Somewhere along the way, I started using the phrase primal foods not as a trend word but as a shorthand for something specific: plants that were never put through the machine of industrial flavour modification. The West spent decades breeding the sharpness out of its produce — Brussels sprouts are the famous example, systematically re-engineered to be milder and sweeter across the latter half of the twentieth century. Many African food systems did the opposite. They kept the bitter profiles, the astringent edges, the complex tastes that most modern palates have been quietly trained to avoid. What I find striking is that this was not an accident or a lack of agricultural sophistication. It was a choice — or rather, a series of choices, made across generations, that preserved something the industrialised world spent considerable effort removing.
This article is about five of those plants: bitter leaf, bitter kola, African eggplant, baobab, and fonio. I want to talk about what they actually are, where they come from, what is inside them, and why the fact that nobody softened them is, I think, worth taking seriously. This is not a piece about diet trends. It is about plants with deep, largely uninterrupted histories — and what it means that they were never asked to be something easier.
Key takeaways
- African food systems actively preserved bitter, complex flavour profiles that Western industrial agriculture spent decades breeding out of its crops.
- Plants like bitter leaf, bitter kola, fonio, baobab and African eggplant contain documented compound profiles — flavonoids, biflavonoids, sesquiterpene lactones, procyanidins — that reflect their unmodified botanical state.
- Fonio is considered the oldest West African cereal, with cultivation thought to date to around 5000 BC, yet it remains one of the most underresearched food crops on the planet.
- The erosion of these indigenous food systems was tied to colonial disruption and the slave trade, not simply to changing tastes — a very different story from the market-driven sweetening of Western produce.
What makes a food primal — and what the chemistry of unmodified plants actually looks like
The word “primal” gets used loosely, so let me say what I mean by it here. A primal food is one that has not been subjected to generations of selective breeding aimed at making it more palatable, more uniform, or more commercially appealing. It still has the full compound profile of its wild or near-wild ancestor. The bitterness is not incidental — it is structural. It comes from compounds the plant produces as part of its own chemistry, and those compounds are present in measurable quantities precisely because no one spent a century trying to reduce them.
Bitter leaf — known to most botanists now as Gymnanthemum amygdalinum, though almost everyone still calls it by its old name, Vernonia amygdalina — is a useful starting point. A 2024 review in Frontiers in Natural Products compiled decades of phytochemical screening on the leaves, finding flavonoids, alkaloids, saponins, tannins, triterpenoids, steroids, cardiac glycosides, sesquiterpene lactones, phenylpropanoids and lignans, among others.
That is a genuinely broad compound profile, and it is worth noting that sesquiterpene lactones — a class of naturally occurring compounds built on a fifteen-carbon skeleton — are responsible for much of the characteristic bitterness.
The naming situation with bitter leaf is, I will be honest, one of the more quietly chaotic corners of African botany. Kew’s Plants of the World Online now lists Vernonia amygdalina as a synonym of Gymnanthemum amygdalinum, following a taxonomic revision that determined the true Vernonia genus — as a 2016 monograph in PMC put it plainly — does not occur in Africa and is almost entirely restricted to the Americas. African species previously lumped under Vernonia have been reassigned to related genera. The common name has stuck regardless. Markets from Lagos to Accra still sell it as bitter leaf, and the compound profile does not care what genus it is placed in.
Bitter kola — Garcinia kola — presents an even richer chemical picture. A detailed 2023 chemistry review in Phytochemistry Reviews identified biflavonoids, benzophenones, benzofurans, benzopyran derivatives, vitamin E derivatives, xanthones and phytosterols from across the different parts of the plant — seeds, roots, stem bark, fruit pulp. Several of these, including garcinianin, kolanone, gakolanone, garcinoic acid, garcinal, garcifuran A, garcifuran B and garcipyran, appear to be unique to this species. That kind of compound specificity — molecules found nowhere else in the plant kingdom — tends to happen when a species has been left largely alone. You can read more in our piece on the differences between bitter kola and kola nut, which covers their very distinct botanical and cultural identities.
