Consuming a healthy diet throughout one’s life helps prevent malnutrition in all its forms as well a range of none communicable diseases and conditions. But the increased production of processed food, rapid urbanization, and change in lifestyles have led to a shift in dietary patterns. People are now consuming more foods high in energy, fats, free sugars or salt and many do not eat enough fruit, vegetables and dietary fiber such as whole grains. There are also growing concerns that some of these common foods have been modified genetically to enhance their resistance while in the gardens and also to increase yield.

Here in Uganda wheat is now an integral ingredient in many people’s daily meals. But did you know that consumption of large amounts of wheat could be detrimental to your health? Doctor Paul Kasenene a qualified medical doctor with specialties in Nutritional, Functional and Lifestyle Medicine explained why this was detrimental. “When it comes to wheat; wheat is being processed and refined through milling and so we are removing the nutritious jam and high fiber brand and what we are remaining with is actually a high energy low nutrient product that we are then consuming.” Said, Paul Kasenene – Nutritionist Specialist. This manufactured wheat is common in fast and easy to cook foods including cereals, spaghetti, flour, bread and many others. Doctor Kasenene said this exposes us to large amounts of calories. “But because it is refined, it is not providing us with the nutrients that we would like to get.” He said that the artificial additions like gluten in wheat are not healthy to the body if consumed in large amounts. “We are seeing that digestive issues like inflammatory bowls, like sensitivity, like bloating, are linked to the amount of gluten and the wheat that we eat, and also we have things like fatigue. So, the fact that we have refined the wheat grain and that the wheat grain now has a lot of gluten in it means that the food that we are eating from wheat can equally be harmful to the body. And so it is important to learn to figure out how we can actually either take much healthier reach into our body or we look for alternative grains.”

There are recommended amounts of food nutrients which we should consume daily. Our intake for energy giving foods should be in balance with energy expenditure, total fat intake should not exceed 30% of our daily meals to avoid unhealthy weight gain, and the same applies for wheat. “Grains should usually make up 20 – 25% of the intake of the food that we consume on a daily basis.” Apart from the direct consumption of wheat, we also use it as a by-product ingredient to make many other foods like chapatti. Doctor Kasenene said that these kinds of combinations with refined oils and salt should not be our regular meals. “Most of the oils that we use to cook food is actually potentially inflammatory and also unstable.Most of us believe that vegetable oils are good for us but there are two types of oils, there circulated and uncirculated. Now many of the oils like sunflower oil, corn oil, palm oil that they actually do use to make chapatti are actually inflammatory. And so when we use such oil, on top of them being inflammatory they actually also increase your fat deposits, there could be a risk for heart attack disease. Every time you see oil smoking it means it has passed its smoking point and then it has lost its actual benefit.”

And what alternatives do we have to serve the modified products? “I would like to encourage people to go back to our traditional grains mainly the millet and sorghum. Then for the rest of the day, if you are thinking of chapatti, cakes, pasta and mandazi; again we can think of things like more fruit, we can think of nuts, seeds and we also have natural foods like gonja, we have things like cassava.” Global health monitoring body World Health Organization has a number of recommendations which people can follow to improve their diet. This is in an intervention to control the intake of harmful ingredients in food that are considered as a risk in causing none communicable diseases.