report on nickel in indian chocolates
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India has not forgotten Cadbury’s worm-gate crisis of 2003, but does anyone remember the nickel-in-chocolate controversy that started in 1991 and kept returning like a mystery fever for years?
It was ironic in a way that middle-class India got into a flap over the nickel content of chocolates eaten occasionally when unhealthy ‘vanaspati’ or hydrogenated vegetable oil, which was used in urban kitchens daily those days, contained plenty of nickel from its manufacturing process.
Nickel is used as a catalyst to turn vegetable oils into artery-clogging vanaspati ghee. Bureau of Indian Standards even now allows up to 1.5mg of nickel residue per kilogram of vanaspati. And vanaspati was the alleged chief culprit in the nickel-chocolate mess.
A private lab’s findings
The controversy started slowly on August 1, 1991 when The Times of India reported that Environmental Research Laboratory, a little-known private laboratory in Lucknow, had claimed all the popular brands of chocolate in India had a very high nickel content, 150–400 times the permissible level.
This was an exaggeration because Government of India did not prescribe any limit for the nickel content of food.
Lab director M C Saxena claimed Indian chocolates contained 15–41.5 parts per million (ppm) of nickel. By weight, he said, there was 600–1,380 micrograms of nickel in each bar of chocolate tested, as against a safe limit of 4 micrograms (also an arbitrary figure).
One microgram is a thousandth part of a milligram, which is a thousandth part of a gram.
Where was this nickel coming from? Saxena alleged all 11 brands of chocolate he tested contained vanaspati instead of cocoa butter as a hardening agent. That was enough to dent reputations, but he made an even more damaging claim: nickel causes cancer, premature greying and reduced immunity. Since children were the target market for chocolates, sales crashed immediately.
How bad is nickel?
Does nickel cause cancer? Yes, if you are breathing it, but probably not if you eat it. World Health Organization even now maintains “there is a lack of evidence of a carcinogenic risk from oral exposure to nickel.” Check out Page 14 of this WHO document.
Government of India did not bother about the private report or the controversy at first. Asked about it in Parliament on September 3, 1991, it replied: “No such study has come to the notice of the Directorate General of Health Services indicating that some leading brands of chocolates manufactured in the country have any content of nickel.”
It was ironic in a way that middle-class India got into a flap over the nickel content of chocolates eaten occasionally when unhealthy ‘vanaspati’ or hydrogenated vegetable oil, which was used in urban kitchens daily those days, contained plenty of nickel from its manufacturing process.
Nickel is used as a catalyst to turn vegetable oils into artery-clogging vanaspati ghee. Bureau of Indian Standards even now allows up to 1.5mg of nickel residue per kilogram of vanaspati. And vanaspati was the alleged chief culprit in the nickel-chocolate mess.
A private lab’s findings
The controversy started slowly on August 1, 1991 when The Times of India reported that Environmental Research Laboratory, a little-known private laboratory in Lucknow, had claimed all the popular brands of chocolate in India had a very high nickel content, 150–400 times the permissible level.
This was an exaggeration because Government of India did not prescribe any limit for the nickel content of food.
Lab director M C Saxena claimed Indian chocolates contained 15–41.5 parts per million (ppm) of nickel. By weight, he said, there was 600–1,380 micrograms of nickel in each bar of chocolate tested, as against a safe limit of 4 micrograms (also an arbitrary figure).
One microgram is a thousandth part of a milligram, which is a thousandth part of a gram.
Where was this nickel coming from? Saxena alleged all 11 brands of chocolate he tested contained vanaspati instead of cocoa butter as a hardening agent. That was enough to dent reputations, but he made an even more damaging claim: nickel causes cancer, premature greying and reduced immunity. Since children were the target market for chocolates, sales crashed immediately.
How bad is nickel?
Does nickel cause cancer? Yes, if you are breathing it, but probably not if you eat it. World Health Organization even now maintains “there is a lack of evidence of a carcinogenic risk from oral exposure to nickel.” Check out Page 14 of this WHO document.
Government of India did not bother about the private report or the controversy at first. Asked about it in Parliament on September 3, 1991, it replied: “No such study has come to the notice of the Directorate General of Health Services indicating that some leading brands of chocolates manufactured in the country have any content of nickel.”
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