Nigerians Should Take Food As Medicine So You Won’t End Up taking medicine As Food
Judex OKORO and Missang AKPET
Professor Henry C. Uro-Chukwuemeka, a licensed physician. He has been a clinician for 30 good years, 1995 to 2025. He joined the university in 1999 and has spent 26 years in lecturing, research and of course mentoring people. He was trained at the university of Port Harcourt, medicine and surgery and graduated in 1995. After that, he furthered his education in the United Kingdom at the University of Westminster London where he obtained a postgraduate Masters Degree in public health. On his return to Nigeria in 2013, he worked with the state government as a medical officer and rose through the ranks of assistant director at the same time.
Before traveling to the UK, he was a lecturer in the College of Medicine at the Ebonyi State University where he started as an assistant lecturer. Later, he undertook another Masters Degrees in health policy and health systems, Masters Degree also in food chemistry and of course a Master's Degree in Clinical Nutrition from University of Aberdeen in Scotland United Kingdom. After that, he obtained a Ph.D because of his interests in understanding what critical role food plays in human health.
In this interview, Professor Henry C. Uro-Chukwuemeka admonishes Nigerians to take food as medicine so that they will not end up taking medicine as our food. He corroborates Hippocrates, who argues that when you take medicine as your food, it means you're going to take 10 to 20 tablets every day for you to survive but when you take food as your medicine it means you are going to eat food in such a pattern or manner that you can only take what is required, He contends that human health revolves around what goes in so that is what actually captivated my interest to begin to dive into the relationship of the science of food.
Excerpts:
Why this online NutriMED Online Clinic clinic?
Well, I am a firm believer in the founder of medicine, the father of medicine globally known as Hippocrates, who believes that we should take food as our medicine so that we will not end up taking medicine as our food. Hippocrates argues that when you take medicine as your food, it means you're going to take 10 to 20 tablets every day for you to survive but when you take food as your medicine means you are going to eat food in such a pattern or manner that you can only take what is required and recommended for your body's healthy growth and maintenance so that is what the man meant and so everything that you see about human health revolves around what goes in so that is what actually captivated my interest to begin to dive into the relationship of the science of food.
So, on the science of food, I need to understand the biochemistry of food because that is the chemical that reacts in the system. Having gone through that, I decided to now understudy the science of food, I enrolled and obtained a PhD in food science and technology in 2018 from East Edge University and became the first physician in Africa to undertake a PhD in Food Science and Technology. You know, when you understand the chemistry and the science of food, you may also want to know the application in clinical practice. So, as a clinician, I was so much interested in understanding this. That is what informed my taking up the master's degree in clinical nutrition from one of the oldest universities in the world, the University of Aberdeen in the United Kingdom in 2022.
Now, I discovered that along the line there is nothing about foods in our environment or our local foods. As a clinician, when people come to the clinic to consult, we are more interested in telling them what to do and most of the things we tell them to do are most often than not things that you and I know are western. There was absolutely nothing about our local foods, there was nothing about what should people do to keep healthy. So, this is again what informed me to begin to write books which I have done 10 books on the whole. I have published six of them.
With all this experience and knowledge obtained, I decided to pass down the knowledge and educate the public. I now looked at the target audience and saw that the best way to reach this Gen Z population effectively world over is through the social media. This is the reason why I decided to start this online clinic where we can discuss the relationship between nutrition and medicine and how we can prevent diseases with food and how we can apply what's in our environment to treat sicknesses. This is why NutriMED Online Clinic was birthed. We will be able to tell everybody who follows our YouTube channel what they need to do to be healthy. Everybody, whether you are healthy, young or old, newborn or very elderly, politician or professor, journalist or artisan, no matter who you are, no matter where you are, you must eat food.
We are trying to basically do something that will touch every human being on earth, every single family on earth, every single community on earth, the society remains healthy and of course the state or nation or country or region or globally. We are healthy not out of having so much funds but out of making use of the food in your environment out of quality preparation and safety measures, out of understanding that you can have 20 varieties for instance but there are ones you choose depending on your health status. You can have a whole cow to yourself and eat if you have all the money but you don't know that with 80 grams of red meat consumption a day you are subjecting yourself to cancer.
The Clinic is born out of 30 years’ experience putting down and getting across to people. I’m having all these experiences from the classroom teaching, from seeing my patients from my interactions from my own personal experiences in what happens to adaptation of all kinds of food in this world.
People are adulterating even the live chickens, with drugs, with chemicals, and even the way we store our seeds, and we smoke them is contamination and adulterated. So, who is safe? Nobody. Who is free? Nobody! But if we don't take it hard on and then begin to educate people, then there’ll be problem. The world belongs to the people. So, once the people begin to perceive that the particular way that food is stored is wrong, and that the particular way that food is prepared is wrong, then the world will change because we are looking at healthy living and aging healthy. If you are not healthy, if you are 200 years old and you are sick, then you will be very unpleased with yourself. But if you are healthy and you age-healthy, you will be happy with everybody around you, of course, with your Creator. This is our target and our aim is reaching everybody all over the world.
