Low-Carb in West Africa: A Paradox?

The other night I was sitting around at night with my sister-in-law and my consultant. I had just listed to the Radio Lome news broadcast, so it was around 7:15pm. My sister-in-law prepared a meal of corn porridge (pate in French, akple in Ewe) for everybody. Given my Wegovy regime, I am not usually hungry at night, so I did not eat any. But everybody else had a huge plate of corn porridge with some sauce on the side. I estimated that the plates had three or four heaping cups of corn porridge.

What the heck!

This was not unusual. I have seen Togolese eat this kind of meal at night many times. They were ingesting a tidal wave of carbohydrates, and then heading off to bed. But what about all the warnings about eating high carbohydrate meals before bed time? What about all that harmful glucose floating around in their blood all night long?

More generally, the Togolese in the village eat a huge amount of carbohydrates. Generally, they eat a very light breakfast, but lunch and dinner is always a big helping of carbohydrates, usually corn porridge with sauce. But at least in the village, it is rare to see an overweight person. And I really doubt there is much diabetes. There are no official records and healthcare is not that great in the village, but it just seems to me that the villagers are all of a healthy weight, and probably not diabetic.

Shouldn’t I be able to eat exactly like them, with no health consequences. Is the whole low-carb idea a western fad, and ultimately just bullshit? What exactly am I doing?

But I know for a fact that at a certain point of my life my A1c was 6.4 (the last pre-diabetic notch before being considered diabetic). I also know for a fact that I had a serious problem with urination at night, and that it was probably linked to being pre-diabetic (and having too much glucose in my blood at night). I also know that I was (and still am) severely obese, with many obesity related health problems.

How can I reconcile all these observations? I think there are a few things going on here. 

In the context of traditional village life, people are more physically active than I am in my ivory tower at NYU. I do teach but it is only two courses a semester. For most of the rest of the time, I am sitting my chair in my office either reading or writing, so that is extremely sedentary. It is basically an office job.

The average Togolese person in the village is moving about all day doing various tasks, including going to the farm to work in the fields. Granted, working in the fields is not an everyday affair, but even on other days, they are continually moving about engage in various tasks.

It stands to reason that they will be able to burn off those calories more easily than me, even if they are ingested as carbohydrates and even if they are ingested at night. The exact biological mechanics are beyond my pay grade.

The other huge difference is the nature of the carbohydrates. In the west, we have been brainwashed by the food industry to consume very unhealthy high processed foods, like breakfast cereals loaded with sugar (which I happily fed to my own children for years) and highly processed white bread. These foods are in direct contrast to the carbohydrates consumed in the village, such as corn porridge and fufu, which are not processed in the same way. I feel that this difference makes the kind of carbohydrates consumed in Togo (especially in conjunction with sauces filled with leafy green vegetables and oil) less threatening to blood glucose levels than the kind of junk consumed on the day-to-day basis in the US. Once again, the mechanics are above my pay grade.

These are my preliminary thoughts on resolving what I take to be a paradox: healthy non-diabetic Togolese eating carbohydrate rich meals late at night.