One of my favorite things to eat in the evening is Kelewele. Now, whenever I buy the Kelewele, before I eat it, I try and squeeze it very, very hard. I see all the oil that comes from it and I tell myself, I can actually cook braised rice with this oil.

I am never eating Kelewele again. I wake up the next day and in the evening, I am the first person in the queue to go for my Kelewele. You see, some of the most interesting things I've seen are 13-year-olds, and 28-year-olds being diagnosed with hypertension. In fact, I recently met a 13-year-old girl who had a history of stroke. This used to be called the disease of the old, What happened?

When it comes to a disease like hypertension, there are usually two main causes.

1. One, we call genetics and

2. Two, lifestyle.

When we say genetics, we simply mean that if your great-grandfather or grandmother had hypertension and your grandmother had hypertension and your mom now has hypertension, it means that there is a probability that you may also get hypertension. Usually, when it comes to genetics, there is not much we can do about it. What we have control over is our lifestyle.

Number one is your diet. 

What you take inside can make or destroy you. Too much sugar, sweet drinks, alcoholic drinks, and bad cholesterol. What cholesterol does is that when you take too much fat, they go and line the insides of your blood vessels and that makes the lumen of your blood vessels very small. Blood is not able to move to all parts of the body easily and your heart has to pump at a very big force to be able to move it and that is what we call hypertension.

Number two is exercise. 

This one, I can't even blame you. It is very hard but you don't have to be in the gym to exercise. One of the things we can adapt into our life is developing a working lifestyle. You don't have to drive everywhere. Some people would even not mind driving to the bathroom.