The Wife of Ondo State Governor, Mrs Betty Anyanwu-Akeredolu has admonished Nigerians to adopt healthy lifestyles and scrutinise the food they eat to avoid toxic substances that could lead to cancer and other deadly non-communicable diseases.
Anyanwu-Akeredolu gave the admonition at the 4th Annual Scientific and General Meeting organised by the Society of Lifestyle Medicine of Nigeria (SOLONg) webinar, themed: Lifestyle Medicine- Healthcare Redefined.
Anyanwu-Akeredolu who is the founder of the Breast Cancer Association of Nigeria (BRECAN), a Non-governmental Organization raising awareness on cancer, further enjoined stakeholders to lend their voices in helping change the eating pattern, especially the way Nigerians eat, stressing that the country has the worst kind of menu coupled with many eateries spread all over.
She said it is not enough to raise their voice but practising what they preach right from home by training young ones how to eat healthy starts from childhood.
“By practising what we preach, right in my home, I think my children and my grandchildren have no choice but to emulate what grandma eats and that’s the beginning”.
“It’s not that we talk about in conferences. What do you put on the table for your family? And once they became at a very young age, they grow with that kind of lifestyle and approach to healthy living.
“I think avoiding toxic substances like tobacco, and alcohol, which has to be something we approached through policy formulation.
“As regards to government also playing a role in minimising, or encouraging our people because as some policies that you put up, it will discourage people and at the same time, it helps in kind of assuming going by the way of a healthy lifestyle.”
Also, the President of SOLONg, Dr Ifeoma Monye revealed that deaths from NCDs are on a sharp rise in Africa and the World Health Organisation predicts that this is set to get worse unless we act decisively in Africa.
Monye said the gathering is to advance discussions on what the stakeholders must do now to mitigate the healthcare emergency that is upon us.
She said: “The recent combination of COVID, conflicts and Climate change changes the equation and makes Nigeria and the rest of Africa even more vulnerable.
“In order to effectively deal with the menace of NCDs, we must deal with the root causes. This is what Lifestyle Medicine has come to accomplish.
“Like the proverbial story of a flooded house, kept flooded by a running tap, in order to stop the home from being flooded constantly, the reasonable thing to do is to turn off the tap, stop water from filling the sink and overflowing, rather than simply mopping and mopping and mopping the flooded floor, knowing that the root cause of the flooding is the tap that has been turned on.
“We are therefore standing together in our dedication to identify and eradicate the root cause of chronic disease and rather than just treat the diseases that result from our lifestyle practices, which study after study has confirmed is down to our behavioural choices, we can prevent and even reverse chronic disease by changing our behaviour, turning off the tap as it were, through therapeutic lifestyle interventions,” She added.
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