As we say in the back streets of anything which endangers human health, the ban of styrofoam takeaway food boxes by Lagos State Government is…”GOOD RIDDANCE TO BAD RUBBISH”
Generally speaking, all plastics are potential killers, while the ones which come in contact with food are even more dangerous to health. Their origin is crude petroleum. In whichever form, they bear deep within them petroleum residues. These residues are released whenever plastics are heated. Petroleum chemicals in heated plastics migrate into foods, juices and medicines, even food supplements stored in them. These chemicals enter the human body from the edibles and may cause such problems as brain and vision damage, dental and gum problem, throat, stomach and intestine questions, reproductive system issues and many types of cancer.
You may now understand why some producers of food supplements package their products in glass bottles and not in plastic containers. Three classical examples I can easily recall now are Tahitian Noni, UDO’s health products such as UDO’s oil and Maria swedish Bitters. You may now, also, understand why these products and similar ones are more expensive. Their glass ware packaging protects your health better than competing products package in plastics. Now, “consider ogogoro” sold in plastic bottle. This is a spirit which has the capacity to extract anything into itself and permanently hold it. You can imagine what you gobble when you drink a tort of ogogoro!
Nena Uche, now of blessed memory, was a young reporter in the 1980s when, as her Editor at The Guardian newspaper, I asked her to investigate correlation between a growing market of plastic products in Nigeria and a seeming epidemic of cancer, notably breast cancer. Although her efforts did not yield a copy for publication, I did not lose interest in the subject. I remembered her during World Plastic Day some years ago as I did again last week when I heard the news that more than 500,000 Africans died of cancer last year. More harrowing was the news as well that more children today are coming down with cancer than did the children of my generation. Even more heart breaking was the news that Nigeria’s hospital system is incompetent in treating cancer. A medical doctor named Amaka whose first name I lost, said in a radio programme that Nigeria needed a minimum of 200 radiotherapy machines but had only 14, one of them for the entire North Eastern region. She said, also, that phototherapy could cause anything from N800,000 to N1.4 millio. This is not to mention chemotherapy and surgery where radiotherapy fails or is inadequate.
I still wonder about the role every day use of plastics may be playing in the health down-turn of this cancer-stricken generation. Can the cause be plastics? To this question, I will also like to wonder if plastics are behind the rapid growth of uterine fibroid cases in Nigeria. For almost every other woman is challenged by this reproductive system malaise. If you examine the natural medicines many women take to mitigate uterine fibroid so that they avoid surgery, you may discover that many of them, powder or liquid, are packaged in plastic! I also wonder if cervical cancer against which vaccination is now encouraged is not caused by the use of condoms, soft plastic which should easily yield their toxic residues into secret places of women. For the heat in this places can easily impact a soft plastic. It is not lost on me that Human Papilo Virus (HPV) which is the target of the vaccination may be a culprit in cervical cancer because, nowadays, the cervix has become the receptacle for not only varied sperm deposit but also for frequent deposit by the same spouse or man. This idea is worth investigating by the health authorities. It stems from the the notion that the woman’s secret place is naturally acidic for self protection against germs and infections while sperm is alkaline. The thinking goes that it doesn’t matter if a woman is chaste and sticks to only one partner. Her body is equipped with antibody against “foreigners”, including sperm cells. The semen protect the sperm cells with anti-bodies- antibodies. Being alkaline, the semen neutralises virginal activities. If it does so on an almost a daily basis, the virgina and the cervix may lose their natural acid-base immunity, incline towards alkalinity and favour HPV colonisation and cancer.
My siblings and I have not ceased to see our maternal grandmother as an unusual woman. She yielded way in 1980 at 71 to cancer of the right breast. I was 30. A few years before then, she fished out of her wardrobe a basket in which she had kept a number of baby things. She wished to show my children my baby clothes, talcum powder, empty can of Oster Milk, the reigning infant formula of the 1950s and, of course, my feeding bottle. It was the first time I saw a glass feeding bottle with teat at both ends. This story is to show that today’s babies are exposed too early to plastic poisoning. Baby food is served hot in plastic feeding bottles and kept in plastic containers, which are in turn kept in plastic warmers to keep it hot for as long as possible. Petroleum residues leak into these foods and begin the battle of the infant body with neurological and other health challenges. A study group of medical researchers and doctors in the United States has been campaigning for years for the abolition of plastics in any form in baby food formulas and their feeding paraphernalia. It is a battle that may be difficult to win as other plastics battles. Do babies not eat the teeth of their feeding bottles? Do mothers still not push rubber suckers into the mouths of crying babies? My children were served their meals in plastic plates, ceramic plates and bowls. They took plastic spoons for lunch and took water along in plastic bottles. Hands up all parents who are not trapped with their children in this plastic tradition?
