. A mixer of maize and beans pounded together with pumpkin leaves, bananas and potatoes to form a green variant of a meal we call ‘mataha’ which could also be yellow in color when you remove the pumpkin leaves to become ‘matoke’ or be brown in color when you add a special type of bean we call ‘njugu’ which was my favorite.
2. When my mum was real tired, she would prepare a meal of shifted flour mixed with water and cooked to form a type of hard dough that looks similar to a cake called ‘ugali’. We would then eat it with an abundance of milk from the cows that we had. Our favorite part of the ‘ugali’ was the crust that remained on the pan since my mum was not the best cook of the dish. We would heat it until crisp then mix it with milk. Up to date, this mixer is sweeter than any breakfast cereal I have tasted!
3. Meat was not my mum’s delicacy, so occasionally she would yield to our insistence and prepare a meal of rice with meat stew or chicken stew which we would heartily enjoy.
4. Finally as the last part of her menu was the Saturday night chips which was the most unique experience of our home. That was a story in itself so interesting that there is a separate story for it.
5. A mixer of maize and beans commonly called ‘githeri’ with additional carrots, potatoes and cabbages to add color to the meal.

The above formed the basic diet that I and my siblings ate for a period of over 27 yrs on a daily basis. In those days, we used to claim to have the most boring diet compared to our neighbors who would occasionally indulge in fried steak, sausages, chicken, pork and other meat based meals. More over you would agree with me on the dullness of our diet when you consider that for breakfast we had a bowl of porridge as an alternative to tea and bread which my mum greatly discouraged. Years later, am kind of grateful for my mum’s unattractive meal plan because today more than ever, I have become an occasional visitor to the hospital. I guess because my diet has changed to a more meat based diet. From my mums point of view, we today are spoilt and don’t know what good food is. I wish I had collected some of the recipes so that I could prepare some of the meals and also device shorter method of preparing those meals to suit my fast paced urban life. I think this would be helpful in preventing me from constantly going to the hospital since her diet worked for a whole 28yrs of my life. I think it draws me to the following conclusions

1. Raw is sweett
2. The more oil the higher the risk
3. The more meat the more the risk
4. More tasty the food the more unlikely its healthy

I have no medical way to prove if my verdict since am not a nutritionist but I just 27yrs of my life as an example. Since I have changed my diet, I think I have grown more susceptible to disease. In fact just about a month ago, I got infected by this cold that stuck around for over three weeks; some kind of a record of some sorts since colds have only prevail over me for a maximum of three days. At least I learnt one basic lesson from home to help me cure my ailments “as long as a goat eats it, you can eat it” as my mum would say as I would start to experiment with a lot of different herbs in order to find a cure for my ailments. I only take medicine or go to the hospital as a last result. So what am I basically saying? We are what we eat; therefore a change of diet is a change in your life - at least health wise.