Researchers from the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC) analyzed 10,500 products that had provided complete nutrition information in the nutrition facts panel.
They found only 32 percent are within the scientific thresholds recommended by the World Health Organisation's regional standards.
The finding demonstrates that the nutrient profile model (NPM) from the WHO Southeast Asian Regional Office (SEARO) is appropriate and practicable for the Indian ultra-processed food market and may encourage the industry to embrace science and evidence-based cut-offs on salt, sugar, and saturated fat.
NPM is a scientific method to categorize food and beverage items according to their nutritional composition with the ultimate aim of identifying and differentiating foods that are unhealthily high in salt, sugar, and saturated fats.
"Our study finds that applying the SEARO NPM cut-off points would result in 68 percent of products in the market requiring at least one warning label. This is in stark contrast to an earlier study undertaken by Nutrition Alchemy, utilizing a small dataset of 1,300 which found that 96 percent of products would require a label. This creates an erroneous impression that FOPL based on the SEARO NPM is not practicable and based on ground reality," said co-author Dr. Chandrakant S. Pandav, Professor and Head of the Department - Centre for Community Medicine, AIIMS.