For years, I launched a one-man campaign against the exposure of “Pure water” bags to the sun at Ilupeju Model Market in Lagos where I had an office. Many people still do not know that exposure to heat causes petroleum residues in the sachets of this brand of water to leak into the liquid content. The principal among these leeches is xenoestrogens. Xeno came from the Greek word for “foreign.” Thus, xenoestrogen is foreign estrogen. These are artificial estrongens . Estrogen, a hormone, makes the woman a woman. Testosterone, the male hormone, makes the man a man. The men have some estrogen in their bodies. However, too much estrogen than they require to be men may make them to begin to develop female characteristics. These may include subnormal sperm cells in many ramifications, including low sperm count, de-energised sperm, agglutinating sperm, short-lived sperm, physically damaged sperm and even azospermia (absence of sperm). Too much estrogen in relation to progesterone, another female hormone which must be a special ratio with estrogen, may cause in women, ovulation problems, uterine fibroids, disruption of the menstrual calendar, period pains, ovarian challenges, premenstrual syndrome (PMS) or Tension (PMT), bloated, tense and sore breasts and even breast cancer. A person with too much estrogen in his or her body is said to be estrogenated. The human body produces its own estrogen. Foreign estrogen may come from estrognated poultry chicken, turkey, eggs, cow milk and flesh, and some estrogenated agricultural products. Although estrogenation challenges may be confronted with and inhibited by such good supplements as Zinc, Vitex, Evening primerose oil, Don quai, Black coshosh, Ashoka, Ashwahgandah, Peruvian mecca, Broccoli, Marigold flower extract etc, the culprit, petroleum residues are better avoided. Avoiding xenoestrogens may be a lot of work, though, because the modern agricultural system puts them in foods? How many persons do not, like me, eat poultry birds and their eggs? I gave them up about 30 years ago when I realised that poultry chicken and turkey, like fish from a pond, were sick animals which could give only MESO health and not RADIANT or VIBRANT health. For health is, at the day’s end, no more than the RADIATION or VIBRATION capacity of the human blood!
Back to “pure water” sachets and our health. Watch the vehicles in which they are distributed in town. Bags and bags of them are exposed to sunlight. They are not protected, also, by the women who buy them. Some women are even nauseating during the maize season when the weather is cold, and many persons are tea hungry. Some women drop a few sachets of water in the basin in which maize is boiled. The heat makes the water suitable for warm or hot tea!
As I said in an earlier article years ago, we now live in a world of poisons and may be unable to do away with plastics. We have the capacity, though, always to detoxify our bodies of their poisons. For years to come, babies will still be fed from plastic bottles. My children fed from plastic plates and drank their water and tea from plastic cups so they would not break China ware and mugs. Back in high school in the 1960s, did we not take our hot meals in plastic bowls? If we flee from “pure water” today and go for bottled water, there is something we may not know about this brand of drinking water. I do not intend here to talk about whether they are acidic or alkaline on the PH scale. Many of them manage to hit 7.0 on that 0-14 scale in which values below SEVEN are ACIDIC and not good for health. That is why many of them do not carry labels which show their mineral content or their pH quality. The Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) and, perhaps, the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), deserve blame for this and more. Many people do not know that, under international good manufacturing practices, these bottles are to bear certain standard numbers at the bottom. Some numbers indicate certain bottle types are not meant to be used for food storage. Some are picked from the refuse dump, washed and recycled for packaging edibles such as drinks, palm oil, peanuts, palm wine etc. If we believe we can avoid these or escape from them, what about the following:
•Plastic pipes bring water into our kitchens from sun-heated overhead plastic tanks. Boiling the water does not inactivate the chemical seepage from plastics. It may even make them concentrated.
•When we buy roast corn or boiled corn or roast yam in the street, is it not kept in cellophane bag?
• When women grind pepper in the open market, do they not bring it home in plastic containers or bags?
•Do we not eat popcorn and peanut in cellophane wraps? What of biscuits and sweets or chewing gum, all of which may have been sun-heated?
• To worsen matters nowadays, agidi and moin moin are no longer cooked in leaves but in cellophane wraps! So, we now find fufu no longer in leaf wraps but in “cellophane” covers!
