Organically produced natural foods guarantee good health says Dr Arnold

Ghana News Agency, 5 Aug 2011

Food items produced from organic farming is nature’s prescription for good health, speakers at a seminar on diabetes in Ho advised on Wednesday.

The seminar under the auspices of “The Life for the Living Medical Centre and Buem Micro-farming Project and Co-operative Society” was attended by medical doctors, agriculturists, chiefs and diabetic patients.

“We have to invest in sustainable organic gardening”, Dr David Arnold, Founder of the West African Rural Empowerment Society, advised.

Dr Arnold whose Society is promoting organic farming among peasant farmers in the Mberi Kingdom in Nigeria and old Baika-Buem in Ghana through a small loans scheme, urged Ghanaian farmers to give up inorganic farming practices and “get back to the ways of your ancestors”.

He said organic farming was the best bet for good health and longevity for a developing country such as Ghana.

Dr Arnold said there was a direct link between the prevalence of diabetes in Ghana and the quality of food people eat.

He said the surest way to reverse the diabetes boom was to revert to eating foods produced organically and indigenous to the country.

“You have the soil and water, you have the will. You have to make an example,” he added.

Dr Arnold said organic sustainable gardening also had the potential to keep many young people in the rural areas away from the cities if given the right schemes and financial support.

Mr John Tsrakasu, Volta Regional Director of Food and Agriculture, said evidence of the potential viability of organic farming in Ghana could be found in the Keta Municipal area where onions and other vegetables were grown using droppings from bats.

He said human faeces and the droppings of animals provided abundant sources of organic matter for improving soils and crop yields.

Mr Tsrakasu said there were also indigenous weeds and shrubs which had similarly proved to be good for organic farming.

He said unfortunately, schemes aimed at popularizing organic farming were short lived.

Mr Tsrakasu said it was about time organically produced food items were consumed locally rather than being exported.

Dr Gabriel Cousens of the Tree of life Rejuvenation Centre Arizona, USA, asserted that diabetes could be cured.

He said the secret lay in the consumption of organically produced and natural foods.

Dr Cousens said within three weeks of following the regimen, diabetes patients could be cured no matter their type of diabetes or how long they had been living with the disease.

“There is a natural cure for diabetes otherwise there is something wrong no doubt about it”, he said.

Dr Cousens described diabetes as a chronic degenerative syndrome caused by downgrade in genetic and epigenetic programme.

He said the diabetic condition could be reversed by turning off the genetic and epigenetic toxicity through diet because what we eat affects our genes.

Dr Cousens said this would bring an end to the toxic memory, increase the genetic expression thus turning off the toxic process and turn on the generative process.

Dr Timothy Letsa, Volta Regional Director of Health, who chaired the seminar, said self discipline in eating habits would be required to reap the full benefits of eating for good health.