My case is a personal testimony of how diet can change your life. Since the age of 3yrs old until very recently, the only thing that has taken me to the hospital is injuries since I was a hyper active boy. Between the Ages of say 10 and 27 yrs, I practically never visited any hospital for any medical condition. I also rarely caught a cold or any other form of disease. My friends also get amazed at my ability to withstand feeling cold when they are fully loaded with a number of sweaters when I chose to remain in a T-shirt.

There was a day that as young adults, we went for an outing to Ngong Hills, some real famous hill range south of Nairobi. On this particular day it decided to rain for over 5 hours as we climbed the hill and descended later. We got so cold that we had to play soccer as a way of keeping warm. The next day, I was the only one who was able to move around as the rest spent their whole day in bed to keep warm and avoid getting sick. What do I attribute this to? I believe strongly to the food I was brought up eating.

My Mum is a strong believer in cooking traditional meals where the only artificial ingredient she would add to the food is salt. She believed in boiling everything first then later frying the food by adding a little oil and tomatoes and onions to taste. Our stable diet at home was
1.A mixer of maize and beans commonly called githeri' with additional carrots, potatoes and cabbages to add color to the meal.
2.A mixer of maize and beans pounded together with pumpkin leaves, bananas and potatoes to form a green variant of a meal we call mataha' which could also be yellow in color when you remove the pumpkin leaves to become matoke' or be brown in color when you add a special type of bean we call njugu' which was my favorite.
3. When my mum was real tired, she would prepare a meal of shifted flour mixed with water and cooked to form a type of hard dough that looks similar to a cake called ugali'. We would then eat it with an abundance of milk from the cows that we had. Our favorite part of the ugali' was the crust that remained on the pan since my mum was not the best cook of the dish. We would heat it until crisp then mix it with milk. Up to date, this mixer is sweeter than any breakfast cereal I have tasted!
4.Meat was not my mum's delicacy, so occasionally she would yield to our insistence and prepare a meal of rice with meat stew or chicken stew which we would heartily enjoy.
5.Finally as the last part of her menu

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