Wait! Your healthy food may not be ‘healhty’

• Follow

Next time when you buy expensive so-called healthy food items,  don’t forget to check the ingredients. Most of the food prducts claim to be healthy but in reality are not so. Some products lure you by making claim that it has  high fiber and some claim that it has Omega 3. These so-called healthy products are twice or thrice as expensive as general products. The details of low sugar, salt, fat and calorie is revealed on the backside of the wrapper. These products print fancy names like bajra, quinoa, oats but how much quantity of these is there in the products, can be checked on the labelling.

Sometimes dark chocolate is sold with the claim of being good for the heart. Sometimes soy milk is sold on the claim  that it is  beneficial in reducing cholesterol. But do the products match up to the claims? The sale of healthy food products in India is continuously increasing. According to a report by Avendus Capital, by 2026, Indians’ per capita spending on healthy foods will double. Whereas in 2020, health-focused food and beverage had a share of 11 percent in the country’s 88 billion dollar packaged food and beverage market. By 2026 it will increase to 16 percent. The market for healthy food is expected to grow to 30 billion dollars. With a CAGR of 20 percent, India is the fastest growing market for healthy food in the world.

By 2026, the number of health-conscious consumers in India could increase to 176 million. There will be a surge in the sales of so-called healthy snacks like biscuits, fruit snacks, snack bars. The market for healthy dairy products is also expected to grow very fast.

With this growing market, the marketing and advertising of so called  healthy food will also increase. These advertisements are used to deceive consumers by hiding the reality of these products. Therefore, shop keepers will be able to sell such products easily to the consumers

Although the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, regulates food and beverage items in India. The authority also pays attention to food safety. Despite this, such products are being marketed recklessly, expensive items are being sold on  declaration that these are very healthy. FSSAI had proposed to bring a rating last year to inform the consumers on how healthy these products are.. Its purpose is to help people choose healthy products. Companies will rate such products on a scale of 1 to 5 based on the amount of salt, sugar and fat. You will see this rating on the product packet. But nothing concrete has been done on this proposal yet. Therefore, there is a need for FSSAI to take some more steps. The authority must implement this rating system as soon as possible.

Remember that next time when you buy any healthy biscuit, bread sugarless drink or oil for cooking, check its labelling. In our busy life, we all have less time and we buy things by seeing the ‘Healthy’ tag. But is the thing you are paying more for worth it? Because the products claim one thing and give something else. So read the label otherwise you may be eating refined flour in the name of oats and that too by paying more. So stay alert.