Heart under attack.
“If there is one food that symbolized the era of industrial cooking fat in India, Dalda would be high on the list.”
After making Indian cardiac surgeons and cardiologists multimillionaires since 1937, when the greatest star of the Indian Kitchen was brought to India by the Lever Brothers ( later renamed as Hindustan Lever and Pakistan Lever after 1947 ). Their love for the people of India’s monetary contributions remains equal to the affection for money that comes from the people of Pakistan. Their corporate social responsibilities ( CSR) have affected both citizens of India and Pakistan. Lever actually unifies the pain of Hindustan and Pakistan, where each country is proud that Lever has the prefix of their county’s name, not knowing that they are also known by their beloved neighbour’s name.
This was called Ghee, vanaspati ghee, and gullible Indians thought since it had the texture of ghee, it must be super healthy.
Enter DALDA. The vanaspati ghee, that had been single handedly responsible for more cardiac diseases in India than any other invention. Your grandfather and great grandfather would have probably lived 10 years longer, if hydrogenated vegetable oils had never entered our sacred culinary traditions.
Many research papers were published. And slowly but surely the Indians got wiser. Sales of DALDA drastically went down from 1990 onwards. The educated middle class became aware of the dangers of hydrogenated vegetable oils.
Dalda fooled India because it had the term “vegetable” in its name along with “ghee”. Your grandmother thought that it is ghee from vegetables. Very healthy !! But later middle class avoided it.
Dalda and Rath Vanaspati disappeared.
Surprise! Surprise !
They are back, in a new avatar. Rath and Dalda are back with a bang !!
Today, 26 June 2026 , I saw them on the Reliance Supermarket shelf and they were selling like hot cakes. It was young families who were loading Dalda and Rath in their shopping trolley, as if there were no tomorrow!!
The bad memories of death of loved ones due to cardiac diseases has faded. So they are now back in favour.
The claim that now they are absolutely fantastic because in the pack it is written - “zero transfat”. They now say that it is hydrogenated followed by interesterification. The claimed absence of trans fat is welcome. However, a product can still be nutritionally inferior because of its fatty acid profile and the way it is processed.
So they are again going to fool the younger Indians, and when their children see premature deaths of their parents from cardiac complications, once again somewhere in 2040, Dalda/ Rath sales will go down.
Then again as public memory fades, they will be back somewhere around 2080.
This cycle will go on. Will we ever learn ?