Nestle company which makes the popular Maggi spice has debunked negative rumors about side effects of consuming the product. As part of the international women’s day celebrations, the Maggi food brand launched a cooking competition with health practitioners in Yaounde.
The aim of the competition was to promote healthy cooking with the different Maggi flavours. It focused on empowering women with better daily food preparation choices to ensure healthy living. Both the cooks prepared tasty meals with Maggie flavours and without salt. Through their cooking skills, the public learnt that that they must always make deliberate effort to use the right measurements of every ingredients in food, especially salt for human consumption.
"For a balanced diet, we need to eat 25% of protein, 25% of carbohydrates and 50% of vegetables. Our traditional meals are our culture and we must nourish our bodies with meals which make up the DNA of the Cameroonian culinary’ said Ngo Mooh Magdeleine, the Culinary Category Development Manager. Even so, this must be done with moderation, she said. “To prepare a meal for six persons, we are encouraged to use 5 maggi cubes or two tablets without salt because maggi contains salt, with 1kg of meat and 1½ltr of broth."
Ngo Mooh added: "We must be careful with the way we cook. People go around eating the wrong foods and end up blaming Maggi for making them sick."
On his part, a nutritionist, Samuel Fotso, stressed on the need of using the specified quantity of Maggi, in food preparation. "Today we've shown how to plan weekly meals for a balanced diet. We are advised to use 5 cubes of Maggi when cooking a meal for six persons. People of age should consume half a cube a day in their meals, without salt" he stated.
Lovelyn Tambang, Application Group and Packaging Manager in charge of Recipe Management, Innovation and Packaging dismissed all claims people hold against maggi as a poisonous substance. "Today on social media you hear people say maggi is produced with ‘formol’ and other dangerous substances, that it makes people sterile but that is all false information. Maggi is produced with natural ingredients which we can easily find in our kitchen like onions, garlic, palm oil, salt and ingredients you'll find in our common market. We have no artificial materials in our product and we follow the guidelines of WHO. All what we do in priority for Nestle is for our safety and healthy lifestyle". She explained that, maggi is made of 50% salt which has a balanced proportion of sodium needed by the human body. She added that, the high presence of this sodium proportion found in crude salt is what usually makes people ill, as the too much salt that is not suitable for human consumption.
To one of the competitors, Dr. Zebaze Sonia of Hope Services Health Centre "this competition has helped women to know how to use Maggi properly. Despite all the truth and lies told about Maggi it has helped them to know how to use it moderately, for the health of everyone and their family members. We used two maggi cubes and one maggi crevette to cook a pot of of okra soup", said Dr. Zebaze.
On her part, Alma of Efoulan District Hospital shared her experience during the competition. "It was a good experience. There are many ways to use Maggi Crevette. We used just one cube to prepare a fruit cocktail. What kills people is the quantity of salt they consume. We are encouraged to use just a little portion of Maggi to season our food" she said.
Sa'ah Siona Ikei, The Post Newspaper
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