‘Foreign foods reduce life expectancy’

frican mango seeds (Ogbonno)… used for popular ogbonno soup and also in making weight loss drug

• Traditional diets recommended as medicines to stop damage caused by imported, processed meals
* U.S. Institute confirms efficacy of Bitter kola drug for Ebola, partners with Nigerian firm to develop treatment
* Locally produced palm oil is better than imported vegetable products, has more vitamin A than carrots

A professor of pharmacognosy and founder Bioresources Development and Conservation Programme (BDCP) and International Centre for Ethnomedicine and Drug Development (IntCEDD), Maurice Iwu, has warned against the consumption of foreign and imported food products even as he linked them with the proliferation of chronic diseases and sudden deaths. Iwu, however, recommends locally prepared and traditional foods as medicines to reverse damage caused by processed meals. Iwu also told The Guardian how he stumbled upon the bitter kola drug for Ebola, which he said has been authenticated by the United States Institute for Health (NIH) and the drug is presently undergoing further development. Iwu clarifies that he never said Garcinia kola cures Ebola but that there is a compound in it that has activity against Ebola. Contrary to views propagated by the Western media that palm oil is not good for health, Iwu said that locally produced palm oil is better than imported vegetable oils, very rich in nutrients and has more vitamin A than carrots. CHUKWUMA MUANYA writes. Excerpts

Some know you as former Independent Electoral Commission (INEC) Chairman, some know you because of the Bitter kola cure for Ebola while others know you for your involvement with herbal products and as professor of pharmacognosy. Who is professor Iwu? It is like you have multiple identities? What is the situation Sir?
First and foremost I am a professor of Pharmacognosy and then I use to teach at the University of Nigeria Nsukka. I taught pharmacognosy as the Head of Pharmacognosy. Pharmacognosy as you know is a study of natural product medicine. It is a science that is based on that whole concept of using nature as a treatment modality.

In terms of Ebola as you rightly captured in some of your stories, we worked on it in 1999 way before Ebola became a household name and it was part of general concept of trying to find treatment for orphan diseases or diseases that don’t have treatment or for tropical diseases like malaria, Leishmaniasis and Trypanosomiasis. We are actually studying those areas that don’t lend themselves to easy and quick answers.

So by the time Ebola came up again because people were surprised and shocked that such a disease can kill like that and they did not know much about it.

So the statements we made were not controversial, they were based on facts because people did not know much about it. Then on Garcinia kola, which is a whole totally different story, we worked on Garcinia in 1985. We were able to show the properties of the product by observing what the traditional healers used it for. Everybody you meet in Nigeria has his or her own story, his or her own anecdote about the bitter kola. Like most things like that it is such a humble nut, not a true nut, we call it bitter kola, and people get surprised at the activities we ascribe to it.

Iwu

Basically your concept is food as medicine. What is it all about?
It is not a new concept. The whole African world view includes this co-existence with nature and part of it is the fact that African over a very long time have acquired this knowledge of food substances and they know when somebody is feeling ill, what type of food to eat, what type of food to avoid. There is also some taboos surrounding eating of foods. So it is now a question of going back to the kind of things that Africans even from the days of ancient Egypt are known to be good medicine men. What is so strange about African medicine is that things that everyday plants that they use for food and when used differently can cure diseases.

So we didn’t want situation where we will get trapped in this Western view that medicine must be poisonous, that medicine are poisons and when taken in small doses can cure. But African is the other way round that medicines cannot be separated from food substances but there are certain foods when taken in certain manner and in certain times can be good way of treating diseases but treating diseases from a totally different concept. The Western view is obsessed with the disease itself.

You don’t want to become your own disease; the disease that is troubling you now becomes the definition of who you are. So what happened in food, as medicine is that you strengthen the body’s ability to fight disease, you go into cellular medicine, and it takes a while. But modern medicine is even coming to that belatedly.

