Sweet Nothings

 Oral Rehydration Salts (ORS) is a formulation for replenishing electrolytes, especially in cases of diarrhoea, for vulnerable populations like little children. When cholera was around, ORS saved millions of lives. There is no real confusion about this mixture. The World Health Organization (WHO) has clear guidelines about the percentage of sodium, potassium, glucose, and other constituents it should contain, and the government has been using it in public health programmes for decades.

But then private companies saw a market, especially with markets like athletes, and began to sell ‘ORS’ liquids. Recently, the FSSAI, the food standards body, banned the labelling of all such products as ORS. A paediatrician from Hyderabad had to campaign for eight years to get the ban. She had found parents were giving it to children with common ailments expecting to rehydrate them and made the condition worse because they had been stuffed with sugar, much more than what the WHO has guided. Instead of rehydrating, it often led to more dehydration. A court has now given a tem­porary stay on the ban for one manufacturing company, which means ORS that is not really ORS will still be available on shelves.

Why did the commercial ORS need to be different at all? Here, we run into a common phenomenon with most food products on shelves—the wanton addition of sugar. It is a carefully planned strategy because sugar elevates taste and leads to repeat customers. In the past, there was no awareness about sugar’s negative consequences unless you were a diabetic. But now, the world and India, especially, are in the middle of an epidemic of lifestyle ailments and sugar is among the culprits.

A 300-millilitre bottle of a soft drink has eight teaspoons of sugar. The more sweet something is, the more of it the consumer wants. Sugar-addition is a mechanism for habit creation.

The commercial ORS drinks are not very different from soft drinks. They obviously don’t want to compete against cola companies and so the marketing veers to medical benefits that parents of little children then get taken in by. It is a sweet vicious circle.