-The Hindu COVID-19 or otherwise, educational institutions need to ensure that schoolchildren are nurtured and nourished With COVID-19 cases reducing in the country, several establishments, including schools, are opening again. While the reopening of all schools is on the anvil, the festive season ahead and the fact that children are not yet in the ambit of the vaccination drive are causing apprehension. We, as a society, must focus on the nutrition of...

-Hindustan Times Adding iron through fortification on top of existing iron tablet supplementation programmes (as an extra layer) for women and children is redundant, wasteful, and potentially dangerous. Overeating rice means even more risk of excess Large-scale, mandatory food fortification has often been thought to be a cost-effective intervention to address micronutrient inadequacy. But this is only true with rampant dietary micronutrient inadequacy in all segments of the population, including men. India...

-Press release by Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA Kisan Swaraj) dated 2 August, 2021 170 individuals and organizations along with the Alliance for Sustainable and Holistic Agriculture (ASHA Kisan Swaraj) have written to the FSSAI urging it to scrap its plans to make synthetic/ chemical fortification of foods mandatory in India [1]. They cited detrimental and irreversible health and socio-economic impacts such as market shifts in favor of large...

-GaonConnection.com The Indian government is considering ‘mandatory’ food fortification in the country. Several health experts have written to FSSAI calling the decision ‘a blanket approach’ to meet the complexity of malnutrition in the country. Details here. At least 170 people and organisations, including medical experts and nutritionists, have today, on August 2, written a letter to Ashok Kumar Mishra, the assistant director of Food Fortification Resource Centre, department that regulates food under...

-Frontline.in Interview with Professor H.P.S. Sachdev, Member of the Technical Advisory Group, CNNS. The objective of the very first nationally conducted Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey (CNNS) was to collect nationally representative data on the nutritional status of preschool, school-going and adolescent children. The survey took on board many technical and medical experts to work on its design. One of them was Professor H.P.S. Sachdev, a Senior Consultant in Paediatrics and Clinical Epidemiology...