A lady made a comment on Facebook recently alleging that some food vendors use paracetamol in cooking their meats.

She wrote:

Those of U that are food Vendors that cook MEAT with PARACETAMOL!
Hope you know that you are sending people to their early grave?”
paracetamol meat

Her comment got people asking that is it really true that some food vendors use paracetamol to prepare their meat?

The answer is YES!!! It is true.

If so, why do they use paracetamol in preparing meat?

From what we’ve gathered, this practice has been happening since the early 2000. It is commonly used in Uganda, Ghana, and Nigeria by some food vendors.

The reason for using paracetamol in cooking meat is to tenderize the meat to avoid the long hours of boiling in order to meet the increasing demands of their customers.

That’s to mean when paracetamol is used in cooking meat, it softens quickly rather than taking so long on the fire to soften. This could be working smartly for some of these vendors but it has some serious health complications.

Also, it is used as preservatives so the meat will not spoil for days.

According to findings, when the drug is used for cooking, it breaks down into other forms that may not possess its original properties as a pain killer and thus could lead to high acidity.

Also, when this process occurs, the drug is hydrolyzed into what we call 4-aminophenol, which is very toxic to the kidney and liver.