Femi Kusa
I am always an unwanted guest in the kitchen whenever dishes are being washed or when my meal is to be served. I force over whether the plates are well ridden of adhering remnant molecules of dish washing soap because I am aware most of them contain Triclosan and other dangerous chemicals. Triclosan is a chemical discovered daily by researchers to mingle with food in the plate and damage the mouth, throat and intestine. Many people do not easily relate the condition of their digestive system to the dish washing soap in the kitchen, or to the pesticides which came with their food items from the farms, or to cow’s milk in their diet or to wheat bread, or to new crop seeds which America is offloading on African farms.
Do we even realise that grease and iron fillings in grinding machines mix with pepper and other food items such as beans and maize ground in them in the open market… and that we consume them with food? The kitchen blender is not always an answer to this problem because many of them are of such low quality that their electric field damages the atomic structure of food items ground in them. If “structure” is “function”, we should expect damaged structure to unleash damaging functions in the bowels. These were some of the thoughts which raced in my mind last week when Emeka Okocha called me to say his father was gone. The old man was in his 70s and had been battling stage 2 colon cancer when his son and in-law availed him of help from Alternative Medicine, which was started off with some aspects of The Gerson Therapy.
The old man began to show signs of improvement until, as reported, he ate some cake at a birthday party. The cake may not have been the cause of terrible bowl pains which followed, but when the child dies the day after the witch cried, the co-incidence lends credence to a sugar hypothesis. Cancer cells love and thrive on sugar. The pain was so serious that the old man was immediately wheeled in for surgery. Cancer cells are known to be more aggressive after a surgery. So, it may not be surprising that Pa Okocha departed soon after. Somewhere also in Lagos is another gentleman in his 70s who has just had a section of his damaged colon removed. This is a serious matter from the post-surgery lives of many people with this encounter. For it would appear every inch of the colon specialises in a specific digestive function, and the loss of a tract may be a forerunner to many discomfitures as a result of nutritional deficiencies.
You won’t believe it, TRICLOSAN is present not only in the kitchen dish washing soap but in many types of toothpaste as well, including one brand which was noisily sent out of American markets and offloaded on the Nigerian market with advertising blitz. Triclosan is present, also, in cosmetics, bath soap, kitchenware, anti-COVID-19 hand sanitisers…almost everywhere. It is an anti-bacterial and anti-fungal agent on which the Food and Drugs Administration (FDA), the American equivalent of Nigeria’s NAFDAC, imposed some restrictions in 2017. Some studies have detailed some of Triclosan health-damaging potentials when it accumulates in the body. Accumulation is possible and easy because Triclosan is almost everywhere. A University of Chicago experiment with fish showed that Triclosan could alter the intestinal bacterial population which reversed to status quo-ante when the chemical was withdrawn.
Alyson Yee and Jack Gilbert suggest that Triclosan can cause obesity, irritable bowel disease (IBD), irritable bowel syndrome(IBS) behavioural and metabolic disease. They say, also, that foetuses and newborns could be harder hit than adults. Other studies suggest that Triclosan may cause depletion of certain thyroid hormones and that its ubiquitous presence in hospital disinfectants may account for increasing waves of MARSA (Multi Antibiotic Resistant Staphylococcus Aureus) from which many Nigerians are suffering today. Triclosan may help us break down oils and grease in the kitchen and dinner plates but can also break down the fragile mucus membrane lining of the intestine and damage, as well, mitochondria in the cells.
Mitochondria are those tiny organelles in the cell where energy is produced. So, can chronic tiredness be related to the ingestion of Triclosan? Many of us do not realise that a chemical as dangerous as Triclosan, which has been found in creams, soaps and detergents, implicated in skin problems, including cancer, is in the kitchen dish washing soap. A few decades ago, American authorities rejected some dinner plates imported from China. The plates were found to be of such low quality, which permitted Triclosan molecules to adhere to them. When food is served in such plates, the assumption is that the food would pick up Triclosan and down the intestine it goes with it. If I tell you to change your cheap cooking pot to a brand such as Salad Master or Long Rich, which may cause between N60,000 and N100,000 or more, you may assume this is a waste of money. But it is not in terms of health quality. Cheap cooking pots permit reaction with their contents and permit adhesion to them. Quality cooking pots are made of metals like titanium, which forbid them.
