Govt to tighten quality check on junk food

NEW DELHI: The pesticide-in-cola controversy has triggered some swift action in Nirman Bhavan –– the Union health ministry’s headquarters.

The ministry will now plug the holes in quality norms on a war footing and address the larger issue of the health hazards of junk food, including carbonated drinks.

The Indian Council of Medical Research is now conducting highly-sensitive tests on samples of locally available sugar to set the quality norms for sugar –– the only ingredient in colas where quality norms do not exist now.

The norms for bottled water is so low that impurity traces less than the permissible level cannot be detected even in advanced testing procedures, said health minister Dr Anbumani Ramadoss. The government will also now fast-track its Rs 400 crore plan to strengthen its testing laboratories.

Besides adding five more sophisticated laboratories where food and beverage samples could be tested, the existing 25 would be modernised. Cola majors can also soon expect an indirect campaign against them by the health ministry, which is concerned about the huge cost of treating lifestyle ailments like cardiovascular diseases and diabetes, which are linked to obesity, a result of junk food and sedentary life style. The ministry is gearing to address both.

India has one of the largest populations of lifestyle disease patients. Under the soon-to-be-launched national programme on cardio-vascular (CVS) diseases, diabetes and cerebral stroke, the government will ask state governments to advise educational institutes to disallow all junk food including colas from their campuses, said Dr Ramadoss.

The idea is to avoid children getting an early exposure to certain salts in a country where juvenile diabetes is a health problem. “This would be an advocacy campaign, but I do foresee a stage when the public are fully aware of the hazards of junk food, which would, in due course, pave the way for a Public Health Act banning these products,” Mr Ramadoss told ET.

UK, France and Australia are moving in this direction, he said. Global studies in ‘nutrition genomics’ indicate certain diet ingredients can wake up dormant genes to express themselves and lead to an early onset of the diseases they are responsible for.