Mainstreaming millets will be challenging

If consumers have to be warned about the unhealthiness of junk food, the warning should be in the form of a symbol on the front of the pack. Colour-coded warning labels can deter more people from choosing moderately healthy or unhealthy products. For the success of any kind of labelling, we need to promote nutrition literacy through national campaigns. Otherwise, the junk food industry will hijack millets and other such healthy options.

Healthy: With the imperatives of climate change and lifestyle diseases like diabetes and hypertension, experts have been advocating the return of millets to the food basket. istock

Dinesh C. Sharma

Science Commentator

WiTH 2023 being the UN-declared International Year of Millets, the Central Government and its agencies are going all out to promote India as an international hub for the production and export of millets or small grains. Millets are good for human health as well as the health of the environment as they can be produced even under harsh climatic conditions.

These grains, in fact, have been a part of the Indian food system and diets for centuries. Till the 1960s, millets such as jowar, bajra and ragi constituted one-fourth of India’s food basket. Their share, however, declined drastically after the production of rice and wheat went up as a result of the Green Revolution.

With the imperatives of climate change and rising lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and hypertension, health and ecological experts have been advocating a return of millets to the food basket and dining tables, in recent years. The newfound interest in millets is an outcome of such concerns.

From the time the production and consumption of millets started declining to now, our food habits and diets have changed completely. We have decisively moved towards refined, processed, ultra-processed, packaged, and ready-to-eat food in the past few decades. The food processing industry was promoted in the 1960s and 1970s to prevent food losses and enhance the shelf life of agricultural produce.

The transition to processed and packaged food was more rapid and pronounced after the economic liberalisation. Post 1991, the multinational food industry introduced processed and ultra-processed food products and sugary beverages in the Indian markets. A new category of products dubbed junk food — ultra-processed food products high in sugar, salt and fats (saturated and trans fat) — also emerged and they are seen to be contributing to obesity and non-communicable diseases.

In such a situation, mainstreaming millets is going to be challenging. On the one hand, farmers will have to be incentivised to change cropping patterns and on the other, consumers will need to be educated to modify their eating behaviour. The fear is that the junk food industry will try to appropriate the current interest in millets. Ever since the World Health Organisation (WHO) identified junk food as one of the key risk factors for non-communicable diseases and suggested policies to regulate the marketing of junk food to children, food companies have been desperately trying to project their products as ‘healthy’ and ‘natural’. This has manifested in the marketing of multigrain cookies, low-sugar colas, atta noodles, ‘heart-friendly’ cooking oils, ‘fruit’ juices etc as healthy substitutes for home-cooked food as well as fruits and vegetables. Some junk food companies are already knocking on the doors of the ICAR-National Institute of Millets Research in Hyderabad.

One of the ways junk food makers try to project their products is to make tall health claims on packets while hiding key information about actual ingredients and harmful additives. India’s food regulation mandates that all food packs must have ‘nutritional information’ in a prescribed format, basically giving quantities of fats, sugar, carbohydrates etc. Now, forced by the international food regulations and WHO, the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has proposed front-of-pack nutrition labelling (FOPNL) in addition to ‘nutritional information’ printed on the back of a pack. It is supposed to give additional information to help consumers make healthy choices. This can be in the form of easily-understood symbols or text (like the one used to indicate vegetarian or non-vegetarian products).

Health activists advocate a warning symbol just like a traffic light, while food companies want a ‘health star rating’ or nutrition star rating like the star rating used on electrical appliances to indicate energy-saving.

A star-rating system could actually be misleading because the use of a star symbol usually connotes positive attributes even when one or two stars are used. A consumer survey conducted by LocalCircles showed that seven out of 10 consumers want ultra-processed food packs to carry an upfront warning or red symbol for easy identification. Now, Hyderabad-based ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition (NIN) has conducted a study on the effectiveness and consumer perceptions of different types of FOPNL.

The study has concluded that if the purpose of the FOPNL is to “serve as a preventive tool and deter the consumers from consumption of nutrients of concern, then warning-indicator labels like warning labels and nutrition rating could be helpful.” Nutrition-summary labels are partially based on ingredients (fruits and vegetables, legumes, millets etc.) for positive scores and partially on nutrients in the food product.

As regards the star rating — favoured by the food industry and FSSAI for obvious reasons — the study found that even the presence of two stars (indicating not-so-healthy product) prompted consumers to opt for the product and they showed a lesser willingness to opt for others. Moreover, star rating would depend on rules that could be amenable to manipulation and interpretation by the industry, given its industry-friendly food regulations, whereas warning labels will have to be based on actual contents. The mere addition of a little jowar or bajra to cookies, pasta or noodles can’t make them worthy of the ‘healthy’ or ‘nutritious’ tag.

That brings in the question of nutrition literacy, which the NIN study has found to be very low. A majority of the participants in this study claimed that they read food label information, but they often checked only the manufacturing and expiry dates. However, the identification of vegetarian/non-vegetarian symbols on packs was found to be higher. Therefore, if consumers have to be warned about the unhealthiness of junk food, the warning should be in the form of a symbol on the front of the pack. Colour-coded warning labels can deter more people from choosing moderately healthy or unhealthy products. For the success of any kind of labelling, we need to promote nutrition literacy through national campaigns. Otherwise, the junk food industry with its marketing muscle, in tandem with a friendly regulator, will hijack millets and other such healthy options.