India’s food safety authority has decided to put food safety labels on the front side of packaged food depending on the harm fat, sugar and salt cause to human health but consensus eludes food industry and consumer groups on what the label should say, according to multiple officials and minutes of a meeting of stakeholders called by the authority.
The food industry wants the label to be a guideline informing the consumer about the quantity of salt, sugar, sodium and fats in the food packet without giving health warning saying that the aim should be to enable a consumer to take an informed decision and not discourage him to consume packaged food.
The consumer and advocacy groups want labels to clearly state whether the food is healthy for human consumption or not, as most consumers would not know how much sugar, salt or fat is good or bad for their health, if only quantity is specified.
“We will get a people perception study done by the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, on what sort of label would people prefer,” said Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) chief executive Arun Singhal. Once that study comes, draft and then final guidelines on front of package label (FOPL) would be issued, he said.
The FSSAI has taken close to eight years to reach this stage as industry had been reluctant to have front of package food safety labels, implemented in some other countries such as Brazil and Chile, clearly stating if the product is healthy for people or not. In India, the processed food industry is believed to be US $ 44 billion in value and growing at a rapid pace of about 24% every year.
At a meeting with all stakeholders called by FSSAI in June, the industry said the food safety labeling on salt, sugar and fat should be based on serve-size rather than quantity in the packet basis as this is what the consumer eats, according to minutes of the meeting accessed by Hindustan Times.
The consumer groups proposed that the label should inform consumers about the percentage of salt, sugar and fat in the food, and how much higher it is than the permissible limit. And the reference size should be 100 gm/ml.
The FSSAI accepted the consumer group’s view saying there is no information available at present on serve sizes. “The acceptability and understanding of 100 gm/ml as a unit is higher and it enables a rational comparison among products,” the minutes said, quoting FSSAI.
The suggestion of the food industry to have information about positive nutrients on the labels was rejected, as the FSSAI scientists supported the consumer groups, who said that the “first and foremost” aim of FOPL was to inform consumers about negative nutrients in food products, the minutes revealed.
A senior FSSAI scientist, who was not willing to be quoted, said it was no less than an “achievement” to get the food industry to agree to the food safety label on front of the package which is easily readable.
“The reluctance on part of the industry was high but we pulled them through,” he said.
Singhal said five types of labels were being considered including traffic light signs, nutrition score, health star ratings, warning symbols. Each label type has its positives and negatives, he added.
The FSSAI has asked the Indian Institute of Ahmedabad (IIM) to conduct a consumer survey of which type of label would be most understandable for people, after the authority found that most of the consumer surveys conducted in western countries about the impact of labels on people had “geographical bias.”
The WHO had said the high consumption of processed food can lead to obesity and non-communicable diseases, which account for 71% or 41 million deaths, every year, globally.
“The increase in diabetes and heart ailments among young people can be directly linked with increase in consumption of highly addictive processed foods and beverages. We are not asking for a ban on them but only to inform people about the food’s health impact. It would help people in making more informed decisions about what they eat,” Gupta said.
The FSSAI’s 2020 study on pre-packaged food products said that India has become the third biggest consumer of processed food by the end of 2021, after China and the United States, with sales volumes of over 34 million tonnes.
“Factors like increase in per capita income, globalisation, lower prices, evolving preferences and beliefs of the consumer and rapid urbanisation have resulted in changes in diet patterns of the consumer and increase in acceptance of processed and pre-packaged foods and beverages,” the study said.
It added that 53% children consume salted packaged food such as chips and noodles and 56% sweetened ones such as chocolates and ice creams, apart from sugar sweetened beverages. “Sugar is added to these products to make them addictive,” Gupta said.
To see how many food products adhere to food safety norms, the FSSAI got an evaluation done of major processed foods with baseline nutrient value for 100 g/ml, which is also the base for the food safety labels, for fats (total fats, saturated fats and trans fats), sugar (sugar produced by food and added sugar) and sodium (natural salt and added salt) for 1,306 samples of pre-packaged foods and beverages, from 36 food categories.
The study found that 62.8% of the samples failed on all three counts, meaning they had higher sugar, salt and fat than the prescribed levels. If one looks at failure on one ingredient, then 90% of the samples failed to meet the threshold limit prescribed by FSSAI. “Maximum categories failed on thresholds for energy, total sugar, added sugar, total fat, saturated fat and sodium,” the study said.
Most of the processed foods being sold come under the category of ultra processed foods, the Global Food Research Programme of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said, in its 2018 study.
“UPFs have rapidly displaced unprocessed or minimally processed foods, freshly prepared meals, and traditional cooking in the diet in most countries, causing significant nutritional, social, economic, and environmental disruption and damage worldwide,” the study said, adding it accounts for roughly half or more of total calories consumed in the United States.
And, it was rapidly growing at 26-34% every year in the developing world, the study said, and pointed out that it was connected with global increases in obesity prevalence and other nutrition-related chronic diseases.
The FSSAI chairperson and retired Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer, Rita Teotia, at the meeting said, the journey towards FOPL has been long and most of the aspects have been decided upon to the satisfaction of all stakeholders. “Informed choices of consumers need to be the central point in all decisions undertaken on this subject and the label should be easy to understand,” she said, while concluding the meeting.