Triclosan is not the only health culprit in the dish washing soap which may end up in the intestine. There is also the foaming agent called Laureth Sodium Sulphate. It is easily absorbed by cells of the skin and causes allergic reactions. Women who do a lot of dish washing and laundry with bare hands may notice wrinkling of the skin at the back of their hands and the roughening of their palms. There are also PHOSPHATES in dish washing gels. There are fragrances as well. I do not know the constituents of many popular kitchen soap in Nigeria until a few years ago when almost everyone began to make liquid kitchen soap in the homes and street corners for public use. Economic depression and unemployment brought this about.
The entrepreneurship and survivalist spirit was awakened. Young people trooped out to learn how to make kitchen soap which was not regulated or licensed. Some types of kitchen soap come thick and heavily perfumed, others are much lighter in both respects. They come with all sorts of fragrances which linger on in the cooking pot, frying pan, dinner plates, drinking glasses and cutlery and end up in the mouth, stomach and intestine. If we seriously look back in time, we may discover that intestinal and digestive problems, including colon cancer, were not as rampant in the days of the older, and better-regulated brands of washing soap and detergent as they are today in the time of an army of unregulated brands.
I am an unwelcome guest in the kitchen, I said earlier, because I always raise dust about fragrance. I can smell it in the kitchen, even if I cannot see Triclosan. It may be futile to rinse kitchenware over and over in order to get rid of poisonous chemicals adhering to molecules of kitchenware. So, I insist on soaking and scrubbing them with such substances as white vinegar solution or with either lime or lemon juice. In the days when Diatomaceus Earth (DE) or Diatom was readily available in Nigeria, it helped a great deal. Activated charcoal doesn’t come cheap, otherwise it should readily be in the arsenal of remedies against dangerous chemicals in the kitchen. Indian women use red earth or clay.
My mother’s generation washed dishes with soda soap which was made from caustic soda and palm oil. I wonder if we cannot use white clay, which is abundant in Nigeria. Local people lick it for “internal heat.” In pregnancy, it is said to make the foetal skin “smooth”. In the villages of Akwa Ibom State, it is added to the juice of Editan vegetable and used as enema to clean the colon. My concern is that using it in raw, unpurified form may introduce underground microforms to the body, which, in many cases, may be suffering from a heavy microbial load. As I always say, we live today in a poisoned world. The air, the water, the soil, the food and even kitchen are poisoned. Mankind is reaping a bountiful harvest of disobedience to the laws of Nature in a megalomaniac delusion that man is the centre of the universe and can do anything he likes. We cannot flee from our misdeeds homewards for salvation in Paradise. We must live through our rot, while endeavouring to protect our health.
One of the best ways to do this is by empowering the liver. It is the largest detoxifying organ of the body. It requires bitter supplements for its activation. One of the commonest in our country is Bitter Kola. This morning, as I began to write this column, I asked that one be grated for me and added to hot water in a glass cup. I sipped the solution. Empowering the liver with bitter principles, such as found in bitter leaf, utazi and pawpaw leaves or aloe vera gel, enables it to produce more bile salt which neutralise and take out toxins from the intestine through the stool. We may add intestinal mover to the diet. They include Slippery Elm and Psyllium Husk. Diatom is a great one also. So is activated charcoal. I will come to some others in the coming parts of the series. Meanwhile, how can we escape from the unpleasant harvest of what America is doing to Africa? With the Chinese taking over the African (and world) market, American scientists are said to have designed a strategy to make Africans food hostages.
Americans designed high-yielding seeds which they distribute in Africa. These seeds are “castrated”, so they do not reproduce themselves. Gradually, self-reproducing seeds are being eliminated in Africa, which is hungry for bumper harvests to feed an ever-growing population. Unfortunately, the Chinese cannot bring food to Africa because they are too many back home and have to eat all sorts of rubbish to keep body and soul together. Thus, if Africa loses itself re-producing natural seeds and lives on genetically modified, “castrated”, high yielding seeds, it will become dependent on Americans for food. That would be a major problem of Africa, as these seeds have no reproductive potential, how would they help the cells of the human body reproduce themselves? Most cells of the human body die between three and four months, and are replaced. Thus, what will happen to life expectancy and intestinal health is most probably what we are already experiencing….DEATH BEGINS SLOWLY BUT SURELY IN THE INTESTINE.
Africans could have rejected cheap bio-technology foods, if they knew that “cheap” is not always good and comes with dire consequences or that the purveyors of modernism are not always on top of their game. For example, did we know that the new coronavirus (COVID-19), sometimes touted as a bio-technology creature, could shut down the whole world?
