A healthy dose of poison

Give it up, buddy. You can’t eat your way to health in our country. And your attempt at giving your child a healthy nutrition is doomed.
No, I am not talking about the underprivileged who go hungry. Nor about the protein and vegetable-free diet of those who barely get to fill their bellies in this spiralling price rise. I am talking about you, my privileged, aware reader, you who know all about health food and fancy diets and have access to it all. Or so you think.
Let me break it gently. You are probably poisoning your family. Almost everything we eat and feed our kids has toxic stuff in it. Milk, fresh fruits, vegetables, even honey — all that we instinctively reach for as healthy foods now breed disease. And not all of it is caused by evil adulterators. Much of this mass poisoning springs from “efficient” farming techniques, deadly marketing ploys or just callousness.
Take the study on honey released this week. The nectar of the gods, our miracle home cure for a range of ailments, that internationally revered all-natural immunity booster and anti-bacterial is now teeming with antibiotics. Of 12 samples tested by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), 11 had unacceptable levels of antibiotics, from the banned chloramphenicol to the potent ciprofloxacin, oxytetracycline and erythromycin, among others. These were well known brands, righteously touting their herbal goodness, including market leader Dabur and others like Khadi, Himalaya, Patanjali Ayurved and Baidyanath Ayurved. And they had up to 25 times the accepted limit of some antibiotics besides significant amounts of antibiotics that are not accepted at all.
Over time, low doses of antibiotics can damage your health, especially the liver, cause resistance to antibiotics and breed drug-resistant bugs. We are staring at a serious public health hazard.
So do we not have a regulatory board for food safety? Sure we do. There are several for honey. But they don’t check for contaminants. The Export Inspection Council does, but only for honey that is being exported, of course. We export excellent, clean honey to the rich countries, and feed our kids the filthy stuff.
You get firang honey, you say? From lands that have strict food safety regulations? I hate to break this to you, pal, but their food regulations don’t protect you. And since your sarkar doesn’t protect you either, others dump their dirty food here. So what you buy at exorbitant prices expecting great quality is as unsafe as home-grown stuff. In fact, of the 12 samples, the highest contaminations were found in two firang brands — in Switzerland’s Nectaflor Natural Blossom Honey and the famous Australian Capilano Pure and Natural Honey. Don’t expect others to protect you, sweetie. Do it yourself.
Then there is the best traditional source of nutrition for children — milk. In my childhood, the biggest grouse of concerned mothers was the adulteration of milk with water by the local milkman. Domestics were despatched to supervise the milking of the cow or buffalo even in big cities like Kolkata or Delhi. (“Ekdam jal!” said the housewife anyway when she encountered the milk thus acquired.)
Today, watered milk would be almost noble. Now milk is faked with urea, detergents, caustic soda, white paint and oil. A serious health hazard, toxic synthetic milk causes terrible ailments, including cancer. Paneer, khoya and ghee are similarly adulterated, usually with urea and white paint or poster colours with varying amounts of dalda.
But even when the milk is untouched by paint and oils, it can be pretty harmful. It is routinely full of hormones — mostly oxytocin, a banned drug given to cattle to increase lactation. A mainstay of milkmen across the country, oxytocin seeps into the milk and affects consumers, leading to hormone imbalance and miscarriage, male impotence, sterility, uterine cancers, neurological complications and facial hair in women.
So you want to take your child off milk? What will you feed her for strong bones and healthy growth? Fresh fruit and veggies, and lots of calcium-rich spinach, like Popeye? Sorry, sister, but most of our lovely “fresh” fruits and vegetables are flush with oxytocin. It makes vegetables brighter, plumper, bigger and more attractive to consumers. It is injected generously into most gourds, including the lauki and karela so favoured by healthy eaters, and into pumpkins, cucumbers, spinach, papayas, watermelons, bananas and mangoes. Or so we hear.
But oxytocin hasn’t replaced the old faithful — calcium carbide. This well-known fruit “ripener” has been causing all kinds of problems for generations, from rashes and blurred vision to ulcers and respiratory problems and even pulmonary oedema, sterility and cancers. We have done precious little about it.
Now for the heavy metals and pesticides. Fruits and veggies contain several times the permitted levels of lead, zinc and cadmium — especially our traditional health food, spinach. This is largely caused by irrigation with untreated waste water. And pesticides, the preferred poisons, are necessary for a good crop, wouldn’t you say? Never mind that all this affects our lungs, kidneys, joints, reproductive, cardiovascular and nervous systems, and leads to birth defects, Parkinson’s and cancer.
So you want to give up on the old fruit? And the steamed veggies on the side? Just go for fish and meats and may God save the vegetarians? Well, fish often have high levels of pesticides and heavy metals too — since they are routinely bred in contaminated water. And meats are rich in hormones, antibiotics and drugs that the animal was fed to fatten it for the slaughter. In fact, we ingest much more antibiotics and hormones from meats and poultry than we could ever do from honey.
Oh dear. Maybe we could drink lots of water to flush out these toxins? You could, with fingers crossed. We are famous for water-borne diseases. And today the National Institute of Virology has said that most purifiers in India do not eliminate water-borne viruses. You will survive on bottled water, you say? Too bad, moneybags, a study found that in general bottled water had 36 times the acceptable limit of pesticides. And all cold drinks in India are bubbling with pesticides — some of the biggest brands going up to 70 times the limit. So happy drinking, buddy!
The only way to protect yourself and your child is by getting proper safety regulations for food and beverages in place. If we can stick to international quality for export, we could jolly well do it for ourselves as well. Let’s take ourselves as seriously as we take the foreigner.

Antara Dev Sen is editor of The Little Magazine.
She can be contacted at sen@littlemag.com [2]