The human body runs on food. Once, food shortage was the major concern. After the Second World War, technological advances in food production led to a new era that was characterized by an overabundance of inexpensive food, and relatively little physical activity. In the decades that followed, other socio-cultural shifts continued to contribute to the changing way we ate.
Women who had previously controlled most of the average family's food preparation, now enter the workforce in significant numbers. And the processed food industry began to capitalize on our need for fast convenient food.
This meant that fewer meals for being cooked at home, and since convenient foods were generally higher in calories than home-cooked meals, the average persons caloric intake increase dramatically.
Academics studying the intersection of food and health, have written extensively about the implications of this cultural shift on the way we eat today. To the extent, we outsource our food. First, we eat less healthy food, more salt, and fat, and sugar. But we also eat more food because processed food is often designed as snack food, and marketed to us as a way to eat continually through the day. The changes in the way, we, as a society ate led to
the emergence of obesity as a recognized chronic disease with well-defined health consequences, and medical recommendations were made to try and address this growing health crisis. In the second half of the 20th century, a lot of attention was
focused on reducing saturated fat, and total fat in our diets. And the processed food industry responded by giving us what we wanted. But, they still had a vested interest in selling their products, so they found other ways to make the reduced fat products taste good. One way they did this was by adding significantly more sugar, and other forms of sugar, like artificial sweetners to almost everything we ate. This not only made the reduced fat foods more appealing, but it also increased their shelf life. So the food industry had a huge incentive to add artificial sweetners etc to packaged foods.
The resulting increase in our intake of simple sugars fueled our modern epidemics of obesity and diabetes. These shifts in our food consumption patterns have led us to a point in history where our physiological adaptation, our ability to store energy as fat, has become maladaptive. The balance between food availability and energy expenditure has been
disrupted, and its left us with an exponential increase in the incidence of obesity over the past 60 years. An epidemic that the World Health Organization has labeled a worldwide public health crisis
As per a recent study, most of the ultra-processed foods which is available in the Indian food market have excess sugar, salt and saturated fats. The research was conducted by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in association with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and together they analysed 10,500 products that had provided
complete nutrition information in the nutrition facts panel.
They found only 32 per cent are within the scientific thresholds recommended by the World Health Organisation's regional standards.
India faces a rapidly escalating burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), particularly the rising incidence of nutrition-related diseases such as diabetes, obesity among adults as well as an alarming increase in childhood obesity.
The country also clocks the highest growth rate for ultra-processed food and beverages items high in added sugar, salt and additives, besides being ultra-processed.
Over the past year, the Food Safety Standards Authority of India has been preparing to introduce a mandatory front-of-the-pack food label (FOPL) on all packaged foods which will require the food industry to ensure that ingredients of concern are within a certain threshold and also guide consumers towards making healthy choices.
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