The Food That Eats Itself: What Our Ancestors Knew About Whole-Food Digestive Helpers
The Food That Eats Itself: What Our Ancestors Knew About Whole-Food Digestive Helpers
There is a saying among my people that the pot which knows how to cook also knows how to feed the belly without trouble. I grew up watching my grandmother in Ibadan, her hands moving over the mortar and pestle, grinding peppers and mixing things into soups that made the whole compound smell like celebration. She never spoke of science. She never opened any book to learn what she put into the cooking pot. Yet her food never gave anyone heaviness, never made a child complain of a swollen belly after eating. What she knew, what her mother before her knew, was that certain foods carry inside them their own small workers, tiny invisible hands that help the body undo what has been eaten. Today, the learned people in their offices call these things whole-food digestive enzymes, but my grandmother simply called them the friends inside the food. And I want to tell you, dear reader, everything I have gathered about this matter, so that you too may eat with peace and rise from the table without groaning.
What These Small Workers Inside Food Truly Are
Let me explain this thing in the way my uncle would explain it if you sat with him under the mango tree after Sunday rice. When you chew a piece of yam or swallow a spoon of ogbono soup, your body must take that food apart, piece by tiny piece, until it becomes so small that the blood can carry it to every corner of your flesh. This taking-apart is not done by magic. It is done by small helpers that live inside the food itself and also inside your own belly. These helpers are what the educated ones name enzymes, and when they come from the food itself, from the raw fruit, from the fermented seed, from the sprouted grain, we call them whole-food digestive enzymes. They are not made in a factory. They are not mixed in a laboratory by a man in white coat. They are born inside the living food, placed there by the same God who made the seed and the rain. And when you eat the food in its proper form, not overcooked, not beaten to death by too much fire, these small workers enter your belly still alive, still ready to labour.
The Wisdom Our Grandmothers Carried in Their Cooking Pots
You see, in the old days, nobody in my village spoke of supplements or powders or capsules. Nobody swallowed a pill before eating pounded yam. But nobody also walked around holding their stomach and saying the food is fighting them. The reason is simple, and it is this. Our people ate food that was alive. They ate the papaya that had just fallen from the tree, still warm from the sun. They ate the fermented locust bean, the iru, which had sat for three days developing its own sharp smell and its own army of small workers. They ate the pineapple with its rough skin peeled back by hand, and they chewed the mango until the juice ran down the chin. These fruits, these seeds, these living things, they carried their own helpers inside them. The papaya had its own softening power. The pineapple had its own cutting power. The fermented things had their own breaking-down power. And because our people ate them fresh, because they did not drown everything in too much heat, those helpers survived the journey from the farm to the belly and did their work there quietly, without anyone needing to understand the name of what was happening.
How the Body Undoes What We Eat Without Any Confusion
Now let me tell you what happens when food enters the belly, and I will say it plainly because I am not a doctor and I will not use their heavy words. You swallow the food. It travels down. It arrives in the place where the body keeps it, that warm dark room inside you. And there, the body must separate the good part from the rough part, must turn the solid thing into a liquid thing, must pull out the strength of the food and send it where the body needs it. This work is hard labour. If you eat a plate of rice and stew and fried plantain and also a piece of fish, the body must send different workers for the rice, different workers for the fish, different workers for the oil in the stew. And if the food itself brought some of its own workers along, then the body does not carry the whole burden alone. This is the secret. The whole-food helpers share the labour. They begin their work even before the body’s own workers arrive in full number. And so the food is broken down faster, the belly does not swell, the person does not feel that heavy tiredness that comes after a big meal. The person feels light. The person can still walk, can still talk, can still think clearly.
The Foods That Carry Their Own Helpers Inside Them
I want to show you, in a simple way, which foods carry these small workers and what they do when they enter the belly. I have made this small table so that you can look at it and remember when you go to the market tomorrow. These are not strange foods. These are things your mother already buys. These are things growing in the garden behind the house.
| The Food | The Work Its Helpers Do | How Best to Eat It |
|---|---|---|
| Fresh papaya | Softens and breaks apart the tough parts of meat and beans | Eat it raw, ripe, in the morning before other food |
| Fresh pineapple | Cuts through heavy foods and helps the belly feel settled | Eat it fresh, not from a tin, not cooked into cake |
| Fermented locust bean (iru) and fermented seeds | Breaks down the hard outer part of grains and beans | Use it in soups and stews as seasoning, the way grandmothers do |
| Raw honey from the comb | Helps the body handle the sweetness without struggling | Take a small spoon before the main meal, do not put it in hot tea |
| Sprouted beans and grains | Their helpers are already awake and ready to work | Steam them lightly, do not boil them to death |
The thing to notice here is that all these foods must be close to their living state. The moment you put too much fire on them, the moment you boil them for two hours, the moment you fry them in oil that is smoking, those small workers die. They are finished. They cannot help you anymore. And this is exactly what has gone wrong with the way many of us eat today.
