angelo.jedidiah@guardian.co.tt
Reporter
T&T has earned its spot on the world stage through its impressive culinary heritage. Our rich, flavourful melting pot of cultural cooking practices is unlike any other. But our love affair with “sweet” Trini food may come with a cost to our health.
This is part of the message that nutritional therapist Chetwayo La Borde works diligently to communicate as he informs and educates people.
With his latest book, You Are Not Sick; You Are Malnourished, he strikes an alarming but crucial note. In it, he talks about the power of nutritional therapy and claims that you can ‘reverse’ diseases while also rebuilding the human body from the inside out.
“Many people think diseases are just things that people randomly get, but there’s not a single random disease. All diseases have causes. Not because somebody doesn’t know the cause means that it doesn’t have a cause,” Chetwayo told Guardian Media.
“Now, when you get into the understanding of nutrition, biology, biochemistry, you start to see what’s causing diseases. What I have observed over the years is there’s a massive knowledge gap with regards to health and nutrition in the general public.”
Today, the country’s most pressing health challenges are on the rise, from non-communicable diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and hypertension to alarming rates of obesity and fertility issues. But Chetwayo argues that the culprit is not bad luck or genetics. Instead, he points to the modern diet, increasingly dominated by excess sugar, fast food for convenience and nutritional misinformation.
“Most diseases, if not all, can be traced back to malnourishment and/or, it can be traced back to a combination of deficiencies.”
While people may associate malnutrition with poverty, starvation and being ‘skinny’, Chetwayo says malnourishment actually occurs whenever a person’s nutritional needs are not being met. To the surprise of some, malnutrition can also affect people who eat excessively and are overweight, as well as those whose lifestyles bear little resemblance to the traditional images of famine and hunger.
“Malnutrition looks exactly like how society looks today, where you are seeing excess. And that excess doesn’t mean you’re consuming excess of the right things. You could be malnourished while you’re on a full stomach. You could be full and starving at the same time. Because what is being consumed is not what the body is requiring,” Chetwayo said.
“Today, a lot of people’s diet is full of sugars, full of carbohydrates, but is that what the body is asking for? No. That is not what the body is asking for. And the things that the body is actually asking for are not what people are consuming.”
To the dismay of many food lovers, Chetwayo points out that a wide array of traditional T&T dishes are actually some of the unhealthiest. He reminds us that many of these beloved meals and culinary practices date back to the era of slavery, born out of desperation and the need for survival.
“The whole local diet is the problem. Let’s take pelau, which is rice and you have the sugars, of course, to get the browning and so forth,” he explained.
“Then we have doubles, which consist of different forms of sugar and it is deep fried. That deep frying, which is seed oils, so it’s consuming a lot of reactive oxygen species, so that causes a lot of oxidative stress and damage in the body. But we call these things cultural dishes. So, while for many it would taste good, it is actually not good for your body.”
He says a lot of people today are low in key minerals, not just one. Iron deficiency is very common and it is also common for people to turn to supplements rather than adjusting their diet to match their nutritional needs.
And while people may think certain foods are inherently healthy, Chetwayo warns they can do more harm than good for some individuals. Take fruit, for example. He claims that modern varieties are far from “natural” due to generations of selective grafting, which has made them much higher in sugar and less toxic than their original wild forms.
“Fructose is one of the main sugars in fruits and many people don’t research fruits. Because they grew up and they see it. For example, let’s take mangoes. You grew up and you had the mango tree in your backyard, so you grew up and you met it there. So people are of the belief that fruits were always here. The fruits that exist today always existed and that is not true.”
“Fructose is a very problematic sugar for the human body. It could only be metabolised in the liver, and it produces a lot of harmful byproducts.”
As the owner of Chetwayo’s Holistic Health Clinic, Chetwayo criticises the modern food industry while also arguing that both medical professionals and patients should take a more proactive approach to health.
He believes greater attention should be paid to addressing the root causes of illness, many of which, he says, stem from poor nutritional habits, rather than relying too heavily on pharmaceuticals.
“For example, somebody has a headache. They’re going to tell you, I need to take something for the headache. They don’t ask, ‘why do I have the headache, what is causing the headache.’ They just want some instant relief. And due to that culturing of people to seek relief over root cause, it gave rise more to pharmaceutical and supplement industries. So the problem is never dealt with, so it’s going to keep manifesting.”
He reminds readers that nutrition is not one-size-fits-all. Just because a particular nutrient, diet or health issue applies to someone else does not mean it is the problem they need to address themselves, unless they are advised to do so by a qualified healthcare professional.
Chetwayo also warns people against following ‘quick tips’ they may see advertised or learn from social media videos, which he claims can be dangerous if you don’t understand how the body works.
“My tip that I could give is that people need to educate themselves. Knowledge is power, but knowledge is only powerful when you apply the knowledge.”
