Last month I was in Delhi checking out some of the newer retail outlets where my line of earth-friendly products will soon be available. Because the manager was taking me to all his retail points in Gurgaon, an extension of Delhi I was visiting for the first time, I was being politically correct by making a purchase in each store.

After having bought some products I needed, I stopped to look at mints, sweets, licorice, chewing gum etc, strategically placed at impulse purchase points, to see which were the healthiest ones I could pick up. The sales staff eagerly assured me that they were all sugar-free. Taking a closer look I discovered that they were indeed free of plain simple sugar. But they were replete with white poison i.e processed sugar and substitutes which are widely believed to be harmless.

Of course they arent, though they may be marginally better than pure white sugar. The same is true of a whole range of healthy, natural, diet-food, fat-free, low-calorie food ingredients. I had to look very hard to find a non sugar-free lozenge, the good old-fashioned one. My grandparents had the good fortune of living with jaggery or gur, sans bleach or colour. My parents have had to live with white sugar, bereft of the goodness of gur. I am living with all kinds of chemicals infiltrating my air, water and food.

Worse, they seep into the earth. Its somewhat akin to nature’s revenge for trying to be one up on her. Genetically modified, hybrid, irradiated and pesticides-heavy foods, all contribute toward making us more sick than we already are with the consumption of refined or empty foods which fill the belly but do nothing to supply nutrition to body cells, which is the very purpose of eating. The gastronomical satisfaction of such food is its only virtue. Therefore the true connoisseur or gourmet is a person who is able to taste and appreciate wholesome food as nature intended. If you have tasted genuinely organic fare, you’ll know what I’m talking about.

Because of my long and close connection with pure and safe food, an involvement which began with my desire to feed my family right, I have carefully studied the role of sugar in our lives. It’s sad to learn that there’s a political angle even to something as simple as a citizen wanting a natural sweetener. I have been advocating the virtues of non-chemical, non-bleached and non-coloured jaggery for over a decade and have prompted start-ups which produce traditional gur shakkar (golden sugar) from chemicals-free, earth-friendly sugarcane which — its health benefits apart — is easier to spoon into your beverage than jaggery.

I have also been involved with the production and marketing of palm jaggery from Goa (coconut palm) and Kerala (fan palm). They not only infuse the body with instant energy but with beneficial minerals as well. A close runner-up is khandsari (raw sugar) which although nutritionally not on a par with gur is more beneficial than white sugar. It is free of chemicals that make up white sugar, including the animal bone used to process it. In effect it is vegetarian sugar. Moreover unlike white sugar, it contains some nutrients.

To date nobody has produced raw sugar from chemicals-free, earth-friendly sugarcane. So you can imagine my joy when I met a group of people interested in doing so. But when we began discussing pricing I realised that such superior sugar will cost the consumer more than processed white sugar. And unfortunately price-sensitive Indian consumers tend to be unwilling to pay more for healthy products.

So how come refined white sugar is so cheap? The main reason is that it’s subsidised. Which is also why a few years ago the powerful sugar lobby tried very hard to push through a ban on the factory production of jaggery. Can you imagine this? Putting a ban on a culinary tradition stretching back thousands of years? The headline of an article in the Financial Express (October 12) explains the situation well: “UP govt losing Rs.500 crore each year on 24 sick sugar mills.” So we pay a low price for a pack of sugar but eventually it is we who end up contributing by way of subsidies to sugar mills. Not to mention paying by way of ill health.

According to reports Aspartame, an artificial sweetener, accounts for approximately 70 percent of all complaints to the FDA. It is said to be implicated in many health problems including blindness, headaches and convulsions. Sold under dozens of brand names such as NutraSweet and Equal, aspartame reportedly breaks down within 20 minutes at room temperature into several primary toxic and dangerous ingredients. If this is correct you can imagine what happens to crates of diet colas, sugar-free gums, sugar-free medication, all sugar-free sweets in our tropical climate.

For many years I have been strongly advocating the importance of reading ‘contents’ on labels, because most people merely read the name of the product and get duped into purchasing something value-less. There are many new products out there claiming to be low-calorie, diet food, sugar-free, healthy, low-fat, etc. If you read the fine print you will realise how the new substitutes are often worse than the old offenders. 

It boggles the mind to think of the future of children raised on additives, not to mention foods grown with chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Not enough research has been done on the ramifications of continuous ingestion of such foods in the long term. The solution of the modern world of course, will be more vaccines to cope with newer diseases. When that multiplies the problem, we will wonder what went wrong. But who will give back the years lost in emotional despair of the young people who constitute the majority of India’s population? 

(Kavita Mukhi is a Mumbai-based eco-nutritionist and CEO of Conscious Food)