Loading the shop
Last updated 6 September 2026
Every nutrition figure on this shop is read out of a published food composition table, and this page names them. If a claim on a product page carries a number, that number came from one of the four references below — not from a supplier's marketing sheet and not from a search result.
IFCT 2017 — Indian Food Composition Tables, ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad. This is the source for most of the catalogue: the millets, the pulses, the rice, the flakes and semolinas milled from them, the dried fruit and the oilseeds.
We use it in preference to any foreign database because it samples Indian produce. The difference is not academic — IFCT’s Indian black raisin carries 6.81 mg of iron per 100 g and the American Zante currant carries 1.88. One of those figures earns a claim and the other does not, and only one of them is about the fruit in the packet.
Nutritive Value of Indian Foods, ICMR-National Institute of Nutrition. The older table from the same institute, and it is used for exactly one food: foxtail millet (korra), which IFCT 2017 does not carry. For a food IFCT omits, its predecessor is the right reference rather than a foreign one.
USDA FoodData Central. Four foods, all of which are the same article of trade wherever they are grown: pumpkin seed kernels, watermelon seed kernels, dried figs and chia seeds. Where the Indian version of a food is genuinely a different thing, IFCT wins and there is no USDA entry.
ICMR-NIN Recommended Dietary Allowances, 2020, adult man. Every “% of a day” on this shop is worked against these. They are higher than the international reference values, so a percentage here is smaller than the same food would show on a foreign label — which is the conservative direction and deliberate.
A food may only be called a source of something, or high in it, when it actually carries enough. The thresholds are set by the FSS (Advertising and Claims) Regulations, 2018 and we apply them mechanically rather than by judgement:
A product that misses a threshold does not get the claim, however close it comes. Foxtail millet carries 14.7 % of a day’s iron against a bar of 15, so it is not called a source of iron anywhere on this shop.
We do not say that any food here controls blood sugar, helps with weight, protects the heart, lowers cholesterol or improves memory. Those are disease and health claims. Under the same regulations they need approval from FSSAI before they are printed, and we have not sought it.
Plenty of food sold in India carries claims like these. That some of them may be supported by research is a different question from whether a shop may print them on a packet, and the second question is the one that binds us.
What a nutrient is allowed to be said to do is narrower and duller, and it is what our product pages say: fibre contributes to normal bowel function, iron to the normal formation of red blood cells, calcium to the maintenance of normal bones.
Some products on this shop carry no nutrition figure, and the reason is always the same: nobody has measured the thing in that packet.
A biscuit’s composition follows its recipe and no table in the world holds it. Barnyard millet is not in IFCT, and the published figures for it disagree by four times on fibre because some of them measure crude fibre and some measure dietary fibre — two different tests. Rather than print the more flattering number, those products say nothing about their nutrients and say true things about themselves instead.
When a laboratory report exists for one of them, the figure appears here and on the product page together.
The methods on our product pages are written by us, from ordinary household practice — how long a millet is soaked, how much water a cup of rava takes. They are not copied from anyone and they are not claims about health.
Where a product is made by a supplier and their pack carries its own instructions, theirs is the one to follow. Ours is there for the customer who has thrown the packet away.
If a figure on this shop looks wrong to you, write to pn.prananaturals@gmail.com with the product and the number. A figure we cannot defend comes down the same day, and the correction is worth more to us than the claim was.