Survey finds most samples of honey adulterated
NEW DELHI: At a time when honey is being touted as an immunity booster against Covid-19, the New Delhi- based advocacy group Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) claimed on Wednesday that 77% of samples from 13 top honey brands in the country were found to have been adulterated with a modified syrup to beat safety tests.
Only three of 13 brands --- Saffola, Markfed Sohna and Nature’s Nectar --- passed the internationally accepted Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMR) tests conducted by a German lab, considered the gold standard to detect modified syrup adulteration of honey, CSE’s director general Sunita Narain told reporters.
Narain, who released the findings of a four-month-long investigation, said honey samples of leading brands such as Dabur, Patanjali, Baidyanath, Zandu, Hitkary and Apis Himalaya failed the NMR tests.
Three of these companies -Dabur, Patanjali and Emami -said in separate statements that the honey they produce and market complies with all food safety requirements and their products were 100% safe. A Dabur spokesperson termed the CSE’s report “malicious.”
Patanjali said the report was aimed at promoting processed honey. The others didn’t respond.
The findings dovetail with practitioners of traditional Indian medicine recommending honey, turmeric, ginger, garlic, coriander, cumin and other foods for their immunity boosting properties as the coronavirus disease pandemic rages.
Narain said the findings of the NMR tests were worrying because such products could compromise human health in Covid-19 times. “We know that the households are consuming more honey because of its intrinsic goodness. Our research found honey is adulterated with sugar. Sugar ingestion is linked to obesity and obese people are more vulnerable to life-threatening diseases,” she said.
CSE had 22 samples of the honey brands tested first at the Centre for Analysis and Learning in Livestock and Food (CALF) at the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in Gujarat. Almost all the top brands passed the tests of purity; a few samples of the smaller brands failed the tests to detect cane sugar.
Narain said some Chinese companies had developed a syrup containing fructose, or fruit sugar, that can go undetected in Indian tests.
“The Indian tests failed to track the marker for sophisticated rice syrup, which has high sugar content, but was found through NMR,” Narain said, adding that CSE can provide test reports from the German lab to regulatory authorities if they wanted. The rice syrup could be made of fructose which, the CSE found, was being produced by a company in Uttarkhand’s Jaspur town and sold at ₹60 to ₹68 per kilogram. The syrup was also available for import by Chinese companies, which claimed it can beat food safety tests in India.
The syrup was also available on the Chinese website of e-commerce giant Alibaba and was sent to CSE through Hong Kong as a paint pigment to evade the import license conditions necessary to import syrup. Narain said the Chinese companies wrote to CSE reporter saying that 50-80% fructose adulteration can remain undetected in food safety tests conducted in India.
Around 11,000 million tonnes of fructose has been imported from Chinese firms since 2014-15, the CSE said. According to the National Bee Board, honey production in India increased to 105,000 tonnes in 2017-18 from 35,000 tonnes in 2005-06. Honey exports year-on-year increased by 13% in 2019-20; Punjab, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar were the leading honey producers, the board said.
The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India, the regulatory body for food safety, has not prescribed NMR tests for honey. FSSAI acted as a whistleblower for the CSE’s investigation by writing to all states governments to look for adulteration of honey using golden sugar, invert sugar syrup and rice syrup, Narain claimed.
“It remains unclear how much does the food regulator really know about this murky business. The three imported sugar syrups named by FSSAI are either not imported in these names or are not indicted for adulteration. Instead, Chinese companies are mostly exporting this syrup as fructose to India,” she said. A spokesperson for FSSAI said it was waiting for the publication of the results and would “provide our response accordingly.”
ONLY 3 BRANDS -SAFFOLA, MARKFED SOHNA AND NATURE’S NECTAR-- PASSED THE TESTS.