‘Silver foil on sweets replaced with toxic aluminium’Shivani Azad

Dehradun: For many of us, one of the best bits of eating sweets is perhaps the silver foil that glitters on the top of these delicacies. But food safety officials here have come up with a shocking fact. Samples collected from a distributor did not have silver quoting, which are known as vark. These were instead replaced with similar-looking aluminium foils. While vark consists of silver and is known to be anti-bacterial in nature, the aluminium foils can cause severe damage to the brain and stomach if consumed in large quantities. The reason why this practice is rampant is because one sheet of aluminium comes at a much cheaper price than silver, said officials.

The samples collected by Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) were “nowhere close” to the actual silver leaves, said officials. “It was alarming for us to read the findings of the report. The samples contained absolutely no traces of silver even though the sheets were sold as silver foils by the distributor,” said an official of FSSAI, Dehradun.

The district food safety unit has issued a notice to the manufacturers who are based out of Saharanpur and has a distributor based in Darshani Gate here. According to officials, the firm supplies foils to nearly 50 shops in the city and elsewhere as well. The testing of the samples was done at a laboratory in Rudrapur in Udham Singh Nagar.

Meanwhile, doctors said that if consumed in certain quantities, these aluminium foils can lead to severe damage to the nervous system. “Excess consumption of aluminium can lead to depression of various types as well diseases such as Alzheimer,” said gastro surgeon Dr Vipul Kandwal, assistant professor, Doon Medical College, Dehradun.

Officials also said that this was not the first instance when aluminium foils were found in sweets here. “Eighty per cent of the so-called silver quoted sweets in the city is often layered with aluminium. The tentacles of this business have spread so far that not only sweets but items such as biryani and mangoes are at times wrapped in it,” said Brij Mohan Sharma, secretary, Society of Pollution and Environmental Conservation Scientists (SPECS), Dehradun.