By Annie Banerji and Thin Lei Win
SATARA, India/SINGAPORE, April 30 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – Indian health worker Chhaya Sunil Jadhav banned snack food at home after her daughter, 11, fell sick from eating cheap, salty chips after school every day.
“She howled in pain and clutched her stomach. So we rushed her to the hospital,” said the mother-of-three. An ultrasound scan revealed “a giant ball of glue” in the girl’s gut, which doctors blamed on too much junk food.
Now, U.S. food giant Mars Inc and Mumbai-based charitable foundation Tata Trusts are marketing an alternative in western India: bite-sized squares made from yellow peas, which they say are packed with iron, protein, vitamins and micro-nutrients.
“If it is nutritious, I will buy this,” said Jadhav, trying a pack of GoMo Dal Crunchies, which costs 10 rupees ($0.15), at a product demo in her village of Masur in Maharashtra state.
Around the globe, worries about human health, animal welfare and the environment are driving food firms to find wacky ways to keep people’s weight down and diseases at bay.
For poor diet has overtaken smoking as the world’s biggest killer, according to the latest Global Burden of Disease study, causing 20 percent of deaths globally in 2017.
