I Thought I Was Feeding My Children Well-then I looked at their plates

What seemed like a very long time ago, when my children were young, I thought my job as a parent was simple: make sure my child ate enough, studied well, slept on time, and stayed active.

I felt I checked all the boxes of good parenting. And then came the weighing scale.

My child was suddenly on that threshold- a thin line between being cute and being overweight.

The number kept creeping up, and suddenly food became something I thought about constantly.

The pediatrician confirmed my worry-some kilos need to be shed.

Should I cut down portions? Stop biscuits? Say no to packaged juice? Replace breakfast cereal? Encourage more exercise?

Ultimately I started looking more carefully at what my child was eating. And that is when I realised how much of our everyday diet had quietly become ultra-processed.

It wasn't one big change. It was the small things.

A packaged snack in the school bag. A sweetened drink after football. A treat from grandparents after school. Breakfast cereal because it was quick on busy mornings. Instant noodles when there wasn't time to cook. Biscuits because they were convenient and my child loved them. The sausages, the nuggets, all ready to eat.

None of these seemed particularly alarming on its own.

But together, they had become routine.

I had always thought of obesity largely as a question of calories and exercise. Eat less, move more. It sounded simple. But I began to understand that food quality matters too.

Food can be high in one nutrient without fitting neatly into the popular definition of an ultra-processed food. In my case, the problem was a highly sweetened beverage and an occasional packet of chips.

Although controlling everything in one go wasn’t possible. My best solution was one thing at a time. I began with not buying colas and chips. My children got them only if guests bought treats or we had an occasional cheat meal when we went out to eat.

Then came several other small but significant changes. Better breads, less oil to even zero-oil air fryers- more water; I would make mojitos at home using fresh ingredients; the cold brews, the iced teas all started getting processed in my own kitchen. More raw vegetables; it even meant sneaking them in the weirdest possible ways into their favourite foods, complex carbs rather than refined ones, chocolates got darker, more grilled than fried, and most importantly, drinking more water.

I even started making French fries at home- of course, zero oil. And my children still enjoy pancakes made of whole wheat rather than maida.

It's not that my children don’t have ultra-processed foods, but it's just that they exist around the foundation of eating healthy.

The food is modestly processed but not ultra-processed. Instead of opening a pack of ready-to-eat meals, I would rather take them to a restaurant where food is freshly made.

I don’t like depriving my children, because I know they are old enough to buy their own food without my permission, but I also know healthy eating habits are so deeply rooted that they will not enjoy unhealthy meals all the time.

I may sound dictatorial to some people, but I know the struggles with weight are real. I have seen my own transformations from a skinny adolescent to an overweight adult. As a classic case of PMOS, keeping those extra inches away has been a struggle.

I managed fairly well until my early thirties, but two children and two decades later, I am still struggling.

I eat less than most people my age; my eating habits are healthy, I am moderately active, but I am still overweight. I often joke that if I ate the way a regular Kashmiri does, I would cross 100 kilos in no time. I could just live on air and still put on weight.

The scale doesn’t bother me that much, but the consequences do-the increased THS, the insulin resistance, which has been a herculean task to not let it progress into diabetes, the high cholesterol in spite of non-existent oils and fats, the sudden high blood pressure, the weighed-down knees, the weak muscles.

And a constant war I wage with myself to keep somewhat in shape.

I know my problems didn’t start in middle age; they had taken root when I was young and skinny. Although UPFs weren't that much in vogue when we were children,, we did love those rasnas, limcas, and thumbsups. We were the generation that saw the sudden inclusion of ultra-processed foods in daily foods. As TV became popular in the 90s, advertisers told us two-minute noodles were packed with goodness that a chapati couldn't provide; we were taken in by handsome boy-next-door heroes breaking down mountains after drinking a cola. Some foods became the language of love; others. Uncle chips dominated the scene with family-oriented ads before the chips giant Lay's entered the market.

As a young professional, surviving on Maggi after a hard day at work seemed absolutely normal.

I didn’t understand the nature of these foods till I became a health reporter. Besides, the industry didn’t tell us what we were eating.

Decades later, we still don’t understand what we are eating. No one carries a calculator to the supermarket to check whether that 5 gm of sugar per serving exceeds the recommended level.

That's why I find the warning label debate particularly interesting. With the Supreme Court taking the lead

FSSAI proposal focuses on nutrients such as added sugar, salt, and saturated fat rather than the broader category of “ultra-processed food”. The proposal is also being phased, with the initial framework requiring multiple nutrients to cross specified thresholds before warnings apply, followed by a stricter approach in which a single nutrient exceeding the threshold could trigger a warning.

That distinction is critical, and so is the concern that in the absence of these warnings we might still feed our children unhealthy food, thinking it's healthy.

A food can be ultra-processed without necessarily being high in all three nutrients. Similarly, a food can be high in one nutrient without fitting neatly into the popular definition of an ultra-processed food.

Consider a highly sweetened beverage.

If sugar is the dominant nutritional concern, should it receive a warning immediately, or should it have to cross a multi-nutrient threshold?

For child health, this is not a technical footnote- it determines which products parents actually see flagged on the supermarket shelf.

A warning label cannot solve all the problems, and people may continue consuming these foods.

But it can do something important: it can make the health cost of a product visible at the moment of choice.

And there is another potential benefit. Labels can encourage manufacturers to reformulate products to avoid warnings.

India's debate over warning labels is therefore not really about a red symbol.

It is about whether a child should grow up believing that a brightly marketed packaged snack is equivalent to a nutritious everyday food.

And it is about whether public health policy should wait until diet-related disease becomes entrenched—or intervene earlier, while eating habits are still forming.