Legal loopholes allow misleading food advertisements; barely any action by FSSAI: Report

New Delhi: Loopholes in at least half-a-dozen Indian laws and regulations allow food firms to push misleading advertisements promoting unhealthy food with barely any punitive action from the food regulator, doctors and social scientists said in a new report, urging the government to plug these gaps.

One of their key demands is to define “HFSS” or junk food that are high in fat, sugar and salt in the food safety regulations because in the absence of such a definition no action can be taken against companies advertising food items that are harmful to health.

HFSS foods are known to increase the risk of non-communicable diseases like diabetes, cardio-vascular disease and hypertension.

The public health campaigners made the demand weeks after the Indian Council of Medical Research’s Hyderabad-based National Institute of Nutrition released the nation’s latest dietary guidelines, which among other things put a threshold value for salt, added sugar, added fat and calorie for such food.

“The ICMR guideline has to be put into the laws and regulation for actions on the ground,” said Arun Gupta, paediatrician and convenor of the Nutrition Advocacy in Public Interest, a non-governmental organisation working on public health and nutrition. The report, made by NAPI, was released here on Friday.

The campaigners have approached the union government seeking modification in six laws and regulations for an effective control on junk food advertisements.

They are Consumer Protection Act, 2019; The Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006; Food Safety and Standards (Packaging and Labelling) regulations, 2011; The Food Safety and Standards (Advertising and Claims) regulation, 2018; Cable Television Network Regulation Act and Rules, 1994 (Advertising Code) and Press Council of India’s Norms of Journalist Conduct, 2022.

“Tobacco advertisements have been banned because of health consequences. The same logic can be applied to prohibit advertisement of HFSS foods as the disease burden due to non-communicable diseases is way above lung cancer,” said Vandana Prasad, a community paediatrician and a member of NAPI.

When they complained to the FSSAI about nearly 150 such advertisements, the regulator formed a committee to scrutinise them and found at least 32 of them misleading. “But none has been fined as per the rules,” says the report. “The FSSAI only sought clarifications from the companies,” added Gupta.

“Our analysis shows a weakness in the process of identifying what is a misleading advertisement because no objective definition is available in the FSS Act 2006,” said social scientist Nupur Bidla, one of the co-authors of the report.

The Consumer Protection Act, 2019 defines “misleading advertisement” as a product or service that deliberately conceals “important” information. “But the consumer law doesn’t define important information in the context of food,” she noted.