Children’s ‘health drink’ stirs up a storm in India over high sugar content

NEW DELHI – One of India’s popular “health drinks” aimed at children has come under growing public criticism, provoking a wider debate in the country on the high sugar content in these beverages as well as their sketchy salubrious claims.

It all began on April 1 when Instagram influencer Revant Himatsingka put out a video questioning the claims about Cadbury Bournvita, a chocolate malt drink powder mix manufactured and marketed by Mondelez India.

The purported benefits include improvement in brain activity and muscle growth, besides a boost to the immune system as well as bone health through nutrients such as vitamins A, C and D, iron, zinc, copper and selenium.

Reading from a packet of Bournvita in the video, Mr Himatsingka, who graduated from the New York University Stern School of Business, focused on some of its not-so-healthy ingredients, including its high total sugar content – 49.8g for every 100g of the product, of which 37.4g is added sugars.

“Basically, the entire half of the bag is of sugar. How is this helping your brains? How is this helping your immunity? How is this even legal?” he says in the video that spread like wildfire, amassing more than 12 million views and shared by certain celebrities.

Other ingredients flagged include artificial caramel colouring and a glycerol-derived emulsifier to increase shelf life, and artificial vanilla flavouring. Hit by growing criticism online, Mondelez India issued Mr Himatsingka with a legal notice, forcing him to take down the video and even apologise on April 14.

“The presenter’s comments are not based on science and were designed to drive anxiety and fear among our loyal consumers by misrepresenting the facts and omitting factually correct information to sensationalise his view,” the firm told The Straits Times.

“All ingredients are safe, approved for use and within permissible limits,” the firm added in its statement.

But the attempt to put a lid on the controversy failed spectacularly. Irked by the company’s heavy-handed approach to silence the influencer on the emotive topic of child nutrition, many individuals began sharing Mr Himatsingka’s video in defiance, ensuring his views ricocheted more widely on social media.

Even doctors and public health activists questioned Bournvita’s claimed benefits. Nutrition Advocacy in Public Interest (NAPi), a think-tank that focuses on nutrition-related issues, described Bournvita as an “ultra-processed food”, which involves “sophisticated processing” to alter the nutrient and non-nutrient components of foods and their molecular relationships, besides addition of flavours, colouring and cosmetic additives to make them “attractive and highly palatable”.

In recent years, a growing body of scientific evidence has flagged the harmful impact of ultra-processed food, including obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer and even depression.

NAPi’s convener Arun Gupta said the controversy highlights India’s “weak regulatory system”, and that Mr Himatsingka did what the government ought to have done – raise public awareness about health risks from consuming high-sugar and ultra-processed food products.

“The government has to come up with policies, not only to raise public awareness, but also to define specifically what is healthy and unhealthy and come up with a law that bans the advertisements for unhealthy food items,” Dr Gupta told ST.

A front-of-package warning labelling system is currently under discussion in India. However, public health activists have expressed concern that these warning labels – owing to pressure from the industry lobby – could end up being not strong enough to deter the runaway growth in consumption of processed and packaged food.

“The food industry has to be encouraged to move away from unhealthy and ultra-processed food products, and real food incentivised too,” Dr Gupta added, noting that a government ban on advertising of infant food and milk substitutes for babies less than two years of age had curtailed the products’ growth in India, thereby promoting consumption of healthier breast milk and home-cooked food.

The World Health Organisation recommends that adults and children reduce their daily intake of “free sugars” to less than 10 per cent of their total energy intake. The term “free sugars” refers to all sugars added to food or drinks, as well as sugars naturally present in honey, syrups and fruit juices.

This threshold remains elusive, though, with the high sugar content in ready-to-eat food increasingly consumed by Indian children.

A check at a local supermarket shelf stocked with health drinks for children found this: Complan, another popular brand, has 50.5g of sugar (of which 26.8g is added sugars) for every 100g of the drink; and Boost, another drink, has 40g of sugar (with 19g of added sugars).

Responding to a question on why manufacturers add such high amounts of sugar to their products, Dr Cyriac Abby Philips, a hepatologist with a wide following on Twitter for his views on health-related issues, said research on sugar has shown that it has addictive potential and acts specifically on certain brain pathways that provide a “reward effect” to consumers.

“The perception that these sugary drinks are healthy is because the advertisements and promotions are overwhelming, blinding the consumers from fact-checking product ingredients and (leading them into) irrationally consuming it,” he told ST in an e-mail.

The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India said on April 22 that a product’s claimed health benefits have to be based on “statistically significant results from well-designed human intervention studies”.

While it did not make any specific reference to the Bournvita controversy, the food regulator said it had initiated action in 138 cases of brands, including “prominent names”, making misleading claims in the past six months.

The National Commission for Protection of Child Rights also asked Mondelez India on April 21 to withdraw its “misleading” advertisements and packaging for Bournvita.

Dr Philips, too, described Bournvita’s health claims on muscle and bone growth, immunity enhancement and brain development as misleading, because the product has offered no “empirical evidence for confirmation”. The firm did not respond to a specific question from ST, asking it to share published and peer-reviewed published studies backing these claims.

With aggressive advertising that often breaches ethical standards, experts have advised a healthy dose of scepticism, suggesting that consumers review claims and scrutinise packaging information more closely, even discussing them with experts should the need arise.

“It seems that, when it comes to public health in India, it’s every person for themselves in the background of a sleeping health regulatory machinery,” Dr Philips added.