So very soon there will be a convergence, a meeting point between the food as medicine and medicine being therapeutic. So those are the kind of concept. It is not strange at all, it is not my own making, and it has been since ancient Egypt that food can be medicine.

But the implications of that is that it has to be rooted on the environment, the epigenetics, the fact that part of our make up is from what we eat, what we get from our environment. Just like the trees get their nourishment from the soil, so also we get from our environment. What then that means is that if you eat foreign foods, the chances is that your body does not get adapted to it quickly.

So while during that process of trying to seek accommodation of these foreign foods you can get sick, you get some sort of malignancies and so on. There are so many studies to show that environmental pollutants can also be harmful. There is no way the body can determine which one is food and which one is pollutants, so it treats them, processes them the same way and some can be harmful to the body.

So that is a core aspect of pharmacognosy, the whole issue of what natural products do, what xenobiotics, foreign biomes do to your body. For the aged it is even much more dangerous. As they are young, they may be able to process and detoxify themselves and may be able to accommodate these xenobiotics.

But when you get older your ability to cope is diminish, so you are better of sticking to what your body is used to namely: local natural foods. I don’t want to make controversial statement but if you like, you should avoid as much as possible foreign made foods for two different reasons: One is that they are strange to your system and much more importantly is that they need to be preserved for them to transport it to us so they have a lot of preservatives, a lot of compounds that are put in them to make them; and also, the over emphasis on satiation and sweetness or taste by the Western world. So many things that you don’t really need are added to make the food more enjoyable so to speak.

The idea of food as medicine has its root in traditional African medicine, even as far back as Ancient Egypt. . The father of African traditional medicine, the great Imhotep (c. 2650 -2600 BC) who served in the Third Dynasty under King Djoser (Zhosa) used a lot of dietary plants and special diets for treatment. He was the Chancellor to the pharaoh and high priest of the Sun god Ra at Heliopolis. Imhotep (Immutef, Im-hotep, or Li-em-Hotep, as his name has been written at various times; or Imuthes by the Greeks) was an accomplished architect, and the step pyramid at Saqqarah is among his numerous works.

The ancient African healers and those that lived after them had an elaborate materia medica, which consisted of mixtures of various herbs, animal parts, minerals, and clays. The Ebers Papyrus, one of the oldest in medical literature, listed several recipes used by ancient African healers. The list, however, was dominated by numerous food plants, in keeping with the belief at that time that “every disease to which men are liable is occasioned by the substances whereon they feed”.

Even the father of modern medicine, famous Greek Physician, Hippocrates held similar opionin about food and health and was reported to have advised ‘Let food be Thy Medicine’.

You recall the common saying that we are what we eat. This is very true. It resonates in the health status of people who feed on fruits, vegetables and wholesome foods as against that of people who eat junk food. What we eat can also affect our minds, even our behaviour, and our general disposition towards others. It has been established that: too much refined, rich, sugary food can lead to heart diseases and certain types of cancer. That bingeing on meat, butter and cheese is bad for us. That not eating enough fruit and vegetables may lower our resistance to diseases like cancer. That obesity is a disease that makes us even more disposed to other illnesses. That fatness is the foe to fitness.

Yet these facts have been obscured because of the millions spent by the foreign food companies in advertisements and fraudulent research that promote unhealthy diets in order to maximize their profit.

In my latest book on the subject, (Food As Medicine – Functional Food Plants Of Africa – Taylor Francis) I recounted the scientific evidence of the British surgeon Denis Parsons Burkitt (28 February 1911 – 23 March 1993; better known for his observational study on the aetiology of a paediatric cancer that bears his name Burkitt’s lymphoma) while working in Africa during the Second World War and during the 1950s. He had noticed that many of the noninfectious chronic diseases that were common in Britain were rare among Africans who were following a traditional lifestyle. He wrote a book Don’t Forget Fibre in your Diet, which was an international best seller.

