INDIA – The Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) has issued a direction regarding the value of Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDA) for food businesses for reference and compliance following a revision on the requirements by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) in 2020.
The direction said a collated document referred to as RDA 2020 in respect of new RDA values for vitamins, minerals and amino acids is provided to food businesses for the purpose of reference and compliance.
The RDA values of vitamins, minerals and amino acids were specified in the regulations for standards for nutraceuticals.
Food businesses have been given time until July 2023 for compliance. In the meantime, they can make use of the RDA 2010 or RDA 2020.
“The demand for nutritionally functional foods, particularly vitamin rich foods, has increased significantly since the pandemic took over. People have become more aware and educated about it. This bodes well for the nutraceuticals industry as the revised RDA values by FSSAI will enable a lot of brands, established as well as new, to come up with a wide range of compliant products and cater to a larger audience.”
Further, the FSSAI has also thrown light on the report submitted by the ICMR regarding Tolerable Upper Limits (TULs) of vitamin and minerals that was made public citing that it was only meant to serve as a source of information, and not for use by the food businesses.
Niacin determination in food
Meanwhile, FSSAI, has also sought comments on the method of determining niacin, a vitamin typically used in fortification of food products, which it approved on the recommendation of the Scientific Panel on Methods of Sampling & Analysis in its 34th meeting held in July this year.
According to the FSSAI, this is a method for the determination of the mass fraction of niacin in foodstuffs by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) by two different ways of hydrolysis, acid hydrolysis (bioavailable) and acid/alkaline hydrolysis (Total).
The FSSAI said that before the final approval of the method, the comments, views and suggestions of the stakeholders were invited.
“The comments or suggestions, if any, should be furnished to FSSAI within a period of 30 days of the publication of this notice on the website.”
The food authority adds that the method has been validated in inter laboratory tests on fortified and non-fortified samples such as breakfast cereal powder, chocolate cereals, cooked ham, green peas, lyophilized green peas with ham, lyophilized soup, nutritive orange juice, milk powder and wheat flour, at levels from 0.5 mg/100 g to 24 mg/100 g.
The regulatory body noted that only comments and suggestions furnished with supporting scientific evidence would be taken into consideration.
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