Mrs Ann Valentina Ideh, a renown
ophthalmologist in Edo State
Diabetes comes due to the fact that we take
too many sugary things and we take a lot of
food that we should not normally take. You
are going out to parties, you don’t know what
they cooked. They give you salad with a lot
of sugar and you eat without knowing the
consequence. Are you aware that when you go
to fast food restaurants, they put a lot of
sugar in the salad you eat to make it sweet?
That is not the way we used to do it. Our
diets have changed a lot. We eat a lot of
processed food. Before, we were eating yam,
garri, home grown rice but now we are eating
polished rice, we do not take enough
vegetables or give them to our children. We
have water bottles inside which we put clean
water for our children but now children go to
school with juice, soft drinks and so on. Their
diet from the beginning is already wrong.
We are giving them noodle to eat and what
is noodle? The spice used in it is not
healthy. Many people walking around are
hypertensive. What we do here is to screen
people for blood pressure during which we find
out a lot of things. You need to have your
blood pressure and your blood sugar screened
at least once a year. If you are told you are
hypertensive or diabetic, it’s usually a lifelong
thing. Our patients think that when you go to
the hospital and your doctor says you are now
controlled, it means you should stop the drugs.
We have a lot of people with that, diabetes is
one of the causes of cataract. Hypertension is
also one of the causes of the problems at the
back of the eye. We have people who come in
like that because they do not know they are
hypertensive.
Diabetic patients cannot have surgery if their
blood sugar is not controlled. If they do, they
might have infections which are bound to heal
slowly. They are most likely to have
complications after surgery. Most of our
diabetic patients, their meals are majorly
carbohydrate, which is mostly starch. Protein is
richer than carbohydrate; so it’s difficult when
you tell the patient to eat a lot of green
plantain, amala made from plantain and wheat.
Here we eat a lot of rice, yam and so on.
Carbohydrate is our main meal but it’s
supposed to be protein and vegetables which
would be the main meal. Children are also
supposed to come in for a check before going
into primary school.
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