One man’s stand against junk food as diabetes climbs across India
A father’s effort to ban junk food sales in and near schools aims to change what children eat
Rahul Verma’s son was born gravely ill with digestive problems, but over years of visits to the boy’s endocrinologist, Verma saw the doctor grow increasingly alarmed about a different problem, one threatening healthy children. Junk food, the doctor warned, was especially dangerous to Indians, who are far more prone to diabetes than people from other parts of the world.
One day in the doctor’s waiting room, Verma noticed a girl who had gotten fat by compulsively eating potato chips. He decided he had to do something.
“On one side you have children like my son, who are born with problems,” said Verma, “and on the other side you have children who are healthy and everything is fine and you are damaging them giving them unhealthy food.”
Verma, who had no legal training, sat late into the nights with his wife, Tullika, drafting a petition in their tiny apartment, which was bedecked with fairy lights and pictures of the god Ganesh, who is believed to overcome all obstacles. He filed the public interest lawsuit in the Delhi High Court in 2010, seeking a ban on the sale of junk food and soft drinks in and around schools across India.
The case has propelled sweeping, court-ordered regulations of the food industry to the doorstep of the Indian government, where they have languished. They have outsize importance in India, population 1.3 billion, because its people are far more likely to develop diabetes — which can lead to heart disease, kidney failure, blindness and amputations — as they gain weight than people from other regions, according to health experts. Since 1990, the percent of children and adults in India who are overweight or obese has almost tripled to 18.8 per cent from 6.4 per cent, according to data from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation at the University of Washington.
The International Diabetes Federation projects that the number of Indians with diabetes will soar to 123 million by 2040 as diets rich in carbohydrates and fat spread to less affluent rural areas. “We are sitting on a volcano,” said Anoop Misra, chairman of a diabetes hospital at Fortis Healthcare, one of India’s biggest private hospital chains.
In the years since the court ordered the government to develop guidelines to regulate junk food, the case has encountered ferocious opposition from the All India Food Processors Association, which counts Coca-Cola India, PepsiCo India and Nestlé India as members, as well as hundreds of other companies.
Subodh Jindal, the president of the association, said in an interview that junk food was unfairly blamed for diabetes and obesity. It was overeating, not the food itself, that has caused the problem, he said, asking, “Do you eat two pizzas a day or two pizzas a week?”
The government this year took a significant step that public health experts believe will help combat the rise of obesity in the world’s second most populous country. It partially implemented a tax on sugar sweetened beverages, instituting a 40 percent tax on such drinks that are carbonated, though not on juices made with added sugars that many children drink.