FSSAI takes down ‘100 per cent fruit juice’ labels: Here’s all you need to know about added sugar

Anything with a “100 per cent fruit juice” label on packaged beverages is nothing but fruit concentrate diluted with water. That’s why the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has ordered manufacturers to take down labels making tall claims from their products, saying they were misleading. Describing them as reconstituted juices, it said, “The major ingredient…. is actually water and the ingredient (fruit), for which the claim is being made, is only present in limited concentrations.” What are reconstituted juices? These are manufactured by adding water to the concentrate or pulp extracted from a fruit and are heat-treated to kill microbes. “A whole fruit is usually made of 80 per cent water, the nutrients and fibres comprising the rest. A fruit concentrate is prepared by removing this water, so it is essentially concentrated nutrients. There is nothing wrong with that, it is healthy. However, when reconstituted with water, it is diluted further to make it look like the juice from many fruits. For example, you can get 50 ml of juice from an orange. But it can be used to create 100 or 200 ml of reconstituted juice,” says Ritika Samaddar, regional head, Department of Clinical Nutrition and Dietetics, Max Healthcare.

Usually, packaged juices use high fructose corn syrup in small quantities that do not need to be declared on the label as per norms. “The syrup may be in negligible amounts but the added sugar in it has been linked to conditions such as fatty liver, obesity, insulin resistance and high triglyceride levels. Consume a whole fruit at best or pulp the fruit in a juicer at home instead of falling for one that is available in the market. Juices lose the fibres and even some nutrients of the raw fruit. If you eat the whole fruit, you might be eating only one or two oranges a day, but as a juice you could be having five or six oranges. What happens if children consume these juices? Dr Karunesh Kumar, senior consultant of paediatric gastroenterology at Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals, Delhi, strictly advises against packaged juice in early childhood to negate sugar dependency. “Parents give these to their children instead of carbonated sodas. But given their added sugar, they should not be given to toddlers, overweight or obese children. This is because consuming foods and beverages with high salt or sugar content at a very young age will prompt them to eat similar foods later in life,” he says.

Besides, sugary juices can trigger gastrointestinal problems like bloating and diarrhoea. “Some toddlers develop false diarrhoea — where they pass partially formed stool several times a day.

What do the FSSAI directives say?

The FSSAI has asked food manufacturers to exhaust already printed labels by September 1. Now they have to label products as “sweetened juice” if they contain more than 15 gm/kg of nutritive sweeteners, be they sugar, jaggery or corn syrup. Products made with non-nutritive sweeteners — products such as aspartame that cannot be processed by the body and hence do not add calories to a drink — are exempt from this.