You must make healthy eating a habit and a goal this New Year...

The New Year beckons and we all expect the very best of the year. Good wishes keep flooding our mobile phones via the various social media platforms; whatsapp, facebook and others. Amidst all these wishes, I also wish you a year full of health and wellness.

I want you to know that the choices you make come 2017 about what foods you eat or avoid will go a long way to determine how healthy, well or sick you will be several years to come. Thus it becomes very necessary for us to consider making healthier food choices. But the situation is not so with most people.

It is very common to hear a patient defer their appointment to see a health care provider for reasons such as funerals, family celebrations and marriage ceremonies.

Often their role in such activities is so insignificant that those ceremonies can actually go on minus their presence, but they surely must be there to make issues complete and as it were fulfill all righteousness. This to them is more important than acting at the same time to safeguard their own health.

It is with great disappointment that I watch patients who default on their treatment and only return to me some time later to give me some of the aforementioned as their reasons for not being able to come for dietetic reviews.

It baffles me since I stand at a place where my view of the possible outcome of their condition is really not a thing to joke with. It is bad to ignore your own health just to suffer bad consequences after some years.

Prevention is better than cure; a very true old saying. We have to act to prevent diseases rather than wait only to rush to cure them when they appear. When you sleep under a treated mosquito net, you will not get malaria. So why expose your body to the mosquitoes and suffer the consequences.

Healthy eating is a must if we can prevent diabetes, hypertension, prostate cancer, high blood cholesterol, strokes among others.

Some say after all, we have been eating for so many years and are still alive, many also realising that they can hardly do anything about their current eating habits whimsically resort to the popular saying "all-die-be-die". My brothers and sisters, "all-die-no-be-die oooo". Visit the mortuary and see.

Prevention is a possibility

Elsewhere, there is growing concern about the dangers that current eating habits pose to the very survival of the active workforce of nations.

There is much more commitment as well from the part of governments and civil society to save the lives of the many unsuspecting youth and young people who risk falling prey to non-communicable diseases due to bad eating habits, lack of exercise and lack of knowledge on preventive health practices.

For those in our part of the world, the burden of disease becomes double since people are hungry due to lack of economic empowerment and at the same time they will be sick due to the kind of foods they eat.

There is also going to be lots of confusion on the minds of many people since what they eat can cause them problems. And at the same time, when they are not able to eat too, they will have problems.

There is a way out of this if we are going to be able to help our people. Government should confront the issues well, this country cannot continue concentrating on curative health care alone and relegating preventive health care to the background.

Much more needs to be done in terms of teaching the Ghanaian populace how to prevent lifestyle related diseases like diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and several others.

Stay blessed and keep doing your best to eat well for health and wellness.

Author: WISE CHUKWUDI LETSA. The writer is a dietician at Trust Hospital and author of “Diet, Health & Wellness Book" and. “Answers for your diet”. For copies, Contact: Tel- 0244090262, Email- This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., Whatsapp: 0244090262.

Source: Graphic Online