• Watch commuters hurrying home from work in the evenings. To avoid late cooking, they buy from road-side food sellers all sorts of sizzling hot foods which are dispensed into shopping bags! Some of them who can afford “take-away” food boxes prefer it. They and their families enjoy presumably sumptuous meals drowned in or embalmed with monosodium glutamate( MSG) which is not the subject of this column.
THE DANGER
I am not looking at the environmental impact of these non degradables, which is one of the major reasons the government of Lagos State had banned their use in the food sector. I am more concerned about how they may disparage human health. I cannot support the argument for more time to sell off existing stock or that abrupt disuse of take-away plastics would erase jobs. We are told many jobs would be lost and businesses would lose money. Don’t people’s lives mean something to us anymore? Every day, petroleum chemicals from plastics may weaken susceptible organs, damage them or even cause cancer. The industry keeps defending itself world-wide.
No part of the body may be safe from plastic poisoning. The summary below says it all.
THE BRAIN
Psychiatric hospitals are overflowing with patients. However, it is not all cases that are the outcome of psycho-active drug activities. Some brains are filled with heavy metals such as Mercury, Lead and Cadmium which may be discharged from plastics. Unless the brain is detoxified with the mixing of the herbs: Chorella or Chelated Minerals or Chelated Zinc, for example, heavy metals may poison brain cells or cause them to be unable to uptake glucose as food. As glucose is the food of the brain, this may cause what researchers call “Diabetes of the Brain”. Hungry brain cells wilt or die. Is this why many children suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity DisorderIS (ADHD) for which they are labelled “SCATTER BRAINS”? Many adults also suffer from this syndrcaterome. This has nothing to do with psycho-active drugs and “rehabilitation” is not the answer, but detoxification and healing of the distorted or damaged cells. In some persons, it is expressed as Dementia, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease, all of which are now being related to Glaucoma and said to be treated with Coconut oil as a food supplement. Coconut oil provides the brain with Ketones, an alternative to glucose. Candida toxins may be other culprits behind brain malfunction and irrational behaviour. Candida belongs to the yeast or mold family. Dark-field microscopy exams have now shown candida presence in blood samples, something thought impossible before now. The tongue offers an early warning signal for Oral Thrush, which is often ignored, but is actually a mirror of overpopulation of Candida in the intestine. Candida grows on sugar as fuel and encouraged by a weakened immune system induced by toxic and acidic internal environment. There is another level of chemical toxicity present beyond the intellectual grasp of doctors. Intellectual here does not refer to academic or professional erudition but to the mindset, that is, comprehension of the brain or the intellect that only what can be observed by material senses and physical, scientific tools which assist them really exist in the Universe. Hence, these “REALlSTS” are limited in scope and experience. The condition is mistaken for lunacy or insanity in which brain cells are actually damaged or lost. In possession, the brain of a healthy person is taken over partly or wholly by a disembodied earthbound soul who takes it over and may crowd out the owner’s soul from the entire body. In the struggle of both souls to control the brain and the body, the original owner exhibits a SPLIT PERSONALITY or BI-POLAR syndrome, often described as lunancy. The origin is a polluted blood composition or low blood vibration (voltage) which enables the invading soul gain access. The simple treatment of this condition is dietary and attitudinal changes which bounce off radiation of the invader by making it not homogenous with the host environment. This is not a subject for today. It is merely to show the role that plastic poisoning may play in this condition, as the professional study groups are saying in the United States.
THE EYES
They, too, suffer from free radical activities, especially in the absence of anti-oxidants. Millions of Nigerians today, many of them young person, suffer from vision challenges encountered in old age some decades ago. With the increasing linkage of the eyes to the brain as outward forms of it, eyes profit from the treatment of the brain. Contact Lenses are, therefore, not encouraged. We learn of their potential danger from how our bath tub plastic buckets can get slimy with fungi. Would we like fungi to invade the eyes in the name of fashion? What if “TAKEAWAY” chemicals find their way into the eyes? The brain and the eyes may profit from Chlorella, Ginkogo Biloba, Bilberry, Marigold flower extract (Lutein, Zeazanthin and Asthazantin), Magnesium, Lecithin etc. I recall a health cure too close for comfort to elaborate upon here. It is about the wife of a prominent Nigerian pronounced “brain dead” in Nigeria and in the United States. Back home in Nigeria, she received “miraculous” healing through traditional Medicine. She returned to the University and took a Doctoral Degree!
