Bakeries, restaurants are promoting unhealthy diets

Every corner of Kampala is dotted with billboards of unhealthy and cheap food. Not for downtown clients but working-class residents. It is a class statement being seen and eating in these fast-food restaurants. The advertised chicken drumsticks and chips are attractive to the eye but dangerous to your body and children are hooked.

Everyone is becoming a baker and there is a corner cake shop everywhere you turn and soda is so cheap; increasing unnatural sugar in take more than our body needs. Cooking classes are about whipping wheat!

It is a painful sight, seeing overweight children of formerly village raised parents devouring these unhealthy foods with gusto. Have they forgotten what their grandmothers and their parents fed on?

It is certainly not true that these parents cannot afford healthy organic foods for their families. It is an absurd bourgeoisie (middle class) statement.

In the last 20 years, there has been a sharp rise in non-communicable diseases (NCDs) such as diabetes, hypertension, stroke and heart attacks. In 2021, NCDs killed at least 43 million people worldwide. Of these, 18 million died before the age of 70 and; 82 percent of these deaths occurred in low-income countries like Uganda.

With Uganda’s compromised healthcare services, sedentary lifestyles, we better change our eating habits. I have been to ‘eatshops’ and ‘meatings’ (they nicely call them workshops and meetings). With spring-rolls, egg-rolls, chapati, meatballs, chicken wings, cake slices, sausages and the appetising meat samosas coffee/tea breaks, you are a potential candidate for NCDs.

I have asked at these restaurants and hotels why we cannot have apples bananas or cavendish (bogoya) or groundnuts and other healthy meals such as old yummy katogo (casserole) and the answers have been bizarre!

“Our clients don’t like it. They cannot come from their homes and come to a top restaurant and eat katogo!”, “We discuss with meeting organisers and they are the ones that sometimes suggest this menu”, “Our clients are classy people. They cannot be munching at groundnuts, which will leave ‘pink flags’ in their teeth”;

“This is not a village eating joint. When you go back to Rubirizi, you can eat those”, “Catering Institutes don’t teach us those local things of yours. They are not continental. We love Mzungu foods”

With the arrival of ordering food online, we are in for a rude shock. One of the delivery guys told me; “Our delivery bags are not designed for fish stew, millet bread and steamed bananas. They are for ‘dry foodstuffs’ Besides, these restaurants and cafes are not run by Ugandans. They do not know about Ugandan food. The boxes which we pack in cannot hold soup!”

As a people, we need to sober up. Maybe it is time for restaurants and cafes to write on their muffin, pizza, burger and cake boxes words as; ‘Eating this food maybe harmful to your health’ as alcohol and cigarette companies were compelled to do. I think the Ministry of Health would be glad to enforce this.

I recently talked to a marketing manager of a ‘juice’ product from one of the big beverages company that produces ‘apple juice.’ I asked him where they source their apples. He looked at me with an empty stare. And asked another from an orange juice producing company in Eastern Uganda to at least share with me a list of 10 farmers they buy oranges from.

He advised me to read the packaging; it reads; ‘Orange Flavoured Juice’ and the other was; ‘apple flavoured.’ My friend, these restaurants seldom serve pure fruit juice but concentrates. That ‘juice’ from the ‘reputable’ company is something that looks like and tastes like fruit juice but it is an industrial concoction.

So, what if you changed just one little thing in your diet and don’t eat cake or chapati for a month with a promise that you have five more years added onto your life, would you do it for me?

Aggrey Nshekanabo, team leader at Naalya Motel, Kampala.

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