The African eggplant, Solanum aethiopicum, rounds out this picture of unmodified complexity. Unlike the large, mild aubergines that became a staple of European and Middle Eastern markets through centuries of selective cultivation, African varieties of this plant retain a pronounced bitterness — the kind that makes a first encounter with it quite surprising if you are expecting the softness of a cultivated variety. The CABI compendium entry on Solanum aethiopicum classifies it across questions of genetics, food quality and food safety, reflecting that it remains one of Africa’s most cultivated indigenous vegetables — yet has seen almost none of the flavour-modification programmes applied to its Western relatives.
What all three of these plants share is a compound density that reflects minimal intervention. They are not nutritionally richer because someone optimised them — they are compositionally complex because no one spent a hundred years removing the parts that made them harder to like. I find that a genuinely interesting distinction. We have mostly framed the modification of food as progress. These plants are a counterargument, still growing.
Baobab and fonio: two ancient crops that survived without reinvention
If bitter leaf and bitter kola represent the preserved complexity of West African culinary plants, baobab and fonio represent something slightly different: an ancient continuity that industrialisation simply did not reach. Both are old in ways that make most Western food crops look recent. And both carry histories that are, to my mind, more interesting than anything a marketing team would have written about them.
Baobab — Adansonia digitata — is a tree that operates on a timescale that is hard to fully absorb. Individual trees are estimated to live an average of 1,000 to 3,000 years, meaning a baobab standing in a Sahelian village today may predate most of what we think of as recorded history. A 2024 remote-sensing study published in Nature Ecology and Evolution mapped nearly 2.8 million baobab trees across the Sahel using sub-metre-resolution satellite imagery, finding that 94 per cent of rural buildings in Senegal had at least one baobab tree in their immediate surroundings. That is not a crop that was introduced — that is a tree that has been a structural part of the landscape for longer than agriculture itself in many regions.
The chemistry of baobab fruit pulp is well documented. A study investigating the phytochemical profile of Malian baobab, using HPLC coupled with photodiode array and electrospray ionization mass spectrometry, found the fruit pulp rich in procyanidins and flavonol glycosides, with tiliroside as the major constituent. A cross-country composition analysis, published in Food Science and Nutrition in 2017, identified significant variation in pulp moisture, protein, fibre, ash and mineral content between trees from different African regions — with the highest mean crude fibre recorded in Kenyan specimens. Variation like that is what you get from a plant that has never been homogenised.
Fonio is a different kind of story, and one that I think deserves more attention than it gets outside West Africa. Digitaria exilis — white fonio — is widely described as the oldest West African cereal, with cultivation thought to date back to around 5,000 BC. A 2025 genomic study published in Nature Communications traced fonio’s history through DNA and found that white and black fonio were the result of two independent domestications, with no gene flow between them — an unusually clean separation. The study also found that fonio’s demographic decline was linked not just to agricultural shifts but to the intensification of the slave trade and the introduction of less labour-intensive crops from elsewhere. That is a history with weight to it. The shrinking of fonio’s reach was not simply a matter of taste.
We covered what a primal diet meal plan actually looks like in practice in an earlier post — fonio comes up there because it fits the framework well: unmodified, semi-wild, nutrient-dense, and from a tradition that never needed to make it milder. If you are building a whole-foods diet for healthy hair or general wellbeing, these older grains are worth understanding properly rather than reaching for them as trend foods without context. You can also find organic Oryza glaberrima wild African rice — another ancient, unmodified African grain — in our range, if this direction interests you.
Who Took the Bitter Out of Your Food?
Bitterness was bred out of modern food because it doesn’t sell. It turns out your gut is lined with receptors for it. A 31-page printable workbook: the physiology explained with its limits stated, a twelve-week ladder from arugula to bitter kola, how to cook bitter things so you actually want to eat them, a swap table, three tick sheets, and a worksheet after every section. Not a diet. Not a detox. Just one flavour, put back.
