Diary – 21 February 2004

It had never occurred to me that India might have an obesity problem, but apparently it does. Just before leaving India this month to return to Britain, where I found an obesity panic going on — see this week’s cover story — I chanced upon a story in the Times of India headlined ‘Obesity costs India dear’. According to the article, 27 per cent of Delhi schoolchildren are obese, and the country has spent over £43 billion on treating obesity-related health problems over the past five years. Since we know that millions of Indians suffer from malnutrition, this seems very odd. But then it turned out, further on in the article, that the problem was confined to ‘affluent families’ in the cities, which contained only about 5 per cent of the country’s population but consumed 40 per cent of its available fat. Since India has more than one billion people, the vast majority of whom are very poor and couldn’t get fat even if they wanted to, obesity affects only a tiny proportion of Indians.