Hey folks,

School lunch scandals…sound deliciously intriguing, don’t they? Well, they are currently creating an uproar in the United States... Two furious mothers have come up with a documentary film on how food companies are deliberately misleading their kids. How? They stack school canteens with foodstuff, labelled ‘healthy snacks’, which are actually full of unhealthy negative nutrients. When a teenager picks up a bowl of yoghurt instead of a packet of chips, believing that she has opted for the ‘healthy lifestyle’, she consumes large doses of high fructose corn syrup and artificial sweeteners. Potent ingredients for adolescent obesity. And in a country with over 25 per cent of the population suffering from this disease of fat-ness, the mothers certainly have a reason to be angry.
In fact, it is time that we Indians got angry too! School surveys in Indian cities show that 30 per cent of adolescents from India's middle classes are overweight. Consuming far too much refined sugar and animal-based fats is the reason, say medics. Scary, right? But more scary is our tendency to eat without finding out what is it that we are putting in our mouth… Do we know, for instance, what those sumptuous burgers, those tangy chips, those ‘energy’ drinks (sold by food vendors in every city school) are made of, and how our bodies react to them? Do think about it…