04/10/2025
HOW WE POISON OURSELVES
We often blame “big food,” “big pharma,” and “big government” for hijacking our health, and they deserve blame.
Why?
Big food doesn’t care about our health, it only cares about profit, flooding our plates with ultraprocessed products that taste sweet but destroy the body from inside.
Big Pharma doesn’t care about prevention, it only cares about profit, thriving when we stay sick and dependent on lifelong medications.
And big government doesn’t care about safeguarding lives, it only cares about profit, collecting from both sides while failing in its duty as the people’s gatekeeper.
In this unholy alliance, the ordinary Nigerian is left defenseless, paying with money, with health, and eventually with life.
Amidst this hijack eeeh, if we are honest, the bitter truth is that we are also our own greatest saboteurs.
In Nigeria, we have normalized poisoning ourselves in the name of profit, convenience, or appearance.
We chase gain at the expense of life, and we have made shortcuts more valuable than safety.
We are so emotional about compliance that when regulators attempt to enforce standards, we accuse them of wickedness.
Yet without regulation and quality assurance, chaos reigns.
Governance fails, markets become toxic, and citizens become victims of their own economy.
The result?
Our food and medicine are killing us slowly.
Take a close look at the everyday practices that poison us:
1. Fake medications – It is increasingly difficult to buy original drugs in Nigeria. Pharmacies, patent medicine stores, and open markets are flooded with counterfeits. Many people even know the producers, but still patronize them. Fake drugs waste money, delay healing, and create drug resistance that kills.
2. Stockfish and dried fish preservation – Many sellers use formalin and other dangerous chemicals to keep pests away. These poisons build up in the liver and kidneys.
3. Grain storage – Bulk food sellers spray maize, millet, and beans with pesticides to prevent spoilage, but these same chemicals remain in the food and enter human systems.
4. Palm oil adulteration – Palm oil is diluted with fiber, cheaper oil, or even industrial dyes to increase volume. Consumers unknowingly ingest toxins daily.
5. Fake chocolates and milk – Imported or locally packaged “chocolates” and “milk” are often counterfeited with cheap fillers and powders that lack nutrition and damage health.
6. Cassava processing – Some producers soak cassava in dangerous chemicals to quicken fermentation and whitening for akpu/fufu, turning a staple into poison.
7. Beans preserved with sniper – To protect against weevils, many traders spray beans with sniper, a dangerous pesticide not meant for human consumption.
8. Honey adulteration – Real honey is scarce. What floods the market is often sugar syrup, glucose, saccharine, and coloring packaged as honey. Some go to the extent of killing bees or flies and throwing it inside to make it look real.
9. Suya and barbecue meat – To give meat a “shine,” some roadside vendors use unhealthy oil instead of edible oil, releasing heavy metals into the body.
10. Fruit ripening with carbide – Instead of natural ripening, mangoes, bananas, and plantains are forced with calcium carbide, which scars the digestive tract.
11. Soft drinks and “fruit juices” – Many so-called juices are nothing but colored sugar water, offering zero nutrition but maximum metabolic harm.
12. Ground spices adulteration – To bulk up volume, traders add chalk, sawdust, or even powdered bricks to ground pepper and curry.
13. Crayfish adulteration – Ground crayfish is often mixed with sand, shells, or cheaper fillers, eroding both value and safety.
14. Packaged water – Not all sachet or bottled water is tested. Many come from untreated boreholes or contaminated sources.
15. Smoked fish darkening – Some producers use plastics or rubber to produce a darker, “appealing” color, filling the air, and fish, with toxic compounds.
16. Bread whitening – Bleaching agents and excessive improvers are used to make bread look fluffy and white, stripping it of safety.
17. Vegetables laced with chemicals – Farmers apply excessive fertilizer and pesticide to increase size and speed, leaving dangerous residues on leafy greens and tomatoes.
18. Meat preservation – Formalin and other chemicals are sometimes applied to delay spoilage of beef, chicken, and goat meat in markets.
19. Ogogoro (local gin) – Illicit gin is often adulterated with methanol or industrial spirit, leading to blindness, liver failure, or death.
20. Groundnut oil adulteration – Original groundnut oil is frequently mixed with cheaper seed oils or recycled cooking fats, introducing harmful compounds.
When you examine this list, it is sobering.
These are not imported poisons, they are made, sold, and consumed by us.
We cannot only blame foreign companies or corrupt regulators.
We must also admit that we, in our homes, markets, and communities, have created a culture where profit is valued more than life.
The truth is bitter, but we are our own problem.
Until we start valuing human life above money, until we stop tolerating and patronizing those who adulterate food and drugs, until we choose safety even when it costs us more, we will continue to die slowly and call it “God’s will.” But this is not God’s will. This is our doing. And only we can undo it.
