The predominantly cereal-based diet advocated by nutritional scientists and economists for tackling hunger is a flawed prescription that bears wide-ranging health consequences on the poor in India, Veena Shatrugna, National Adviser on Nutrition to the Supreme Court Commissioner on Food Security, said on Tuesday.
In an address organised by the Safe Food Alliance (SFA), Ms. Shatrugna said, “Chronic hunger as it exists in India can be largely traced to the rapid scientific advances in the area of food and nutrition analysis and classification,” as a result of which a diet of large doses of cereals continued to be advocated as a means to achieve the baseline benchmark of about 2,400 calories per day per person.
According to Ms. Shatrugna, nutrition research in the 50s and 60s, though brilliantly innovative and deeply committed to the welfare of Indians, simplified the science of food with indices and correction factors using concepts such as consumption units, biological value of proteins and calorie needs of workers.
These inputs were recast and deployed in administrative initiatives that systematically transformed the diets of the poor in India to plain cereals as the major source – even perhaps the only source – of calories to the exclusion of other nutrients, she said.
“The consequences of this cereal overload and nutritional depletions have been far-reaching and are responsible for a large measure of the profile of ill health, and the epidemic of chronic diseases in India.”
In fact, the cereal overload had resulted in a diagnosis of widespread micronutrient deficiencies in the poorer strata of society, she said.
V. Suresh, advocate and Supreme Court-designated adviser to the State on Food Security, said that while one would have expected a reduction in poverty given the resources and money that had been ploughed into various alleviation schemes over the decades, the stark reality was that there were more proportions of the poor than the entire population at the time of Independence.
Mr. Suresh feared that the Department of Food would shape the proposed Bill on Food Security in a manner that would reduce the poor to non-entities and virtually disband the Public Distribution System.
