Food Safety Conversation: Good Food for Good Health

To mark World Health Day 2021, Food Safety Works hosted its April Food Safety Conversation themed around the topic “Good Food for Good Health”,  on Thursday (08-04-2021). World Health Day is a global health awareness day is observed every year on April 7 to draw worldwide attention to a subject of major importance to global health each year. The theme for 2021 is “Building a fairer, healthier world”.

In this edition of Food Safety Conversation, the panel consisted of respected experts from the world of food, health and nutrition. Talking about nutrition we had Dr. Latha Shashi who is Consultant Nutritionist & HOD, Dept of Clinical Nutrition and Dietetics at Fernandez Hospital Hyderabad, for health we had Dr. Venkatesh S who is the Lead Interventional Cardiologist at Aster RV Hospital, Bengaluru and for food we had Chef Nabhojit Ghosh, a Consultant in Culinary concepts and Food & Beverage.

There were a lot of interesting threads that went on and one remarkably interesting thing that came out from the discussion was that we blame our bad habits (and in this case, of eating fast food, aptly called so) on lack of time. What is more important for you than your health. Dr. Latha rightly mentioned that if you can plan for your meetings, why you cannot plan similarly about your food. Something that everyone should introspect. She also mentioned that various research has proved that a child’s taste buds have chances of getting accustomed to the diet style of the pregnant mother. She suggests that people should have a disciplined eating to have a healthy life.

Another theme was on the market driving junk food. Here Chef Nabhojit Ghosh aptly pointed out that if we are building an ecosystem which is driven by lowering price points and discounts, somebody’s got to pay and it is usually your food that pays the price, replacing good ingredients with substitutes. So clearly, we need to start making informed choices and signal to the market that you care. He also makes a point that it is not the internet that should decide what kind of diet a person should follow rather it should be the doctors and nutritionists who should be deciding what diet a person should follow.

There were so many more insights from Dr. Venkatesh, right from overselling of the fruits to the demonetization of the fat and efficacy of the studies that are done. He also mentions that the market driven food culture is a huge factor in the decision we make on what we eat. During the conversation, there was also discussion about the importance of fortification of processed food. Dr. Venkatesh also points out that it is not an easy task to come to a conclusion from any observational studies to figure out the exact reason for a health issue, but pure study has come to a conclusion that the increase in refined carbohydrates consumption over a period of time increases the chance of getting a lifestyle/non-communicable disease. It took us a whole hour and 40min to complete it against an allocated time of an hour and 15min. We are sure you will like the candid conversation. The recorded session is available on our YouTube channel which you can watch at your leisure in case you missed the live session. Link is below