NEW DELHI: Sanjay Singh, the food inspector from Barabanki in Uttar Pradesh who nailed Maggi noodles for containing excess lead, may not have heard the Larry Groce song Junk Food Junkie, which highlighted the danger of packaged foods causing slow death in America, but he does know that the Rs 10,000-crore ‘industrial diet’ market which is growing at a rapid pace of 30-40 per cent annually is slowly poisoning India’s children. A report of the Public Health Foundation of India reveals that diseases due to unhealthy foods and changing lifestyles account for nearly 60 per cent of deaths in the country. After liberalisation, India opened its doors to multinational food companies such as Kellogg’s, Pringles, Pepsi Cola, McDonald’s, Domino’s Pizza and Pizza Hut, Kraft Cheese and Aquafina, which are selling products that may have toxic ingredients. This is sabotaging the ‘Make in India’ story of Prime Minister Narendra Modi by making India a dumping ground for profit— making and selling items that could cause cancer, depression, obesity, asthma and various other serious ailments.
But the man who started the debate has picked up a few other samples of noodles, chips and colas from local retail outlets. Knorr Soupy Noodles from Hindustan Unilever, Foodles of GlaxoSmithKline, Ching’s Secret of Capital Foods Ltd and Wai Wai from CG Foods have been sent for re-testing. He also plans to go after the unregulated bottled water industry, which is estimated to be worth about Rs 1,500 crore and potato chips brands, which have an annual turnover of over `2,500 crore.
KIDS IN PERIL: Prof A A Mahdi, national President of Indian Society for Lead Awareness & Research (InSLAR), and his team have been fighting a lonely battle for several years against the dangerous ingredients in fast food.
“We need to check all products, including noodles, chips and colas to ensure that people, especially kids, are consuming poisonous substances because they will not only affect the kidneys but will also damage the immune system.” Potato chips like Pringles are not made from actual potatoes. The Pringles Company, to avoid taxes in the UK, had even argued that the potato content of their chips was so low that they are technically not even potato chips. They are basically rice, wheat, corn, and potato flakes machine processed and packaged. A by-product of the heating process is the carcinogenic acrylamide. Contrary to popular health perception, baked chips contain more than three times the amount of acrylamide than fried ones. Lay’s chips manufactured by PepsiCo and endorsed by Bollywood star Saif Ali Khan had claimed zero transfat in a 2012 advertisement whereas test found 0.9 gm/100 gm. A study in Delhi showed 60-70 per cent of children in different age groups consumed potato chips at least two-three times a week with consequences of getting hypertension. Recent studies show around 10-12 children per 10,000 Indians would have developed cancer in India by 2014. In India, of eight lakh cancer patients annually, around 50,000 are children. Although, the court restricted food items high in fat, sugar and salt such as noodles, pizzas and burgers in schools through an order recently in March 2015, industrial food continues to rise.