Priyanka Sambhav
If you have replaced sugar with honey in your nimbu-paani or green tea to reduce the sugar intake, then the possibility is it may have been doing just the opposite. Significant brands of honey failed a purity test conducted by the Centre for Science and Environment ( CSE). The investigation found that the ‘Made in India’ honey is adulterated with sugar syrup.
The CSE conducted the test at two levels- first one in Gujrat’s National Dairy Development boards’ lab in which all the big brands (except Apis Himalaya) passed this test barring few smaller brands. But when it came to the second round of lab test, almost all the brands big or small failed. This second round of test was Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) – a test done by specialised labs in Germany. The NMR test checks the presence of modified sugar syrups, and almost all big and small brands failed this test. Out of the 13 brands tested, only three passed the NMR test.
The CSE test finding as reported on their website are-
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77 % of the samples were adulterated with the addition of sugar syrup
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22 samples were tested, and just 5 cleared the test
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Leading brands such as Dabur, Patanjali, Baidyanath, Zandu, Hitkari and Apis Himalaya, all failed the NMR test.
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Only 3 out of the 13 brands – Saffola, Markfed Sohna and Nature’s Nectar — passed all the tests.
“It is a food fraud more nefarious and more sophisticated than what we found in our 2003 and 2006 investigations into soft drinks; more damaging to our health than perhaps anything that we have found till now – keeping in mind the fact that we are still fighting against a killer COVID-19 pandemic with our backs to the wall. This overuse of sugar in our diet will make it worse,” said Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) director general Sunita Narain , while releasing the CSE investigation into honey adulteration.
When we are gulping down dollops of honey to boost your immunity in COVID19 era, but all it has been doing is boosting your sugar levels.
“What we found was shocking,” says Amit Khurana, programme director of CSE’s Food Safety and Toxins team. “It shows how the business of adulteration has evolved so that it can pass the stipulated tests in India. Our concern is not just that the honey we eat is adulterated, but that this adulteration is difficult to catch. In fact, we have found that sugar syrups are designed so that they can go undetected.”
CSE just didn’t sample of honey for lab tests but also investigated on how Chinese companies were selling sugar syrup that can bypass Indian lab tests.
Though brands like Dabur, Patanjali and Emami(makers of Zandu Honey) have denied usage of the so-called Chinese sugar syrup.
