0 comments
0 viewsIn Swaziland, some Aids patients have resorted to eating cow dung mixed with water. These patients are not quelling hunger pangs, they are saving their own lives – ARVs don’t work on an empty stomach. The drugs need to be absorbed through the digestive process, which requires something to digest in the first place.
No matter what your illness, if you don’t have the right kind of food, you won’t survive. Whilst clinics and hospitals all over Africa provide patients with ARVs and TB medication, ensuring that these patients have at least one proper nutritional meal a day is often beyond their reach, just as it is financially and geographically beyond the reach of many of the families or areas worst afflicted by illnesses such as Aids or TB.
Eleven years ago, innovative South African social entrepreneur Basil Kransdorff, an industrial chemist by trade, developed a solution to this nutrition crisis. He created a maize meal pap with all the necessary micro-nutrients for a complete diet. In fact, e’Pap has 29 times the amount of nutrients as are found in normal refined maize, with a single portion containing the nutrient equivalent of a ten course meal. Weight gains of between two and five kilograms are regularly reported within five to 10 days of first consuming e’Pap, while marked improvements in energy and concentration, sleep habits and skin condition have also been clinically observed.
Furthermore, the pap does not require cooking and is made by simply adding water, milk, maas or yoghurt and stirring, which makes it an accessible and easy nutritional solution for people in areas without electricity. On top of all this, a single portion of e’Pap costs next to nothing – between R1 and R2 per day.
As a nutrient dense food, rather than merely giving a ‘full-feeling’, e’Pap also addresses the ‘hidden hunger’ in the human body – the need for minerals and nutrients which are actually absorbable by the body. It focuses on providing people with micro-nutrients, rather than just macro-nutrients which is the focus of most feeding schemes.
Krunsdorff says that “People have forgotten what food is about” and that e’Pap was specifically designed to maximise “bio available nutrient density” which means that, unlike the majority of supplements, e’Pap’s added nutrients and minerals are designed to mimic their natural form so that the body can recognise them and thus process them.
It is quickly apparent that e’Pap is not only a smart product in theory, but that it works on the ground too. A Mozambican local speaks of e’Pap as a “magic food”. An activist working for an Aids NGO in Mozmbique says simply, “e’Pap saves lives. If you have e’Pap, you live. If you don’t, you die”. She sends shipments of e’Pap to Mozambique every month and the difference is clear: those getting the e’Pap can now live, for a considerable length of time and relatively comfortably, on ARVs.
When such drugs are taken by people who are malnourished, this can result in strong nausea and throwing up any of the medicine just taken. A Mozambican local speaks of e’Pap as ‘the magic food that helps our patients recuperate forcefully.’
Since its inception e’Pap has proven that it can be a cheap, accessible and effective solution for the hungry and the sick, both in South Africa and the world beyond. Over the last eight years, over 42-million food portions of e’Pap have been delivered via community-based structures across the African continent.
Krunsdorff says “People often believe that products developed in Africa are inferior. We are very proud that we’ve created a state of the art product that we know is going to change the future road map of our continent”.