Adulteration in Food Commodities: A Persistent Public Health Concern

Food commodities have always been vulnerable to fraudulent admixture or adulteration with cheaper, inferior materials. Such practices are often revealed when food materials are transported from the countryside to urban centers, where quality control measures are more stringent. Adulteration involves lowering the quality of food by adding cheap and inferior substances to it or by removing essential components. Additionally, it includes the presence of harmful substances in the food.

According to the 1938 Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, food must not contain any added poisonous or deleterious substances that may render it injurious to health unless the added substance is required or cannot be avoided by good manufacturing practice, and a safe level has been established. Any food that does not meet these conditions is considered adulterated. For instance, the presence of harmful substances such as pesticides beyond permissible levels or the inclusion of non-food substances like melamine in dairy products would render the food adulterated.

Recent incidents underscore the ongoing relevance of this issue. In 2023, reports surfaced of honey being diluted with sugar syrups in several countries, compromising its purity and nutritional value. Similarly, there have been cases of olive oil being mixed with cheaper oils to reduce costs, deceiving consumers and posing potential health risks.

Adulteration is not only a breach of consumer trust but also a significant public health concern. Ensuring the integrity of food commodities requires robust regulatory frameworks, vigilant enforcement, and public awareness to protect consumers from the dangers of adulterated food.
Adulteration in Food Commodities: A Persistent Public Health Concern

What is food adulteration?

Food adulteration is the process by which the quality of the food or its products is reduced through the addition of a foreign or inferior substance or the removal of valuable substances from food. Consumption of adulterated food causes diseases like cancer, asthma, ulcer, etc. Majority of adulterants used by the shopkeepers are cheap substitutes which are easily available.

Reasons for food adulteration are:
*To get more profit
*To increase the weight, adulterant is added
*To increase volume of trade by showing lower prices

Adulterant usage was first discovered in 1820 by the German Chemist Friedrich Accum. He identified many toxic metal colorings in food and drinks.

There are three types of food adulteration
 Intentional adulteration
 Incidental adulteration
 Natural adulteration

Intentional adulteration means knowingly adding some undesirable substances to the food or removing/replacing some of the items and making it of poor quality. Those substances are added as a deliberate act on the part of the adulterer with the intention to increase the margin of profit. On a wide-scale, intentional adulteration in food is an attack on the safety of food supply. For example, addition of water to milk, addition of dried leaves to tea leaves, addition of chalk powder, wrong weighing of foodstuffs. Intentional adulterants are sand, marble chips, stones, mud, chalk powder, water, mineral oil & coal tar.

Incidental adulteration: Sometimes food gets incidentally or unintentionally contaminated in fields (e.g. crops) during growth and harvesting, storage, processing, transportation and handling by the producers as well as by the consumer.

Incidental adulterants are: pesticides, residues, tin from can, droppings of rodents, larva in food. Metallic contamination: Arsenic from pesticides, lead from water, mercury from effluent, from chemical industries, tins from cans.

Natural adulteration occurs due to the presence of certain chemicals or harmful substance naturally occurring in foods e.g. lead from water pipes joints mixes into the water.

Some adulterated foods in market includes: Cow/buffalo milk can be adulterated with starch, milk powder and urea; Butter is adulterated to an enormous extent with oleomargarine, a product of beef fat; green chillies, green peas & other vegetables adulterated with Malachite Green, Argemone seeds; Mustard seeds and mustard oil adulterated with Argemone seeds, Papaya seeds.
What is food adulteration?