Modern lifestyle food products are not about taste and quality alone. Established and popular brands are increasingly becoming conscious about the health of their customers. The Rs 350 crore worth home bred food products company, Cremica Food Industries Limited, is readying to bring to the market scientifically and medically validated sauces, dressings and jams with low Glycemic Index (GI) which may help reduce risk of developing Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, hypertension and obesity.
The company on Friday signed a memorandum of understanding with Mohali based National Agri-Food Biotechnology Institute (NABI), which in collaboration with the endocrinology department of the PGI Chandigarh, will undertake a six-months study of the food products having low GI and understand its effects on consumers and other subjects.
Announcing this at a news media conference at the NABI campus in Knowledge City (Sector 81) Mohali, Dr TR Sharma, Executive Director, NABI, institute scientist Dr Mahendra Bishnoi and Dr Sanjay Badada, Professor in the Department of Endocrinology, PGI Chandigarh, who have conceived, and will personally monitor the test programme, said a lot of companies make tall claims about the health aspects of their food products, but these need to be validated scientifically and medically by creditable independent agencies for the consumers to actually believe them.
Though the test programme is funded by Cremica, the joint effort of NABI and PGI will be strictly guided by scientific, medical and professional protocols in the interests of the consumers, Dr Sharma asserted.
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Photo By : Life In Chandigarh
GI measures how carbohydrates-containing food raises blood glucose levels. Foods which are low on GI scale tend to release glucose slowly and with greater regularity. Hence, they may foster weight loss.
In an interaction with NABI scientists, Cremica Industries Vice President (Technical) Aziz Khan claimed that Cremica had developed low GI sauces, dressings and jam, specially made with low GI-based sugars. “We have been able to reduce the GI scale in some of our food products from 80-90 to 60-70, and further efforts are being made by the company to further bring them down to 20-30,” he informed.
Describing this as remarkable, if these scales are validated independently, Dr Badada said low GI foods will not only benefit diabetics, but also pre diabetics. Intake of these can also prevent diabetes among normal people, he added. In the light of these observations, he suggested that if the low GI food products get validated in the test programme, the company must introduce these in the market at affordable price points so that all sections of society can benefit, and not just the elite section.
A number of other senior scientists from NABI were also present. Apart from Aziz Khan, the Cremica team comprised GM Quality Arun Talwar, Vice President Human Resources Nikhil Bhuchchar, Regulatory Affairs Head Ajay Sharma and DGM Marketing Vivek Pathak.
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