Diabetes Plagues Sweet-Toothed Indians

NEW DELHI, Dec. 31, 2007 — -- Andrabi Khurshid is scared of sugar.

Sugar killed his grandmother. It has made his father blind and lame.

The 43-year-old won't touch it, he says, for the rest of his life.

"For the last 10 or 15 years, I've not had a cup of tea or coffee with sugar. In the back of my mind a spoonful of sugar may trigger the whole thing."

That whole thing is type 2 diabetes, a disease running rampant in India. Caused by obesity or inactivity or genes — or all three — it often ends in blindness, amputations and heart disease.

The story of India today is one of hundreds of millions of villagers who live on less than $2 a day. But it is also one of a booming middle class that is now bigger than the entire population of the United States. India, in other words, has never been richer. But it's also never been fatter. As India rises, so does obesity — and with it, diabetes.

"India is all set to become the diabetes capital of the world," India's health minister, Anbumani Ramadoss, told reporters in November. "We have at present 25 [million] to 30 million diabetics in the country and the number is going to touch 70 [million to] 75 million within the next 15 years."

The United Nations says that for the first time, more of the world is overweight than undernourished. For Indians, that means that as their pocketbooks fatten up, so do their bellies. Diabetes is unlike the disease in the West: in the United States, the poor get fat, receive worse health care, exercise less. Here, diabetes affects the rich more than the poor; the city more than the country.

In India's richest city at its richest hospital, S.K. Wangnoo says diabetes is getting worse.

"We are seeing on an average, 500 patients every month," the doctor said from the diabetes wing of the Indraprastha Apollo Hospital, part of the largest hospital network in Asia and the third largest in the world. "A decade back it used to be 200 to 300."

Every fourth diabetic in the world is an Indian.

"Diabetes and heart disease are emerging as the single most important medical factors for younger Indians," said Vijay Viswanathan, the managing director of the M.V. Hospital for Diabetes & Diabetes Research Centre in Chennai. "As Indians get richer, especially the urban population, physical activity comes down, their eating habits become less healthy, and they tend to put more weight on around their waist."