Anuradha Sridharan

Products that are being promoted as "Sugar-free", "no-added-sugar" are on the rise. As people are getting aware of the consequences of high sugar consumption, food industry wants to tap into the new demands by launching sugar-free products. Until a few years back, only diabetic patients were seeking such products, but nowadays many health-conscious people who don't want to be trapped by lifestyle diseases are looking out for sugar-free products. Whenever I accompany my in-laws for grocery shopping, I get very concerned with the way they scout for sugar-free foods in every aisle. Be it ice-creams, jams, biscuits, cookies etc. All they would check for is the label "SUGAR FREE" on the front side of the pack. Both of them have diabetes and hypertension. They have been on artificial sweeteners for decades. The intention of this article is NOT to talk about artificial sweeteners and their ill effects per se but more about the label "sugar fr...

  Let me share with you a perfect example of how celebrities/influencers promote junk as "healthy" by spurting out attention-grabbing numbers/stats.  As I was scrolling through my Insta feed a couple of days back, I stopped at a sponsored ad. It was from Unibic Cookies that showed a video of Shilpa Shetty making a fruit parfait with Unibic Digestive cookies as the base/crumble. This particular line in the caption caught my attention - " To give it a healthy twist, we are making this recipe using Unibic Daily Digestive cookies which has 26% fibre " Woah, 26% fibre? seriously? I have never seen a packaged food with that high an amount of fibre. I immediately opened my Amazon app, searched for this pack and looked at the nutrition facts table. 100 gm of these cookies contain 6.1gm of dietary fibre , which means it has 6.1% fibre.  So the number quoted in Insta caption is clearly misleading.   Source: amazon.in   I then opened the video fr...

Source: BigBasket   The chocolate and nut based spreads have become a staple in many urban households, ever since Nutella set its footsteps firmly in the Indian market. As though Nutella isn't enough, there are quite a few similar chocolate spreads that have been occupying the supermarket shelves the past few years. A few weeks back, I heard a mom saying casually, "My daughter CANNOT eat idli, dosa or chapathi without ketchup, jam or choco spread". Her 5-year old daughter is a sweet child but OBESE at such a young age. How did our kids reach that "CANNOT EAT FOOD WITHOUT CHOCOSPREAD" state? It is us, parents who introduced them to such junk in the first place. If the child protests that she won't eat regular food, why do we succumb so easily? What worse could happen? They might throw a tantrum or skip a meal. So what? After a few days, they would forget and move on. Instead, what do we do? We indulge them, we fulfill their every single demand fo...