A fascinating record of ancient food knowledge rarely written down.
The ecology behind the plants: where primal foods actually grow
One thing that rarely gets said in writing about African foods is what the landscapes they come from actually look like — and why those landscapes produced plants with the profiles they have. Baobab, for instance, does not grow in spite of difficult conditions; it thrives because of specific ecological adaptations that took millennia to develop. The Malvaceae family tree it belongs to is ecologically remarkable: its thick, fire-resistant bark, its deciduous leaf-shedding during the dry season, and a trunk that absorbs water during the rains and contracts as the season dries — all of these are structural answers to the Sahel’s particular demands.
The baobab is not a monoculture crop. It is an ecosystem in itself. A 2024 paper in Conservation Science and Practice documented the range of species that depend on it: birds, bats, baboons, elephants, antelope and a wide range of invertebrates all use the tree for food, shelter or both. Elephants, the paper notes, extensively debark baobabs and often ringbark them entirely — which gives some sense of the pressure these trees are under, and also of how long they have been important enough to compete for. A tree that elephants and humans have been in relationship with for thousands of years is not the same kind of thing as a plant developed in a greenhouse in the last century.
Bitter kola occupies a similarly specific ecological niche. Garcinia kola is a forest tree — it reaches around 90 feet — found across West and Central Africa, particularly in the humid forest belt. A botanical taxonomy paper in PMC situates it within a region of extraordinary plant diversity, noting that West African Garcinia species extend east into Lower Guinea while Central African species extend west, and that the overlap zone constitutes a biodiversity hotspot, possibly shaped by Pleistocene rain forest refugia — pockets of forest that survived past climate shifts and became cradles of speciation. The unique compounds found only in Garcinia kola almost certainly reflect that long, geographically contained history.
Fonio, meanwhile, grows at the other ecological extreme — semi-arid, poor soils, high heat. A 2026 systems review published in Agriculture describes certain fonio landraces as among the world’s fastest-maturing cereals, capable of completing their cycle quickly enough to bridge the mid-season hunger gap before other crops are ready. That speed and tolerance did not come from a breeding programme. It was there already, in a plant that evolved under exactly those conditions. I have written about what the primal diet actually means more broadly, and the ecological argument — that plants shaped by difficult environments retain something that pampered crops do not — is central to it. Our wildcrafted miracle berries are another example from the same tradition: gathered, not farmed, from their native forest habitat.
Why bitterness was preserved — and what the cultural logic was
This is the part I find most compelling, and the most frequently overlooked. When people talk about African food being an acquired taste, they often mean the bitterness — and they frame that bitterness as something that was simply not yet smoothed away, as if smoothing were the natural direction of travel. But the preservation of bitter profiles in African food systems was not passive. It was active. Bitter kola — Garcinia kola — is prized specifically for its sharpness. Its seed is, as the ethnobotanical literature puts it, eaten raw because of its bitter, astringent quality, which is followed by a slight sweetness. The bitterness is the point, not the obstacle.
Bitter kola’s cultural status in West and Central Africa is extensive. It appears in social ceremonies, in ritual exchange, in hospitality. A peer-reviewed agroforestry study on the domestication potential of Garcinia kola notes that despite the tree’s economic and cultural importance across West and Central Africa, its phenotypic and genotypic variation remains poorly documented — which is itself a kind of statement about how little formal research attention has landed on it. A botanically complex, culturally central plant, and we still know less about its genetic diversity than we know about most commercial fruit crops. I find that imbalance striking, if not entirely surprising.