_Why chose May 28, 2025 for the launch?_
We launched it on May 28 because we found that the United Nations have set aside May 28, every year, as World Nutrition Day to address imbalances, food insecurity, to address poverty, to address deprivations, to address malnutrition of all kinds, both the hidden and the obvious. So, choosing May 28 2025 to launch NutriMED marked my 30 years as a physician, a mark of my 26 years as a university lecturer, a mark of my rise to the rank of a professor of nutritional chemistry and as a professor of public health and community medicine and of course as a visiting professor of health policy account systems. All of these experiences from different universities bring it down to talking to your own people because human beings are the same no matter your race and anything that affects anybody here can affect anybody in the U.S and the fact of migration and travel, people in Nigeria are all over the world, people in America and Nigeria. So if you are pushing up something that will make everybody healthy, of course, you are trying to protect the health of everybody.
_How will this clinic, operate?_
Well, we have mapped out that every week we have a topic we'll discuss. That topic will be there for one good week, seven days and we expect that people would have listened to me talk if you have subscribed to our YouTube channel. First of all, we have a field visit, for instance, if I go to a food vendor, I'm going to understand what she's doing, how hygienic, what is the recipe, and then how healthy is her food. It's not about what your culture is, because there can be bad cultures transmitted from generation to generation, it's about telling you that this is wrong. Now, when we have done that, we encourage healthy eating, fresh foods and all that, fruits eating and all that. So, when we have gone to the field, we come down and sit down and educate the people. It's going to be filled with questions and, of course, I'll try to teach.
On the YouTube, each episode is going to last not more than 10 minutes, 8 to 10 minutes and then we'll give rooms for questions and answers so, people are going to listen and ask questions. We'll use the whole one week to answer questions. On that episode, we have shots. And, of course, the second week will be another episode. So, for every week of the month and for every month of the year continuously God willing there will be something new for people to watch on that channel and if there are some questions they should consult me for instance for personalised nutrition or for treatment of their diseases.
We have a solution to most of the illnesses because there is no aspect of medicine that doesn't require nutrition. And so in that clinic, physicians are going to be there, surgeons will be there,
Professors and of course, consultants, my fellow colleagues will be there. Nurses will be there, professional nutritionists will be there, school children will be there. So, when we launch, we will try to let the people see that there are policymakers. For example, when we visited the abattoir, we saw that the place was filthy and yet everybody consumes meat from there yet they didn't understand it. When we visited the rice field, we saw that we are just processing the rice with something like nail polishes and contacts, some didn't even cover their hair. These are the things that people overlook, but we are going to push for policymakers to insist that the right thing be done. I've observed this even in our small-scale or medium-scale or large-scale industries.
_How affordable is the service you intend to render today to your clients?
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We're not talking about money, I mean, for instance, if I want to put this on the YouTube, everybody can access the YouTube so long as you have data so nobody's paying me. However, if you are consulting me as a physician to take care of your personalised nutrition or personalised care or personalised management of any of those clinical infectious diseases, well of course we have to look at it. We are going to be on Facebook, on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and of course all the social media handles will be there.
_Advice for people like us who are staying outside the state and especially in terms of the way we eat, the way we consume food?_
The world is very diverse we cannot on an interview like this give you something, the only thing I have done is that every week you're going to get an update and if you subscribe, subscription doesn't mean you are paying, it's just for you to click so that you can have access to my YouTube channel. So, if you are following up and you have questions we can handle it. Our Episodes will be live on YouTube, you can join us while we livestream live say maybe from 10 to 11 a.m. We have already taken some episodes. We will load all the video that we have taken. We have videos that will take us the next six months which we have already prepared and so every week, the videos are automatically pushed to the public. There won’t be a case of we lacking what to say or what to show you, let them just have a simple way of sparin0g 10 minutes to look at my YouTube channel subscribing to it and then looking at what we are doing and I’m sure they will be very happy they're not paying me any money.
_Running this, you know, by the time you go two years, three years, four years, it is cost effective, and do you have any plans of monetizing the YouTube channel in future?_
Yeah, I think it's natural for a client to pay once you hit a certain mark. I mean, it's there for them. I'm not going to start begging them to pay me. Yes, in terms of resource input, I know it's quite expensive. I've spent some millions already trying to shoot a 5 Episode video. It’s quite expensive, especially in this part of the country. I mean, one episode, if you add the total cost input, it's about a quarter of a million, that’s about N250, 000 to shoot, to edit, and then to, you know, upload. Like I said, this is my 30 years in practice, I'm giving back to the society. But if people want to advertise their products, it is ok, but we'll be very careful. For us to accept your product for advert on our YouTube channel, we must be sure that it does not infringe on the basic principles because if you are producing a toxic company, or a toxic product, sorry we certainly are not going to run, even if you pay a million Dollar. But if you think that what you're producing is healthy for the society, then fine, I cannot put my face for anything that is not healthy, because that would be very much against what we’re preaching.
_Looking at this online clinic, does it have a lifespan? For how many years do you think you're going to run this? Is it going to be something that will always be there?_
Well, it's going to be there for number of years, there's no lifespan. The lifespan is as long as God gives me life. Incidentally, coincidentally, and by the special design of God Almighty, I have children who are also already missing, not one, not two. They chose their profession by themselves and are also part of this. Some of them are already showing interest in what I'm doing. So, it's going to be more like a family thing, but their succession will not be a problem. Even if, for instance, God takes me any day, people, and the NutriMed Online Clinic will be something I hope will continue.
