During grocery shopping, you may have noticed that, with people becoming more health-conscious , packaged foods now come with labels such as ‘100 % pure’ or ‘no palm oil.’
Dr Rajni Kant Srivastava, former director, ICMR- Regional Medical Research Centre (Gorakhpur), weighed in on why everyone needs to look beyond individual ingredients and pay attention to the overall nutritional composition of their diet. “Nutrition cannot be reduced to a single ingredient or a single claim on a food package. The focus also needs to be on the broader food environment, including the availability and marketing of foods high in fat, salt and sugar (HFSS), particularly to children. ICMR-NIN-led Let’s Fix Our Food Consortium calls for evidence-based action to improve environments and dietary behaviours among children and adolescents. Its recommendations include creating healthier school food environments, improving nutrition literacy, introducing front-of-pack nutrition labelling, regulating food marketing to children, and taking measures to curb excessive intake of fat, salt and sugar. Oil is an essential ingredient in most cooking preparations, so choosing the right one is important. The edible oils you include in your diet require closer scrutiny, as each has a different nutritional composition. Instead of imposing a blanket ban on any particular oil, you need to understand its nutritional composition and how much of it you consume.
Consumers need to understand the overall nutritional profile of what they eat, including the quantity, composition and frequency of consumption,” he said, cautioning that claims such as ‘100 %’ or those highlighting the absence of a particular ingredient, such as palm oil or sugar, create this illusion of purity or superiority which may not actually be the case.
