Eating Healthy Isn't Expensive

By Tonisha Rock-Yaw

Claims that Barbadians cannot eat healthy because healthy foods are too expensive are being dismissed by Vice President of the Heart & Stroke Foundation, Ena Harvey.

At a meeting to launch the March 15 Different Strokes: the polo edition fundraiser recently, she described this belief as a misbelief stating that if Barbadians really wanted to get healthier and reduce the growing number of non-communicable diseases they would return to eating our local ground provisions.

“We are what we eat, we can reduce the food import bill, we [can] get healthy. . . if we eat christophine, spinach, the okra and breadfruit. All those things that are good for us. A lot of people don’t know for example, that the guava is much more nutritious than a [foreign] apple and that the apples that we get sometimes [are] a year old from last year’s autumn season. That eight Bajan cherries have enough vitamin C for you for the entire day and that our food is healthy food. Coconut oil, coconut water are good for us and that we need to consume all of that. People need to be sensitise to know and to feed their children our food. Feed their babies, feed their toddlers from the pot. You don’t need to have expensive food to be healthy,” Harvey stressed.

Harvey lamented that this misbelief was causing harm among the population especially our young children.

In the October 2019 Atlas of Childhood Obesity survey released by World Obesity, it showed that in 2016 15.8 per cent of boys and 15.1 per cent girl aged five to none were obese; 10.6 per cent of boys and 10.9 per cent of girls aged ten-19 were diagnosed as obese. That organisation predicts that by the year 2030 11,648 Barbadian children ages five – 19 will have obesity.

At Heart & Stroke we run a youth gym for clinically obese kids. . . . We have kids 11 years old who suffer from hypertension, diabetes and it’s because of the way that we feed our kids, because of the food culture of our families now. Where time is not taken and food is not honoured. A lot of things have to change in our society for us to reach this goal of being healthy and well,” Harvey maintained.

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