The examples he cited included coronary artery disease, diabetes, colon cancer, appendicitis, and even varicose veins. Burkitt suggested that these ‘‘Western’’ diseases were largely due to a high-fat, low-fiber diet. He was eventually dubbed ‘‘the Fiber Man’’ for his insistence on the importance of a low-fat, high-fiber diet.

These so-called Western diseases as identified by Burkitt remain the major causes of death and disability in the United States, Europe and Australia. It has also been argued that arthritis, the number 1 cause of disability in the United States, has a dietary component. Some physicians from the United States believe that osteoarthritis is due to ‘‘wear and tear’’ on the joints, yet osteoarthritis is relatively uncommon in Africa, where most of the population does most of its work by hand.

According to Burkitt the Western diseases are easy to prevent but hard to cure. As he put it, if people are constantly falling off a cliff, you could place ambulances at the foot of a cliff or build a fence on the top of the cliff. He argued that the modern science is placing too many ambulances at the foot of the cliff. Burkitt emphasized the importance of fiber in the diet and the dangers of fat: ‘‘The frying pan you should give to your enemy. Food should not be prepared in fat. Our bodies are adapted to a Stone Age diet of roots and vegetables’’.

The modern preservation and processing of food expose us to the risk of chemicals used for preservation and imparting desired flavors on the food. The more far removed the consumer is from the source of the origin of the food the greater the risk of consuming more of such potentially harmful chemicals.

Take for example a group of compounds called PFASs (Poly – and perfluoroalkyl substances) used in almost all aspects of modern living, including food packages, fast-food raps, pop-corn bags, stain-resistant fabrics, non-stick frying pans, water-proof clothing and thousands of other uses not indicated on their labels. PFASs also increase the risk of cancer. Your guess is as good as mine as to have many grams of this toxic chemical we consume everyday through imported foods.

Bitter kola (Garcinia kola)… contains a compound kolaviron that stops the replication of the Ebola virus

Coming home or bringing it down to the common man, which foods can be taken as medicines in Nigeria?
So many, from our simple bitter leaf (Vernonia amygdalina) a lot of people who are diabetics use it routinely and like to use it in place of ordinary tea. When people have stomach cramps and so on they take guava leaves (Psidium guajava), and they use it as decoction. We talked about the bitter kola which people eat all the time. In Western world-Europe and America- our common Ogbono seed, a drug from it is the number one selling product for weight loss and the whole idea is not that they are using it for food. It is the same Ogbono but without much processing that is being utilized.

Of course everybody is trying to use Moringa as tea but they forget that Moringa is an Hausa vegetable that they use for cooking and there are so many such examples but it is a question of being able to take the appropriate diet and appropriate meal at certain time and also try as much as possible to eat wholesome foods rather than processed meal.

There has been this talk about an herbal festival tagged Herbfest coming up which you are involved in, what is it all about?
About seven years ago we decided to keep having a festival whereby we look at various standardized herbal product that have gone trough the process of scientific enquiry that have been licensed by the National Agency for Food Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC) and any other regulatory bodies in Africa and then are showcased. Apart from the showcasing of the products, every October, there is a symposium whereby we now take a topic related to these things and it now become the main theme of this thing and younger scientists are able to discuss their findings and able to let us know what they have found and they older scientists are able to guide the younger scientists on what to do and a lot of healthcare practitioners attend the Herbfest to be able to know what is the cutting edge.

Of course a lot people come to display their products so that those who are interested in marketing those things and those who are trying to use them for their own personal health come into that. It is not like the normal trade fair where people keep on talking about products that have not been tested. The Herbfest is a techno-scientific exposition whereby we are trying to give credit to scientists and also talk to people who have done works in this area.
Where is this Herbfest going to take place?
The current one is going to take place October 6 to 8, 2015 here in Abuja at Raw Material Research and Development Council at Maitama. It is usually a very interesting gathering. It is not meant for scientists alone even the lay people can attend. For example the symposium we are going to have will be on “Utilisation and Successful Exploitation of African Medicinal Plants and Natural Products.”

