Have you ever looked at the nutrition labels printed on the back of a packaged food item? The panel that tells you how much sugar, fat, carbs, protein is in the packet? No?
Well, in honour of Mumbai Multimedia Studio’s article today, I raided my fridge. And got some pretty shocking results. The tiny tetra pack of my favourite chocolate milkshake had a whopping 33 grams of sugar. The 150g tin of stress-relief chocolate chip cookies? 34.5g of sugar for every 100g; 27.5g of fat.
The tub of ice cream in my freezer had me scrambling for a calculator. At 13g of sugar per serving (that tub had nearly 13 servings of ice cream!), I was looking at nearly 170g of sugar. Needless to say, as a person who just mindlessly attacks ice cream tubs with a spoon on movie nights, I was horrified.
India’s food safety body, the FSSAI, is trying to figure out how to make this knowledge more easily accessible for consumers. After all, who’s going to be standing around calculating serving sizes in supermarket aisles?
In 2015, an expert committee tasked with looking into this suggested that India mandate front-of-pack (FOP) labels. You’d be able to read how much fat, sugar, and salt there was in a packaged food product by simply looking at the display.
However, after multiple committees, several study reports, and a gazette notification later, this train is still only inching forward. The destination is nowhere in sight.
For instance, thanks to lobbying by food giants, one study report was diluted so heavily that the committee members gave up hope of it ever being published in its original form. Another was dropped after conflict of interest allegations surfaced about the committee head. A third study—which analysed 1,306 product samples across 30 food companies and 36 food categories—showed bleak results. So bleak that a working group assembled by FSSAI suggested raising the recommended salt, sugar, and fat limits so that more products could stay out of the warning zone.
Meanwhile, industry players and consumer advocacy groups can’t agree on how these labels should look. I wouldn’t be surprised if FSSAI members are currently clutching their heads in despair, much like I did after my ice cream mathematics
