THE OTHER USE OF TRANSFORMER OIL;CAN'T BELIEVE

THE OTHER USE OF TRANSFORMER OIL; CAN’T BELIEVE THIS!

Before you bite that chips or mandazi, look and think twice before you leap. You may scold a doctor for his usual brief health tips and Alphonce for this rare counsel, but you cannot make a health living without. Anyway, listen carefully. A visit to Nairobi could be mistaken of thinking Nairobian as a fast food section in Kenya. Yet, for non-visitors like me it’s the same story. KEBS assures of standardized quality products to Kenyan consumers but it has never told us anything about chips and chicken as a consumption product in the busy swallowing Nairobians. The delicacies, as we call them, are beckoning our early interment too little fast. How? Please read with me.

Not once, not twice I have gone without electricity for two or more days because oil has been stolen from the transformer. Theft of transformer oil is habitual in Nairobi estates with Dandora, Kibera, Kitengela, Kariobamgi and South C topping the list. Despite the “Mulika Mwizi” initiative with its superb advert, the saboteurs have now proved to outsmart all the alarms and traps. Being the inquisitive person that I am, I sought to find out the real use for the dreaded yet coveted transformer oil. To start with, transformer oil has four main uses: it si used to treat skin disorders; to my superstitious Luhya, Kisii & Kalenjin it is a talisman (i.e. protects against all other evil charms to babies); it is used as fuel for industrial furnaces; or it’s mixed with vegetable oil and hence used as cooking oil. Looking at these uses, there is nothing to fret about but on double-clicking the latter; two things come into big picture: your health, your life. From just the look, this had me scratching my head.
Where in Nairobi
The astonishing news on how the Nairobi’s Tom Mboya and River Road fast food joints use transformer oil for cooking the “delicacies,” sent me prematurely into books for quickie research. And my findings are more than a textbook can offer, divulging the looming lethal hazard.

Technically speaking, transformer oil is a mineral oil used to cool and insulate the fins of an electric transformer. For starters, mineral oil and vegetable oil are different in that in that the former is made from petroleum fuel. The transformer oil is characterized by its high temperature stability and resistance to vitiation due to overuse. Vitiation and deterioration of the vegetable oil by constant re-use and poor storage results in poor quality oil. The frying oil that has a dark colour, shifted flavour and unwanted odour is not unusual. The chips vendors have unisonly opted to adulterate the normal vegetable oil with the transformer oil to suppress the shifted flavour and ensure re-use and re-use (more than 6 months). It might sound like an Einstein ingenuity but the sacrificial lamb is we the consumer since it leaves harmful substances to our ailing health. The outcome, as you might have guessed, is ingestion of harmful fatty acids and free radicals that are linked with chronic diseases like diabetes, cancer and heart disease. According to Mwindangasi (name changed deliberately), a chips vendor in town, “the more the proportion of the transformer oil, the better. The oil helps reduces darkening of bhajias.” He goes on to justify himself that, “If people sometimes back used formalin to embalm ‘ka-ngumus’, we even better!”

Delicious poison
I am not worried by the use of the oil, in fact I am troubled by the high-rate of daily consumption of this delicious poison. If it is not the junk itself, it’s the oil in the junk that is yet to mangle your body system. I cannot overemphasize the effects of high fats in diets to our bodies; the complications like obesity and the chronic diseases like heart disease, stroke and diabetes. Paradoxically, instead of fighting down Trans fats we are introducing a more lethal one. For now, before you swallow that piece of chips, chicken, bhajia, boiled in this kind of oil think…when do I want to die?

Alphonce M. Magati
For http://magati2020.blogspot.com