Who and who are involved?
For the organization, Bioresources Development and Conservation Programme is a main partner. It is working with Nigerian Natural Medicine Development Agency (NNMDA) and the Federal Institute of Industrial Research Oshodi, Lagos (FIIRO). We also have International Centre for Ethno-medicine and Drug Development (IntCEDD) at Nsukka, Enugu State. These are just the main partners but there are so many other partners, collaborators like NAFDAC, Nigerian Institute of Pharmaceutical Research and Development (NIPRD), Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN), National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP), National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI). There are about 16 different agencies both national and international that come together to be able host this exposition.

There is a lot of misrepresentation on who you are, what you stand for and what you are doing now after the INEC job?
Before INEC I was into full time research. I left the university to work at the United States Army Medical Centre in Washington DC. I also worked in the private sector. After INEC, I now went back again on what I trained for.

As a professor of pharmacognosy, what took you to an electoral commission?
What happened was that I had been working in Washington for ten years and then I was approached to come back home to help in the Ministry of Science and Technology actually. But by the time I came for some political reasons the offer was not there and I was asked to participate in the transition then, from one civilian elected government to another.

The then President thought it was going to be tumultuous and it was and he needed somebody who is firm to be able to handle that transition. For me it was a technocratic thing, I wasn’t really so much involved in the politics, I wasn’t involved in the propaganda, I wasn’t involved.

All I had to do is to have this concentrated vision of transiting from one civilian regime to another and what we then did was to focus on the job and that was what made the subsequent transitions easier because it has been done before. But before then there was a jinx each time this sort of thing want to happen, either a military coup will happen or somebody will blink.

So having done that, to me it was a technocratic thing, I went back very quickly to what I knew how best to do. But to my company, the group I founded was still on all these years. So it is not an upstart thing for us. They were having grants; they were doing research, having products and so on. What I merely did was to join them.

Basically what do you do now?
I manage research group. I think we are one of the few knowledge-based companies in Nigeria even in Africa. We have a purely research firm we call Bioresources Research Group of Nigeria, which does only research and teaching and so on. Then we have a group that does conservation, sustainable use of natural products, which is called Bioresources Development and Conservation Programme.

Then we have a company that is into making of dietary supplements, which is called IntCEDD Health Products and we have a laboratory at Nsukka, Enugu State, which is called International Centre for Ethnomedicine and Drug Development. So we have these five different bodies together and we have also invested in pharmaceutical companies. We are co-owners of Niemeth Pharmaceuticals International in Lagos.

So all our whole portfolio is on health sector and environment. What Bioresources Development group does is to look at that interphase between health and environment and that is what we do. So my job is I am like the ribbon that holds these flowers together. I try to manage this complex group. We have very good office in Cameroun. What they do mainly is Bioresources Development and Conservation Programme. They are into many environmental issues. We also have Trust Fund where we mainly health in rural development. S

o of the profit from our enterprises we plough back to social causes. We do that quietly behind the scene. We have been doing that for over 20 years.

We get consultancies, some from federal ministries that deal with these areas, we have got consultancies from United States government agencies, we have got contracts with United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and other agencies of the United Nation. We are essentially knowledge-based organization. What we mine is knowledge and our motto is ‘Science for Humanity.’ We use making science more practicable as an enterprise; we do not have any other business outside our area.

How far with the Ebola drug?
The Ebola story is an interesting one in the sense that before the Garcinia kolaviron there was no compound ever that was able to stop the replication of the virus. Kolaviron that is the compound from Garcinia kola (bitter kola) was one of the first at the time. So when the story unfolded and became public we were forced to go back and look at it again because as I said publicly I had not done anything on for those 15 years. Ebola is not something drug companies or anybody will invest in. Everywhere it has been invested in has been by governments. Because of the military significance of Ebola, until now I discuss in hush because it is a category A biological weapon.

