EAT RIGHT MOVEMENT

Related Topics: Public Health, Government Schemes & Initiatives

News

Union Health Minister Harsh Vardhan has kick-started POSHAN Maah 2019 with a year-long social and mass media campaign on the Eat Right India movement.

What is Eat Right Movement?

• It is a movement launched by FSSAI to improve public health in India and combat negative nutritional trends to fight lifestyle diseases.
• The movement which was launched on 10th July, 2018 aims to cut down salt/sugar and oil consumption by 30% in three years.
• This movement is aligned with the government’s flagship public health programmes such as POSHAN Abhiyaan, Anaemia Mukt Bharat, Ayushman Bharat Yojana and Swachh Bharat Mission.
• FSSAI has prescribed a limit for Total Polar Compounds (TPC) at 25% in cooking oil to avoid the harmful effects of reused cooking oil.

Holistic Approach

• The strength of the ‘The Eat Right Movement’ lies in its holistic and collaborative approach, with stakeholders on both the demand and supply-side joining to make a difference through some clearly identified steps.
• On the demand side, the Eat Right Movement focuses on empowering citizens to make the right food choices.
• On the supply side, it nudges food businesses to reformulate their products, provide better nutritional information to consumers and make investments in healthy food as responsible food businesses.
• Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has also put in place robust regulatory measures under three major pillars: Eat Safe, Eat Health and Eat Sustainably for the programme.

Initiatives

‘The Eat Right Movement’ brings together three ongoing initiatives of FSSAI:

• Safe and Nutritious Food Initiative – focused on social and behavioural change around food safety and nutrition at home, school, workplace and on-the-go;
• The Eat Healthy Campaign – focused on reduction of high fat, sugar and salt foods in the diet; and
• Food Fortification – focused on promoting five staple foods-wheat flour, rice, oil, milk and salt that are added with key vitamins and minerals to improve their nutritional content

Preventive Health

• There is a need for a movement on preventive health for all in the backdrop of the increasing burden of non-communicable diseases including diabetes, hypertension and heart diseases, widespread deficiencies of vitamins and minerals and rampant food-borne illnesses in India.
• Eat Right India movement is a crucial preventive healthcare measure to trigger social and behavioural change through a judicious mix of regulatory measures, combined with soft interventions for ensuring awareness and capacity building of food businesses and citizens alike.

Significance

• There has been a shift in the cause of mortality from communicable diseases to non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and cancer, not only in India, but also across the world.
• The four main factors to prevent non-communicable diseases are healthy diet, physical exercise, avoidance of tobacco and alcohol.
• Thus, the message of ‘Eat Right’ is of great significance and should be promoted everywhere.