For many households and restaurants, using paracetamol is the fastest way to prepare meat. It saves gas, kerosene or firewood. And costs much less, N50 for one sachet of 12 tablets, and each tablet can cause a pot-full of meat to cook soft within few minutes.
It’s an amazing discovery, or so it seems. But what they don’t know is that as much as they are quickening the amount of time it takes to cook, they are also quickening their days on mother earth.
“It’s a lot faster to boil meat with paracetamol,” a young mother, Adeola told this writer upon inquiry. “I have used it to cook cow leg on a number of occasions. If you add one tablet, the meat will melt and become soft in just ten minutes.”
But Adeola is endangering her life and those of her young children. She was in shock to realize this.
Paracetamol, ordinarily, is a killer, when consumed regularly to cure a headache or take care of pains, but when cooked in a pot, it’s a certain expressway to kidney or liver failure.
Medical experts say when paracetamol is used in cooking, it loses the pain killer property and becomes highly acidic and dangerous for human consumption.
When the process occurs, paracetamol is hydrolyzed into what is called 4-aminophenol, which, experts say, is highly very toxic to the kidney and liver.
Last week, a facebook user raised alarm about the prevailing use paracetamol to cook goat meat ‘pepper soup’ in Uyo, Akwa Ibom State and other surrounding areas.
Investigations by this writer revealed that restaurant owners opt for paracetamol because it helps them save costs and reduce the waiting time for customers.
Recently, there has been a hike in the number of young Nigerian men coming down with kidney failure, most of which result in death on account of poor medical care, part of the reason for that, apparently is the consumption of paracetamol/panadol ‘pepper soup’ or meat it is used to prepare generally. Ignorance is proving costly in this regard.
In its 2016 report, the Nigeria Medical Journal noted that Chronic kidney disease (CKD) has so prevalent in the country.
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