So people are taking it very seriously. What we did was to go back. We had a collaborative agreement with United States National Institute for Health (NIH). We do not have B4 level of laboratory that is needed so we sent it back to them including other products for them to reevaluate and luckily the answer is positive: that they have evaluated it and found out that it has activity that it showed at that time and we are proceeding on other aspects of drug development.

Drug development is not a rushed affair, it takes time and there are certain aspects you must follow. We have contacted our colleagues in those disciplines to see that we collaborate with them for them to look at those areas we don’t have the expertise.

So we are continuing with it but as you know even before Ebola we had already a product based on bitter kola that is in the market and that product is still going on. The beauty of Garcinia kola work for Ebola is that of a compound, which we call Akuiluvir. Akuiluvir is really a product that has antiviral activity. Beyond antiviral activity it has immense almost instantaneous anti-inflammatory activity. It is able to prevent the cascade of anti-inflammatory responses that the body is forced to get into when attack by the virus. So it has this double activity. We also believe that because of the Garcinia’s immune enhancing action it means it has triple action. We never said Garcinia kola cures Ebola; we said there is a compound in it that has activity against Ebola.

Cure is a totally different thing because you do not even talk of cure for a viral disease, all you want to do is to contain it and make it less virulent and that is what we do. So the work is continuing and then we are pursuing the work through multiple collaborations with other agencies.

You said if you want to live longer you should not eat anything foreign. What do you mean by this?
What I mean is that if you want to minimize your exposure to xenobiotics that is chemicals, the more local your food the better. It is better for you to eat the food you can vouch for how it was prepared, how it was processed. A case in point is the imported poultry, most of them come with a lot of bacteria because even in the foreign countries they keep destroying them because of the contamination with listeria and some have chemicals pumped into them.

Some of them to be able to grow the chickens as big as they are, they use antibiotics liberally so that when you are now sick your body will not be able to handle those antibiotics the way it should because your body is used to it because of the poultry you are eating.

In case of beef, some of the imported products the animals were killed two years ago and they can only be kept like that with injection of chemicals that we use to preserve dead bodies for the mortuary. Is that the kind of thing you want in your system? The answer is no. Then you look at it in terms of where the crops are grown, the crops are grown with herbicides, pesticides, chemical fertilisers and all sorts of biocidal agents.

The research is not yet certain but while take the risk if you can be able to eat things that are prepared locally, if you can eat fresh things. Why take the risk? So the issue there is that if you want to be able to have a better lifestyle, better optimal health you should eat only things that are produced locally.

The other issue for people who are older particularly, the ability to cope with these foreign chemicals is limited because their body can no longer tolerate that level of abuse. So what then happens is that for our group we have our farms, the plants we use for formulation of our products are grown in our farms, they are organically grown, we don’t use any fertilizer at all, we do not use any pesticide at all. To tell you how obsessed we are with the naturalness of it. We can only do any work done there by solar, we don’t even allow generator to be put there to power anything because there is no public grid. What we now do is to use solar to do the water irrigation and anything is done without any chemicals.

When you look at those products that come abroad, even if they are good products they have to be preserved to be able to get to us, that preservation alone is enough for us to worry and see how far our bodies can cope with them. Some of them the longtime effect of exposure to those chemicals is not properly known.

So do you want to use your body for the experiment as guinea pig? Even when they are tested and known to be safe, they are only known to be safe in Caucasians; there are no such long-term studies that have been done here. You hear all the time, people tell you ‘blacks have more incidence of this and that disease.’ Why? Is it that our genetic make up is weaker? My position is no, it is this exposure to foreign chemicals.

So for optimum health, rather than say live longer, it is better to stay away from foreign foods. We don’t know whether it affects longevity because somebody can die from ordinary stress or motor accident but the key thing is for optimum health it better to restrict yourself to the food around you.