Fonio carries a different kind of cultural significance. An ethnobotanical and genetic study published in Plants, People, Planet in 2023 describes fonio as having a substantial cultural status, playing a key role in ritual ceremonies of many African cultures. It is also called “hunger rice” — a name that carries both the weight of survival and the slight condescension of outside observers who reached for it as a label. The fact that it can sustain people through a hungry season, and has been doing so for millennia, is a form of cultural value that does not show up in a yield figure. There is more on the seeds men traditionally carried on long journeys across West Africa in another piece we published, which picks up the theme of indigenous foods as functional cultural objects rather than trend ingredients. Our organic kola nut powder comes from the same ceremonial tradition — a plant with a social history long before it became a commodity.
What I keep coming back to is the contrast the brief framing lays out so cleanly. Western industrial agriculture made a series of deliberate choices to remove complexity from food — to make it sweeter, milder, easier to sell to a mass market. African food systems made a different series of choices, or in many cases simply did not make that choice at all. The result is a set of plants that still have their original compound profiles, their original bitterness, their original ecological relationship with the landscape they came from. That is what primal means to me. Not a diet trend. Not a return to anything. Just plants that were never asked to become something more convenient.
Primal foods and hair: what ancestral eating has to do with length retention
I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this section that would make claims I am not going to make. Whether eating bitter leaf or drinking baobab anything changes what your hair does is a medical question, and I am not going to answer it as if it were not. What I can say is that when people ask me why their hair is not growing, the answer almost always turns out to be that it is growing — it is just breaking at roughly the same rate. The length never changes. And one of the things that feeds into breakage, at least in my experience over fifteen years of natural hair, is overall physical state. Dry, stressed, depleted systems tend to produce dry, stressed, depleted strands.
The questions that come up most often are about what to eat for natural hair growth, what foods are good for 4c hair specifically, and what vitamins help with length retention. These are all reasonable questions, and the honest answer to all of them is: see a doctor, especially if you are losing hair from the root rather than breaking at the ends. Those are different things. Hair that sheds from the scalp with a small white bulb at the base is coming from the follicle — that is a matter for a doctor or dermatologist, and worth investigating properly. Hair that snaps off in the middle with no bulb is breakage — mechanical, often caused by dryness, friction, tangling at the ends, rough handling. Nothing we sell addresses shedding. Our products are cosmetic. They are for handling, sealing and protecting the strand. If you are concerned about shedding specifically, iron levels, thyroid function and hormones are worth ruling out — we have a longer piece on iron deficiency and hair loss that covers exactly that.
Where diet genuinely connects to hair is in the basic building blocks — protein, minerals, hydration — and the broader pattern of how you are eating. A whole-foods diet for healthy hair is less about any specific superfood and more about not running on empty. The ancestral eating traditions I have been describing are built on variety, bitterness, fermentation, and minimally processed plant material. Whether that translates into faster-growing hair is not a claim I am going to make. But eating like someone who never outsourced the complexity from their food seems, at minimum, unlikely to make anything worse. Our Fadogia agrestis stem powder is another example of the kind of plant that has never been softened or modified — an unmodified botanical with a long West African history. And if you are working on the breakage side of things rather than the shedding side, our chebe powder is part of how I seal and protect my own ends every week — the Chadian tradition it comes from is another example of an unmodified plant practice that was never asked to be something easier.
Frequently asked questions
What is a primal diet?
A primal diet, in the way I use the term, means building meals around minimally processed, unmodified whole foods — things that have not been bred for sweetness, stripped of their natural compounds, or manufactured into something more convenient. African food traditions are a strong example: plants like fonio, bitter leaf, bitter kola and baobab have been eaten largely as they are for thousands of years, with their full botanical complexity intact. It is about food that has not been put through an industrial simplification process.
What foods are good for 4c hair?
4c hair does not have dramatically different nutritional needs from any other hair type — the strand is still made of keratin protein and needs the same basic building blocks. What matters most is variety, adequate protein and good hydration overall. If your hair is not retaining length, the question is usually breakage rather than growth, and that is a handling issue more than a dietary one. If hair is shedding from the root, that is worth investigating with a doctor — iron levels are a common and frequently overlooked factor.
