By Abashi Rahab
Not too long ago, I found myself standing by a roadside food stall, just watching the world go by. It was evening, and the queue was steady. One after another, people placed their orders as if on autopilot. I watched a man buy a heap of fried yam and sauce, “wash it down” with a chilled soft drink, and disappear into the night.
To any onlooker, the scene was unremarkable. In fact, it felt deeply familiar, a routine millions of us perform daily without a second thought. And that is precisely the heart of the problem.
For many Nigerians, eating has become a mechanical act rather than a nutritional one. We reach for what is available, what is fast, and what provides that immediate satisfaction.
We rarely pause to interrogate what is in our “plastic” food or how those hidden ingredients might be rewriting our health story. To be fair, it is not always a case of intentional neglect; often, we are simply creatures of habit.
There is also a stubborn myth that eating right is a luxury reserved for the wealthy. This misconception leads many to throw in the towel before they have even tried. But the truth is, health is not always about the weight of your wallet; it is about the quality of your choices.
That daily soft drink that has become a mealtime staple, the cultural preference for food swimming in oil, and the habit of swapping real meals for processed snacks are decisions that cost us dearly in the long run.
The real danger lies in the silence of the damage. These choices don’t strike immediately; they erode our health slowly. Over the years, they manifest as high blood pressure, diabetes, and chronic fatigue, all conditions that build up quietly until they can no longer be ignored.
What makes this reality so tragic is that eating better is well within our reach. Many of our local staples, like beans, local rice, vegetables, and plantains, are nutritional powerhouses when we treat them with respect.
The secret is not in buying expensive or packaged food; it is in reducing the oil, cutting the sugar, and finding balance in what we already have on our plates. It is about the small, daily steps that move us away from digging our graves with our teeth.
Breaking these habits is no walk in the park, especially when they are woven into the fabric of our daily lives. However, awareness is a powerful catalyst. Choosing water over soda, being mindful of portion sizes, and thinking twice before defaulting to the usual oily foods are small steps that lead to a massive outcome.
In the end, our health is rarely determined by a single meal. It is shaped by the repeated, unthinking choices we make every day. We often complain that healthy food is expensive, and in a tough economy, that can be true. But we seldom talk about the true cost of eating carelessly.
One day, the bill comes due. It stops being about the price of a plate of food and starts being about hospital bills, lifelong medication, and a life forced to slow down long before its time. By then, the conversation is no longer about what we ate—it’s about what those choices have taken from us.
Abashi Rahab is a student of Strategic Communication at Yakubu Gowon University, Abuja. An intern with IMPR. She can be reached at: abashirahab@gmail.com.