Health professionals say the government is wrong to focus on the presence and not the absence of protein.

The fact that a country with an abundance of food, and an expanding packaged food market, has such a large percentage of its people underfed on one of the most fundamental things a human gut requires dietary fibre is quite alarming. Not protein. Not exotic antioxidants. Just fibre. The type that is from vegetables, whole grains, lentils, and fruit. That which grandmothers in all corners of the Indian landscape used to sneak into each meal without ever referring to it as a nutrient.

That era is ending. But the health effects are no longer imminent, they are now a reality.

Nutritionists and gastroenterologists in India have been telling us for years, and now new data has given a hard number figure to this alarming situation. The amount of fiber recommended for Indian women is 25 grams per day and for men, 38 grams per day. The facts of the matter are that most of the Indian adults are eating between 12-14 grams per day, which is half of the minimum requirement for women and a little more than a third for men. It's not something you can call a small deficiency. That's a breakdown of the Indian diet.

Even if the speed has been astounding, the mechanics of how this has happened isn't mysterious. This trend from coarse to refined grain has continued, and is part of a traditional diet, which is contributing to the reduction of fibre intake. Jowar, bajra, ragi and other millets are fibre-rich, low on glycaemic index and very much a part of Indian farming culture for generations. India's coarse grain consumption has fallen drastically. Coarse grains are the least consumed food group in the country, with vegetarians consuming an average of 24 percent of their daily requirement, and non-vegetarians consuming an average of 12 percent.

They were replaced by polished white rice, refined wheat flour and more and more, packaged convenience foods. In the cereal group, rice has decreased more than wheat, and consumption of refined starches like semolina and refined wheat flour have gone up. The end product is a diet that provides the calories efficiently, but removes the roughage that is needed to maintain the digestive tract in good health and metabolic disease out of the equation.

The contribution of processed food industry in this is indisputable. Between 2006 and 2019, the value of retail sales in the ultra-processed food sector in India increased from USD 0.9 billion to around USD 38 billion, representing a compound annual growth rate of 13.37 percent for the period 2011-2021. That's a growth rate that's one of the highest in the world. India is one of the fastest-growing countries for the sales of ultra-processed food products around the world, with its consumption growing by more than 150 percent from 2009 to 2023. But most importantly, these foods are made in such a way that they don't have any fibre in their structure. Ultra-processed foods are formulations made in industrial plants generally consisting of little or no whole foods and mostly refined food substances, additives, and preservatives. They tend to be low in dietary fibre, protein, and essential micronutrients as well as high in saturated fats, free sugars and sodium.

The first price is paid for the gut. Fibre increases the growth of good bacteria such as Bifidobacteria and Faecalibacterium which in turn leads to a higher production of short chain fatty acids which are important for gut health. Diets rich in fibre diversity support a healthy gut microbiome, whereas low fibre diets are linked to loss of microbial diversity and increased pathogenic bacteria. The surge in the incidence of irritable bowel syndrome, constipation and digestive disorders in all age groups in India is no coincidence. These are, for the most part, a consequence of a fibre-stripped diet coupled with ultra-processed foods, which actually damage your gut flora.

But digestion isn't the only downstream consequence. Long-term, fibre is linked to a lower risk of cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes and colon cancer. All three those conditions are now on the verge of a sharp increase in India. It's been reported that 11.4 percent of the population, or 101 million individuals, have diabetes, while 15.3 percent, or 136 million people, have prediabetes. In general terms, 28.6 percent of the population is obese and 39.5 percent in terms of abdominal obesity. The news on cancer is equally depressing: people in the top 25 per cent of dietary fibre intake were 14 to 21 per cent less likely to develop colon cancer than people in the lowest 25 per cent. The incidence of colorectal cancer in India is on the rise and diet is being cited as one of the main reasons.

The NCD mortality landscape exposes what decades of this diet change have created. The percentage of NCD deaths in India increased from 37.9% of all deaths in 1990 to 61.8% in 2016. That is not a trend that is changed by putting a couple of salads on the school canteen. It needs systemic rethinking in the production, marketing, subsidy and scale consumption of food.

