Ten of India’s top honey brands adultered with sugar syrup: CSE study finds

ZT NEWS NETWORK

New Delhi: The Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), New Delhi, has found that almost all brands of honey being sold in Indian markets are adulterated with sugar syrup.

Investigations by CSE with laboratory studies in India and Germany found 77 per cent of samples adulterated with sugar syrup. Out of 22 samples tested, only five passed all the tests.

An official at CSE told Ziraat Times that Jammu & Kashmir’s local brands were not tested in this latest exercise as the main focus was on large brands.

Out of the 13 brands tested, only three passed the NMR test, which was done by a specialised laboratory in Germany. Honey samples from leading brands such as Dabur, Patanjali, Baidyanath, Zandu, Hitkari and Apis Himalaya, all failed the NMR test.

CSE had selected 13 top and smaller brands of processed and raw honey being sold in India. Samples of these brands were first tested at the Centre for Analysis and Learning in Livestock and Food (CALF) at the National Dairy Development Board (NDDB) in Gujarat. Almost all the top brands (except Apis Himalaya) passed the tests of purity, while a few smaller brands failed the tests to detect C4 sugar – call it basic adulteration using cane sugar.

But when the same brands were tested using Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) – laboratory tests currently being used globally to check for such modified sugar syrups – almost all big and small brands failed.

Only 3 out of the 13 brands – Saffola, MarkfedSohna and Nature’s Nectar (one out of two samples) — passed all the tests. 

The German lab that conducted the tests has chosen to stay anonymous.    

Dabur has refused this allegation. The company’s statement said that Dabur is the only company in India to have an NMR testing equipment in our own laboratory, and the same is used to regularly test our Honey being sold in the Indian market. The statement also had NMR test reports from Germany-based Bruker BioSpin GmbH dated July 16, 2020, stating that Dabur Honey had passed the NMR Test. 

The business of adulteration has become sophisticated and the Indian standards cannot detect adulteration. This is because Chinese companies have designed sugar syrups to bypass these standards.    

As of August 1, 2020, NMR tests have been made mandatory in India for honey that is meant for export, suggesting that the Indian government is aware of this adulteration business and the need for more advanced tests.

“It is a food fraud more nefarious and more sophisticated than what we found in our 2003 and 2006 investigations into soft drinks; more damaging to our health than perhaps anything that we have found till now- keeping in mind the fact that we are still fighting against a killer COVID-19 pandemic with our backs to the wall. This overuse of sugar in our diet will make it worse,” CSE’s director-general Sunita Narain said.

“Instead of honey, people are eating more sugar, which will add to the risk of COVID-19. Sugar ingestion is directly linked to obesity, and obese people are more vulnerable to life-threatening infections,” adds Narain.