HYDERABAD: In a bid to ensure that growing obesity and malnutrition amongst children are reduced, experts from AIIMS Bibinagar note the urgent need to mandate content on package labelings of ‘unhealthy’ food products. Director of the hospital Dr Vikas Bhatia was speaking at a webinar organized alongside All India Institute of Medical Sciences, Rishikesh, and suggested this strategy to protect people from non-communicable diseases by controlling such preventable nutritional risk factors.
“There is an urgent need to discuss aspects of food safety, including the need for effective interpretative fronts of package labels on all unhealthy food products to protect Indian lives from the non-communicable diseases. According to the CNNS survey 2016-188, marketing of highly processed food products is a health hazard for children and adolescents because 50 per cent of the children’s population in India is suffering from cardio metabolic risk factors,” said Dr Bhatia at the webinar.