; ; ; Bananas in West Africa


By Roland Joseph Tetteh

The word banana comes from west Africa. When the Portuguese arrived in west Africa about 1482, they found the banana was a fruit eating by the native people of west Africa. They also found that the people there were planting bananas, which they decided to spread the news to the western world of Europe.


The banana is one of the oldest fruits in the world. In the biblical lands, those days, they used banana trees as flower decoration. West Africa began using banana for food that no one knows-it reaches back before the dawn of history.


There are two types of banana in west Africa, that is the sweet banana and the plantain. The sweet bananas are usually eaten raw while the starchy plantains are traditionally cooked and eaten as a vegetable.


For millions of people in Africa in general, bananas are very important dietary staple and Africa leads the world in plantain production.
In west Africa, the banana leaf is used for medicinal purposes. The banana plant, often called a tree, is a large herbaceous annual that may reach six (6) meters in height. The trunk of this monocot is not woody, but is actually a rosette of overlapping corm. The leaf blades themselves are also large, often about 2.5 meters in length.


In west Africa the leaf is used to wrap food commonly called kenkey (local Ghanaian dish) and the trunk also used as a sponge for bathing and used to clean the teeth.
In west Africa there are, of cause, a lot more medicinal fruits, some of which are hardly mentioned in general literature books.
Bananas are used naturopathically as a dietary method of controlling allergic reactions.


Eating banana can help prevent a substantial number of illness and conditions making it a must to add to our daily diet. Adding banana to your diet find it reduces the distressing symptoms of runny nose and puffy eyes.


Banana also helps to overcome anemia, blood pressure, constipation, hangovers, heartburn, ulcers, mosquito bite etc.
Banana is very rich in calcium, phosphorus and iron. The Iron in them is more than in an apple.


Bananas contain pectin, which help to digest other foods, and they are very useful for normalizing bowel function in patients with either chronic constipation or chronic diarrhea.


In fact, where there is no doctor, banana will help to boost your energy levels. There is no better snack than a banana containing three natural sugars-sucrose, fructose and glucose contained with fiber. Every part of the banana is useful.


Banana helps the body to store Protein. A banana a day will give you one fifth of the recommended daily intake of vitamin C and the amount of vitamin B6 in bananas is comparable to that in the equivalent weight of liver.