Diwali Celebrations: You may be buying adulterated sweets from your local store

We eagerly wait an entire year for the celebrations to begin with Dussehra and Diwali. And when it's there, we loosen our purse strings and unleash our appetite to savor the wide variety of goodies prepared during this time. Sweet shops are flooded with people, as there's a huge demand for milk-based sweets. However, in recent times, adulteration of milk based food products has become a common phenomenon, especially during festivals such as Diwali.

You may trust your local sweet shop, but are you sure about the people who supply full cream organic milk and milk products to your local sweet shop. Your local sweet shop is unlikely to have a laboratory to test its products, so it's just a matter of luck whether you get pure milk based sweets or adulterated stuff.

Quality checks are often conducted by government agencies during the festive season, but they too face the problem of limited manpower. Since they cannot cover all sweet shops, they take the route of random sampling. This again leaves gaps and increases the possibility that adulteration may go undetected at many sweet shops. Reports indicate that around 20 to 40 percent of milk based products sold during Diwali are of substandard quality or have adulterants.

You may think about taking some samples and getting it tested by a private laboratory. However, private laboratories do not come cheap and they may charge you anywhere between Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000 for testing food samples. It can also cost you more, depending on the number of tests being conducted and the type of testing equipment used by the private laboratory.

If you have adequate funds, you can certainly utilize the services of a private laboratory. You can also connect with other people in your social circle who live nearby and ask them to contribute to the cause. If they too buy from the same sweet shop, they may also be interested to know whether they are getting pure milk based products or adulterated stuff.

 Another option is to buy packaged full cream organic milk from a reputed brand and use it to prepare the sweets at home. It’s true that you will have to make additional efforts to prepare sweets at home, but considering the risks, it would be worth it. If you care about your health and that of your family members, you should take some wise decisions this Diwali.