This opinion piece is by Dr. Sylvia Karpagam, a public health doctor, with input from other members of the Working Group on Health and Nutrition.
In April 2024, the ICMR-NIN released Dietary Guidelines for Indians (DGI), selectively quoting data from the Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey (CNNS 2019). Instead of bringing out evidence-based dietary guidelines befitting a 106-year-old institution of national importance, they have failed to do due diligence and instead seem to have released a vegetarian dietician’s recipe booklet to enthral India’s middle class and elite.
In what can only be seen as deliberate and wilful obfuscation, the DGI makes it appear like ‘severe forms of undernutrition have largely disappeared’ and only ‘subclinical manifestations of undernutrition and anaemia persist as public health issues’.
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Health and its social determinants 