Why the Modern Plate Has Lost What the Old Plate Carried
Let me speak honestly to you. In Lagos today, in Abuja, in Port Harcourt, young people eat food that has been frozen for three months, heated in a machine, wrapped in paper, and handed through a window. The yam is not pounded by hand anymore. The pepper is not ground on stone. The soup does not simmer slowly over firewood while a woman sings beside the pot. Everything is fast. Everything is hot, too hot, cooked at temperatures that kill every living thing inside the food. And then people wonder why their belly is always full of wind, why they feel heavy after eating, why they cannot sleep well at night because the food sits in their stomach like a stone. The food is dead before it enters the mouth. It carries no helpers. It brings no friends into the belly. And the body must do all the work alone, with its own limited strength, and it grows tired, and the food sits there undigested, and the person feels unwell without knowing the reason. This is not mystery. This is simply what happens when you remove the living part from eating.
A Word About a Thing Called Enzimlex That I Have Seen
Now, I will tell you about something I came across, and I mention it here because it is relevant to what we are discussing and because some readers will ask me where they can find help if their food does not carry enough of these small workers. There is a digestion support preparation called Enzimlex, and from what I have gathered, it is built around the idea of giving the belly those helpers that modern cooking has destroyed. It is not a medicine. It is a support, a companion for the belly when the food on the plate is not doing enough. But here is the important thing I must tell you, and I will say it clearly so there is no confusion. You cannot find this thing in the pharmacy on the corner. You cannot order it from the big market websites. The only place where a person can get genuine Enzimlex is through its own official website, which is enzimlex.biz I say this because in this country, and indeed everywhere, there are people who will sell you anything and call it by a good name. So if you are interested, go to that one place, enzimlex.biz, and see what it offers for yourself. I am simply a writer telling you what I have found. The choice, as always, belongs to you and your own body.
Returning to the Old Ways While Living in This New Time
I am not saying you must go back to the village. I am not saying you must leave your office job and start farming cassava. I know that life has moved forward and that the young woman working in a bank in Victoria Island cannot spend four hours grinding pepper on a stone. But what I am saying is this. You can add the living foods back into your plate. You can eat the papaya before the rice. You can put the fresh pineapple on the table instead of the bottled juice that is nothing but sugar and water. You can ferment your own things, or buy them from the woman in the market who still does it the old way. You can stop cooking every vegetable until it has no colour left. You can chew your food slowly, the way your grandfather chewed, giving the small workers time to begin their task in the mouth before the food even reaches the belly. These are small changes. They cost nothing. They require no prescription. They are simply a remembering of what was always there before we forgot.
Simple Steps for the Person Who Wants to Begin Today
I promised myself I would not make a long list because my grandmother always said that a person who gives you twenty instructions gives you none. But I will give you these few things, just a handful, so that you can start this very week without feeling overwhelmed by the matter.
First, choose one raw fruit to eat before your main meal every day, and let it be papaya or pineapple or mango, something with its own living helpers still inside it, and chew it slowly, letting the juice mix with your spit before you swallow. Second, find one fermented food and put it into your cooking at least three times in the week, whether it is iru in your stew, or fermented maize for your pap, or the ogi that your mother used to make on Saturday mornings. Third, reduce the fire under your vegetables, stop boiling them until they turn grey, and instead let them keep some colour, some firmness, some life in them. Fourth, drink water that is not ice cold during your meal, because the cold water slows down the small workers and makes their labour harder than it needs to be. Fifth, and this is the last one, do not eat in a hurry, do not eat while standing, do not eat while your eyes are on the telephone screen. Sit down. Be present. Let the eating be a thing you do with your whole self, the way it was always meant to be done.
The Final Word From Under the Mango Tree
I have said what I came to say. The food that carries its own helpers is the food that lets the belly rest. The food that is alive feeds you twice, once with what it contains and once with the small workers it brings along to do the breaking and the separating and the sending of goodness to your blood. Our ancestors did not need anyone to explain this to them. They saw it. They felt it. They ate well and lived long and rose from the table with their bodies light and their spirits full. We have lost some of that, yes. The modern world has taken something from the plate. But it is not gone forever. It is still in the market. It is still in the fruit hanging on the tree. It is still in the seed that sprouts when you give it water and patience. You only need to remember. You only need to choose, one meal at a time, to put the living thing back where it belongs. And your belly, I promise you, will thank you in the way that matters most, which is silence, which is peace, which is the absence of trouble after a good meal. That is the whole of it. Eat well, my friend. Eat alive. And let the food do what the food was made to do.
