Health Star Rating System

Syllabus: General Studies Paper 2

The “health star rating” system that the Food Safety Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) plans to adopt in order to help consumers reduce their intake of unhealthy foods has been opposed by close to a dozen consumer and health advocacy groups.

About FSSAI’s Star Rating:

In February 2022, the FSSAI decided to adopt the “health-star rating system”, which gives a product 1/2 a star to 5 stars, in its draft regulations for front of package labelling (FOPL).

• It aims to help consumers reduce their intake of unhealthy foods.
• The HSR format ranks a packaged food item based on salt, sugar, and fat content and the rating will be printed on the front of the package.
• The underlying premise of the HSR is that positive ingredients such as fruits and nuts can offset negative nutrients such as calories, saturated fat, total sugar, sodium to calculate the number of stars ascribed to a product.

 Applicability:

• All packaged food items or processed food will have the HSR label. These will include chips, biscuits, namkeen, sweets and chocolates, meat nuggets, and cookies.
• Exemptions: However, milk and its products such as chenna and ghee are EXEMPTED as per the FSSAI draft notified in 2019.

 Need for HSR:

• A lot of Indian consumers do not read the information available at the back of the packaged food item.
• Also, India has a huge burden of non-communicable diseases that contributes to around 5.87 million (60%) of all deaths in a year.
• HSR will encourage people to make healthy choices and could bring a transformational change in the society.

Why is it being opposed?

• Some experts opposed the use of the HSR model in India, suggesting that consumers might tend to take this as an affirmation of the health benefits rather than as a negative warning of ill effects.
• Impact on Sale: Certain organisations fear it might affect the sale of certain food products.

FSSAI:

FSSAI is an autonomous statutory body established under the Food Safety and Standards Act, 2006 (FSS Act).