Shola Oladipo has a story she tells about okra. In some West African traditions, she explains, mothers warn against eating it during pregnancy – the fear being that its slippery texture will make their future baby dribble. She finds this both charming and instructive. Because okra, as it turns out, is extraordinarily good for you.
High in folate, fibre, low on the glycaemic index. Widely consumed across West Africa and the Caribbean, it has been drunk as okra water by pregnant women for generations, valued long before anyone had the language of glycaemic index to explain why. The culture, Shola suggests, often knows things before the science catches up. Sometimes it just tells the story slightly wrong.
That gap between inherited wisdom and clinical evidence is the territory that Shola and her colleague Jasmine Carbon have spent years navigating, as expert dietitians. On 30 April, they will bring that work to a full-day event that Diabetes Africa has been building towards for the better part of a year: Advancing Equity in Diabetes and Pregnancy for Black Women, a learn-and-apply day for healthcare professionals in London.
There is nothing wrong with our foods
Dr Shola Oladipo
Shola is the CEO of Food for Purpose, a social enterprise dedicated to culturally grounded nutrition. Jasmine is the founder of Carbon Nutrition, a specialist dietetic practice. Between them, they cover ground that most clinical training never reaches: the specific, textured experience of Black African and Caribbean women trying to do right by their bodies, their pregnancies, and their cultures, often with contradictory information arriving from every direction.
This matters most at a particular moment in time. One in two women who experience gestational diabetes will go on to develop Type 2 diabetes within five years. That window, between pregnancies and around them, is precisely when good information, delivered in a way that resonates, can change a life course. The whole point of the session Shola and Jasmine are leading is to equip professionals to have those conversations well, and early enough to make a difference.
The numbers behind all of this tell their own story. At Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, one of the partner hospitals on Diabetes Africa’s current project, just 5% of Black women living with diabetes are considered “well prepared” for pregnancy, meaning they are taking high-dose folic acid (5mg), have optimised their blood glucose, and are not on medication that could harm the baby. For other ethnicities, the figures are higher. This is aligned with figures in England and Wales (National Pregnancy in Diabetes Audit)
That gap is not explained by diet alone. It is explained by a whole system of missed moments: the appointment where it did not come up, the leaflet written for someone else, the advice that stopped short of culture. Focus groups conducted by Diabetes Africa found something telling: that every professional holds a piece of the puzzle, and that even when everyone feels confident, what they know and what they say will differ. The richness is in sharing that, collectively, rather than assuming the picture is already complete.
The see-and-taste session on 30 April is one of six sessions in a full-day programme exploring equity in practice, which also covers data, primary care links, and practical training tools. The see-and-taste session sits at the heart of the day, and it is the most hands-on.
Participants will taste, discuss, question and learn together, with cultural foods as the starting point for conversations about glycaemic index, blood glucose, pregnancy preparation and the beliefs that shape what women eat and drink long before they ever walk into a clinic.
A participant in a previous Diabetes Africa event described the experience as genuinely eye-opening, not because the clinical content was new to her, but because tasting the food changed something. Knowing a dish in theory, she said, and tasting it, are “a whole different board game.” What she had encountered on paper she now understood in her hands and on her palate, and she left thinking differently about how to talk about it with patients.
Shola and Jasmine are reaching for exactly that: the thing that happens when knowledge becomes felt rather than filed away.
Both women speak with clarity about what they want professionals to carry out of the room. The importance of stable blood glucose before, during and after pregnancy. The case for not cutting out cultural foods unnecessarily, when so many of them are far more nutritious than their reputation suggests. A kind of myth-literacy: the ability to hear a traditional belief, recognise what is right in it, and gently offer what the evidence actually says. And perhaps most practically of all, knowing where to go when you do not have the answer.
That last one matters because the job does not end at the clinic door. Many of the professionals who will attend on 30 April are themselves of Black African or Caribbean heritage. They carry this knowledge home. To family gatherings. To the naming ceremony, the celebration held in many African traditions when a newborn is formally welcomed into the family and the wider community, sometimes weeks after birth; to the equivalent celebrations across Caribbean cultures. Someone at those events will quietly ask the nurse or midwife in the room what she thinks about this food, that remedy, this old piece of advice. What she says in that moment reaches much further than any appointment.
“There’s nothing wrong with our food,” as Shola puts it. The conversation is about how to understand it, and use it well.
So, okra. Packed with folate. Gentle on blood sugar. Consumed for generations by women who knew, somehow, that it was good for them, even if they could not have said exactly why. A vegetable that turned out to be a starting point for a much bigger conversation, about culture, about evidence, and about what it really means to prepare for a healthy pregnancy.
That conversation continues on 30 April.
The See-and-Taste session is part of Advancing Equity in Diabetes and Pregnancy for Black Women, a full-day learn-and-apply event on 30 April 2026 at Coin Street Conference Centre, London, organised by Diabetes Africa in partnership with Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust and Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust, with funding from the Burdett Trust for Nursing. The day offers up to 7 hours of CPD for registered midwives. Find out more and register here: www.diabetesafrica.org/pregnancyevent
Found this article helpful?
