By Md Billal Hossain

Scroll through Facebook and every few minutes you come across a video or news report of adulterated date palm molasses (khejur gur) being destroyed. Since this is the molasses season, it is naturally being talked about a great deal. Almost every day, mobile courts are destroying fake molasses in districts across the country, especially those that produce the most date palm molasses, such as Rajshahi, Sirajganj, Tangail, Jashore, Natore, Chuadanga, Jhenaidah, Magura and Narail, and these drives are regularly seen on Facebook and other media.

This fake molasses is made with textile dye, flour, hydrose, "gas powder", lime and sugar. In other words, it contains not even a trace of date palm sap, so it is easy to imagine how harmful it is to our bodies.

With online business growing rapidly in recent years, Facebook and YouTube are full of advertisements for date palm molasses. Thousands of pages freely claim, "Our molasses is 100 per cent pure. You can buy with confidence." Yet the reality is that far more date palm molasses is sold online than the date palms in our country could produce.

The Department of Agricultural Extension (DAE) and other agencies cannot provide accurate figures for the total number of date palms in Bangladesh or the molasses they produce, so it is hard to say how much is made nationally. District DAE offices publish rough estimates, but these are inadequate. Still, the available information shows that production is certainly far lower than the amount of molasses sold on the market.

In addition, sap production has fallen in recent years because of climate change and the felling of too many trees, so it is impossible to produce and sell so much molasses online. That raises the question on everyone's mind: where is all this molasses coming from? In fact, most of the molasses on the market is adulterated, and it is made with so many harmful chemicals that it is a threat to public health.

Many ingredients go into fake molasses, but the chemical used as a whitening and cleaning agent is known on the open market as hydrose. Its chemical name is sodium hydrosulphite or sodium dithionite, formula Na2S2O4. It is an inorganic sulphur compound sold as a white granular powder. It is used in textile dyeing (sulphur and vat dyes), and also to clean leather and leather goods, to purify water and gas, in preparing various polymers and in photography. It is clearly not meant to be mixed into food and is a serious threat to public health.

A study on rats published on 6 October 2014 in the Asian Pacific Journal of Tropical Biomedicine, from the publisher Elsevier, reported that eating food containing hydrose sharply raised creatinine and urea levels in the rats while lowering their calcium. It also caused inflammation in the glomeruli of the kidneys, creating a serious risk of kidney damage. It can therefore be said that hydrose-laced molasses may bring grave danger to the human body. The molasses samples used in that research were collected from Rajshahi, Sirajganj and Tangail, and the study was carried out by a team of researchers from Rajshahi University and Rajshahi Medical College.

The textile dyes used in fake date palm molasses also create a risk of cancer, can damage the eyes, and can harm organs such as the liver and kidneys. In some cases these dyes can cause mutations in the human body.

It is not enough simply to buy date palm molasses these days; it must be bought carefully, after checking. Rather than trusting someone's word online, buyers should make enquiries offline before purchasing. Only then can we escape the health risks of eating adulterated molasses. Let us all be aware, eat pure date palm molasses and live healthy lives.

The writer is a lecturer in the Department of Food Engineering and Nutrition Science, State University of Bangladesh.

Source: Jagonews24. First published in Bengali on The Agro News.