If You Understand These, You Won't Have To Live In Sickness by Apostle Femi Lazarus: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

The Key to Living Longer Is Not in the Hospital

This is a podcast conversation between Apostle Femi Lazarus (host) and a leading natural health practitioner and herbalist known as "the most wanted woman in Africa" in her field, whose social media pages were disabled after her previous appearance. The conversation focuses on indigenous African plants, food, and what we are losing as those traditions disappear.

Trees Going Extinct — and Why It Matters

These trees are not just disappearing. Their disappearance is actively affecting our lifespan, our health, and our environment.

• The shea tree, the dawadawa tree (locust bean), and the oil bean tree (uba tree) are among the most nutrient-dense and medicinally powerful plants known to man — and they are going extinct through urbanization and timber harvesting.
• Most of what is sold as uba (oil bean) outside Nigeria is now the inside of a mango seed. The supply cannot meet demand because the trees are being cut down.
• Every human needs approximately 20 trees to maintain healthy air and environment. When those trees disappear, climate disruption and erosion follow. Trees are not just trees — they are medicine, memory, and nutrient-dense food.

What We Are Overlooking in Our Food

Our taste buds in West Africa have been conditioned by seasoning cubes. But seasoning cubes are not seasoning — they are a substitution. African cuisine has its own rich, medicinal flavors built in:

• Black pepper (uziza seed) — crush fresh before cooking to preserve aroma, flavor, and medicinal value.
• Alligator pepper, uda (negro pepper), calabash nutmeg (ahuru) — these are not just spices; they are medicinal compounds with antioxidants, flavonoids, and prebiotics.
• Ogiri (fermented locust bean) — one of the highest sources of plant protein, prebiotics, and antioxidants. The Chinese have bagged it as tea and sell it at high prices for diabetes and blood pressure conditions. Meanwhile, it sits in every West African market.
• Prekese (aidan fruit) — a powerhouse spice. If burned in a space, snakes cannot remain. Used medicinally to treat fibroids. An unacknowledged superfood.

When these ingredients are combined correctly, food does not need seasoning cubes. Food becomes medicine.

The Connection: Food, Trees, Environment, Health

Everything connects. Bioavailability, biodiversity, lifespan — it all comes down to what we put in our mouths and the environment we live in. God designed us to live long. We have built a system that cuts it short.

• Seasoning cubes — manufactured products designed to replace what our indigenous ingredients already provide better — have hooked West Africa's palate.
• Countries like Finland and Norway have more forest than houses, directly impacting life expectancy.
• Urbanization and the cutting of indigenous trees for timber is not just an environmental issue — it is a public health crisis.

Understanding Sickness and the Body's Design

Sickness is not random — it follows patterns. The body communicates in an organic language. The same way you feel hunger or thirst, the spirit communicates a call into the presence of God. Sin (the nature of darkness housed in the body) exploits legitimate appetites to distract, to draw away from God, to preoccupy.

When the body is rightly nourished — with the right foods, the right environment, the right spiritual posture — the conditions that enable sickness find less ground to work with.

The preventive model is the biblical model. You do not wait for sickness and then fight it. You build an environment — in your body and around you — where sickness struggles to thrive. Indigenous trees, indigenous foods, indigenous wisdom — these were not primitive. They were precise. And they are disappearing.

Allergies, Trauma, and the Body's Memory

Some food aversions that appear to be allergies are actually trauma responses — the body's memory of a painful experience associated with a particular food or sensation. These can be hereditary, passing through family lines as a kind of biological record.

Understanding the difference between a true allergy and a conditioned response is important — because some of what we call allergy is a pattern that can be addressed, while a genuine allergy must be respected and navigated carefully.

Replanting What We Are Losing

The mission is not nostalgia — it is preservation of health, culture, and lifespan. Replanting indigenous trees preserves:

• Our medicinal resources
• Our cultural memory
• Our nutrient-dense food supply
• Our climate stability
• Our life expectancy

There is a way to urbanize and still preserve nature. Countries are doing it. The knowledge exists. The will must follow.