All this has an economic component that India's policy makers are just starting to take in at the top. For the first time, in the Economic Survey 2025-26 tabled in Parliament, obesity and unhealthy diets have been moved from the health column to the economic risk column, making their presence as an economic and long-term threat to public finances, productive capacity and expenditure on healthcare. The economic burden estimates for India for NCDs are USD 4.58 trillion by 2030. That's a figure that has a way of focusing minds. India is already facing 56.4 percent disease burden due to unhealthy diets. That statistic isn't just about the fibre crisis, it's the main driver of it.

What is maddening from a public health perspective is that the fibre deficit is likely one of the easiest to fill in India's diet. The foods that heal it dal, veggies, whole grains, fruit are not imported from elsewhere. These are the bases of all Indian regional cuisines. Knowledge and availability is not the issue at the macro level. The steady replacement of these foods with more affordable, more heavily marketed, more convenient alternatives. Despite being the most health conscious generation, an overwhelming 44 percent of India's Gen Z eats junk food often or regularly, while showing strong interest in weight loss, immunity and skin health. 1 in 5 reported a micronutrient deficiency diagnosed.

It's fucking ironic. A generation that cares more about being healthy than any generation in history is eating in a way that is harmful to their health, because the food environment around them has been designed to make eating processed food the easiest route. India needs to take immediate action to curb the consumption of ultra-processed food if it wants to keep the rising obesity and diabetes epidemic under check and the current regulatory framework to curb marketing is weak and ineffective.

But there are policy mis-alignments at the level of structures as well. The Green Revolution, which was essential for India's food security, established rice and wheat as the staple foods, both in terms of agriculture economy and subsidised distribution mechanisms. Demand for monocultures of wheat and rice were growing due to dietary changes and aggressive marketing and promotion of hybridised seeds and chemical inputs caused more and more domestic production of monocultures, replacing grain production. This has been a salutary shift and the millet revolution which followed the International Year of Millets in 2023 by the Government of India and the reclassification of millets as Nutri-Cereals is a welcome change, but it is a change that needs to overcome decades of entrenched consumer preferences and industrial food momentum. Yet there is no evidence of any measurable shift toward greater fibre consumption by the population, due to bureaucratic enthusiasm for millets.

Meanwhile the healthcare system is the one that is absorbing costs that it shouldn't be absorbing. Each diabetes admission, each cardiovascular event, each gastrointestinal surgery that can be attributed at least in part to a fibre-starved diet is a burden to an already strained health-care system. The negative health effects of excessive consumption of ultra-processed foods are growing, including obesity, insulin resistance, fatty liver disease, cardiovascular disease and some cancers, as ultra-processed foods appear to disrupt the balance of the gut microbiota; create abnormal fat storage and accelerate the ageing of the biological system.

What all the data is saying to India is something that should be concerning not only health ministries, but finance ministers, productivity economists and anyone who is seriously considering the country's demographic dividend. In 2020, more than 3.3 crore children in India were obese, which is expected to rise to 8.3 crore by 2035, if the same trajectory is maintained. A generation growing up on fibre-starved, ultra-processed food does not just have an increased risk of medical complications, but of reduced cognitive function, increased inflammation load and reduced long-term economic productivity. It is not just a nutrition problem however in that sense it is a fibre gap. It occurs without noise and silently deprives the country of its human resources.

The fix exists. It's not costly. It is not about some fancy bio-tech or medicine. Increase consumption of dal, sabzi, whole grain roti, seasonal fruit. It has to be honest food labelling, marketing regulation with teeth in it and a school curriculum which takes nutrition as seriously as it does maths. Reinvolving farmers in coarse grains production needs an agricultural policy making coarse grains economically interesting for farmers and affordable for consumers. And it takes a public conversation that doesn't view dietary fibre as the province of wellness influencers but as the building blocks of public health that it is.

India doesn't have a problem with food. Lacks some of the right parts of food. That difference multiplied over 1.4 billion diets is creating a health and economic crisis that will be hard, costly and long to repair when it is here in full strength.