Enabling 'right' food choices

Our eating habits can make or break our health. After all, we are what we eat.?

Unfortunately, the environment we subsist in is geared towards promoting unhealthy food, which is sold using very effective marketing, and we eat what we get.

There is an epidemiological shift happening from communicable to non-communicable diseases like diabetes, hypertension, and obesity in India, and their rise I feel can be arrested effectively by?

• Ensuring supply of better food.
• Teaching people how to make better choices.

There is an urgent need to transform our food system to ensure the availability of safe, healthy, and sustainable foods and diets and to create effective, practical pathways for correct information to reach people across the country in easily decipherable ways. This is a mammoth task that requires a concerted, well-thought-of, and planned effort. This also needs the right tools to disseminate information easily.?

I also feel there is an urgent need to consciously move away from the ‘tall claims’ path getting increasingly popular amongst brand marketeers where communication (labels etc) has become a marketing power game (or a gimmick) designed ‘just’ to grab eyeballs. This needs a reality (and ethics) check and should focus on equipping consumers to make the right choices, for their palate and health both.

The base (marketing) idea should be to ‘empower and sell’, rather than being ‘just sell’. The brands must educate and facilitate, rather than thrust choices on the consumer.

Food labeling is, for example, an important tool that can and has been helping consumers make healthy food choices by providing the necessary information about the food on the packaging. It works well but has its challenges. There is so much information 'on' a pack that it becomes difficult for consumers to decipher and make simple choices. Plus label reading is an art/ science that unfortunately not many have been able to master yet.

We need to continue to reinforce the labeling process and make the labels more expansive, yet, easy to read and understand, but we also need additional tools that use modern technologies such as QR or credible accreditation logos which are designed to empower the consumer to pick safe food, and eat right in a click. We need tools that go beyond just what is needed from a regulatory perspective (such as nutrition facts, ingredient labels, and best before dates) and rate the goodness of a food on parameters that are important for consumers e.g. safety, nutrition, clean ingredients, and environmental impact, etc. We need tools that at a glance can help the consumer decide whether the food meets his or her 'needs' and 'the right' to consume clean, safe, healthy food.

This demands serious work which needs to be done, as of yesterday. After all, food is critical in shaping and determining the health and nutrition outcomes of a country. At every stage along the food value chain – the primary producers, processors, buyers, packagers, marketers, distributors, regulators, and consumers - all need to play a role in shaping its safety and quality, environmental footprint, and ability to feed healthy food to people.

The Three Pillars

According to me, policymakers, brands, and educators need to focus on these three pillars:

1. Food safety: ensuring hygiene and sanitary practices through the food supply chain, combating adulteration, reducing toxins and contaminants in food, and controlling food hazards in processing and manufacturing processes.
2. Healthy diets: promoting diet diversity and balanced diets, eliminating toxic trans fats from food, reducing consumption of salt, sugar, and saturated fats, and promoting large-scale fortification of staples to address micronutrient deficiencies.
3. Sustainable food systems: promoting local and seasonal foods, preventing food loss and food waste, conserving water in food value chains, reducing the use of chemicals in food production and presentation, and use of safe and sustainable packaging.

I believe that consumers today are looking for information that can help them make the right food choices. That’s why it’s important for responsible food companies, regulators, and industry veterans to perhaps come together and create credible, transparent, simplified ways to empower consumers in making the right choices, thereby enabling a healthier and more sustainable food system in India. This will be a win-win for both the market as well as the consumers.

#foodchoices #sustainability #healthylifestyle #empowerment #thinkingforks

Kavita Devgan is a Practicing Dietician, Holistic Health Counsellor, Nutrition Advocate, Health Columnist, Speaker and Author of Six Bestsellers

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