What foods cause hair breakage?
Breakage is almost always mechanical rather than dietary — it comes from friction, tangling, dryness and rough handling, not from eating the wrong thing. That said, chronically poor nutrition can contribute to dry, brittle strands over time. Highly processed diets low in protein and minerals give the body less to work with when building the strand. Breakage that suddenly worsens is worth investigating as a whole, and if hair is also shedding from the scalp, a doctor is the right first stop rather than a dietary experiment.
Why is my hair not growing?
In most cases, it is. Hair grows continuously from the follicle — the issue is usually that it is breaking at the ends at roughly the same rate it grows, so the length never changes. Coiled ends curl around each other, that coiling creates friction, and friction is what snaps the strand. This is breakage, and it is a handling problem. If hair is not growing at all and also shedding heavily from the root, that is a different question — one worth taking to a doctor, because it may be hormonal, nutritional or something else entirely.
What traditional African diet benefits are documented in the botanical literature?
The botanical and phytochemical literature on African food plants documents compound complexity rather than health outcomes — which is a meaningful distinction. Plants like bitter leaf, bitter kola, baobab and fonio have been screened for their composition: flavonoids, biflavonoids, sesquiterpene lactones, procyanidins, and others. These profiles reflect centuries of minimal modification. What those compounds do in the body is a medical and pharmacological question, and not one these articles attempt to answer. The documented story is botanical, cultural and historical, and it is a rich one.
If the connection between ancestral eating and a more intentional approach to whole-body care resonates with you, the 90-Day Bitter Reset Workbook is where that thinking becomes a practical framework — built around the food traditions described in this article, with none of the fads.
Get the 90-Day Bitter Reset Workbook
Sources
- Frontiers in Natural Products, 2024. Vernonia amygdalina: a comprehensive review of the nutritional makeup, traditional medicinal use, and pharmacology of isolated phytochemicals and compounds. Frontiers.
- Tauchen et al., 2023. Garcinia kola: a critical review on chemistry and pharmacology of an important West African medicinal plant. Phytochemistry Reviews, Springer.
- Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Plants of the World Online — Vernonia amygdalina Delile. POWO.
- PMC, 2016. Vernonieae (Asteraceae) of southern Africa: a generic disposition of the species. Botanical monograph.
- PMC, 2019. Phytochemical profile, antioxidant and antidiabetic activities of Adansonia digitata L. (Baobab) from Mali. PMC.
- Muthai et al., 2017. Nutritional variation in baobab (Adansonia digitata L.) fruit pulp and seeds based on Africa geographical regions. Food Science and Nutrition.
- Nature Ecology and Evolution, 2024. Mapping every adult baobab (Adansonia digitata L.) across the Sahel and relationships to rural livelihoods. Nature.
- Conservation Science and Practice, 2024. Persistence of the African baobab in a system experiencing chronic utilization by elephants. Wiley.
- Nature Communications, 2025. Independent domestication and cultivation histories of two West African indigenous fonio millet crops. Nature.
- Plants, People, Planet, 2023. Ethnolinguistic and genetic diversity of fonio (Digitaria exilis) in Senegal. Wiley.
- Agriculture, 2026. A systems-based review of white fonio (Digitaria exilis), an ancient millet that reduces mid-season hunger across West Africa. MDPI.
- PMC, 2023. Domestication potential of Garcinia kola Heckel: searching for diversity in South Cameroon. PMC.
- CABI Digital Library. Solanum aethiopicum (African scarlet eggplant) datasheet. CABI Compendium.
Written by Joanna, founder of Jostylin Naturals. Joanna has been natural for over fifteen years with 4b/4c hair and sources and studies West African plants as part of her work building the Jostylin Naturals range. This article covers botanical, historical and cultural information only and does not constitute medical or nutritional advice.
