Unhealthy Food Warning

There is a certain irony in a food safety regulator needing to be dragged to court before it does its job. Yet that is precisely what has happened with the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, which has finally proposed a red hexagonal front-of-pack warning label for packaged foods high in salt, sugar and fat - not out of its own initiative, but because a Kerala-based non-profit forced its hand before the Supreme Court. The timeline tells its own story. The Indian Council of Medical Research's Dietary Guidelines for Indians, 2024, flagged the dangers of excessive sugar, salt and fat with unambiguous clarity. FSSAI, the very body constituted to safeguard consumer health, did nothing. It took a public interest litigation and judicial prodding for the regulator to even file a compliance affidavit. It is reluctant compliance, and it raises an uncomfortable question: whose interests has FSSAI been protecting all this while?

The proposal itself, unfortunately, does little to dispel that impression. Consider the two-phase plan. In the first phase, only products high in two or more of the three flagged ingredients will carry a warning. A product loaded with sugar alone, or salt alone, escapes the label entirely. Worse, no timeline has been offered for the second phase, when single-ingredient breaches would finally attract a warning. An open-ended promise is not a policy; it is a deferral. Then there is the vexed question of "added" sugar and fat. Restricting the warning to added quantities ignores the plain fact that naturally occurring sugars, consumed in excess through processed foods, are equally harmful. It also hands manufacturers a convenient loophole, since "added" content is notoriously difficult to verify and enforce. Add to this a font size merely one point larger than the fine print on the nutrition table at the back of the pack and an English-only label in a multilingual country, and the proposal begins to look less like a warning and more like a formality designed to satisfy the court without unsettling the industry.

India's packaged food market is expanding at a ferocious pace, and consumers, particularly children and young adults, are consuming these products with little understanding of the long-term health hazards they carry - obesity, diabetes, hypertension and cardiovascular disease chief among them. This is precisely the moment for bold, unambiguous regulation, not one riddled with ifs and buts designed to ease industry into compliance at its own leisure.