As tasty as it is, we all know that the American diet is garbage! However our counterparts over in Africa also have super tasty food, amazing variety, things you may have never heard of!

It’s worth every human looking to and trying African foods.

However, as a diet from a health perspective, how does it stack up to the diet eaten in the USA by African Americans?

Well. This was tested and @sun_of_kemet wrote up on Instagram:

In recent years, public health experts have acknowledged that lowering the risk of the cancer among people of color in the United States, particularly African Americans, will require diet and environmental changes that can only come about through a combination of government intervention and individual fortitude.

However, questions remain about what the ideal food selection should look like for African Americans, a group plagued by significantly high rates of obesity, heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, and other physical ailments. A recent study suggests the answer may lie in the diets of their counterparts across the Atlantic Ocean in the rural parts of the Motherland.

In a study conducted at the University of Pittsburgh, 20 African Americans and 20 South Africans switched diets for two weeks.

In this time, the Africans consumed traditional American food — meat and cheese high in fat content — while African Americans took on a traditional African diet — high in fiber and low in fat, with plenty of vegetables, beans, and cornmeal, with little meat.

After the exchange, researchers performed colonoscopies on both groups and found that those in the African diet group increased the production of butyrate, a fatty acid proven to protect against colon cancer. Members of the American diet group, on the other hand, developed changes in their gut that scientists say precede the development of cancerous cells.

“We wanted to show how diet changes cancer, so we used biomarkers and looked at the proliferation rate that has been tied to cancer,” Dr. Stephen J. O’Keefe, the lead researcher, told ThinkProgress. “We were astounded by the gravity and the magnitude of the changes. In Africans, the diet changes produced microbiota that were cancerous. All this happened within two weeks and was quite astounding. The more we talk about diet, this will be important for all Americans, but most importantly African Americans,” said O’Keefe, a professor of medicine in the Division of Gastroenterology, Hepatology, and Nutrition at the University of Pittsburgh.

Although more than 90 percent of Americans don’t know there’s a link between diet and cancer risk.

What else is there to say, get yourself some plantains!