weight watch

New Delhi, Nov. 26: The new definition for obesity for Indians comes after what some doctors say is more than five years of government inaction despite mounting concerns that many overweight Indians were being wrongly labelled as fit.

A group of medical experts yesterday released new cut-off values for weights and waistlines to classify Indians as overweight or obese — lower than what had been followed so far under international standards.

Group members said they decided to formally disseminate the new values after a meeting of experts from private and government institutions in New Delhi earlier this month. But the earliest suggestions to revise the obesity measure called the body mass index — the ratio of the weight in kilograms to the height in metres squared — for Indians had come more than five years ago.

A diabetes specialist Ambady Ramachandran, now president of the Indian Diabetes Research Foundation, Chennai, had proposed that the body mass index for Indians should be lowered from 25 to 23, as reported in The Telegraph in January 2003.

“It was clear from research findings by 2003 that Indians suffer from obesity-related diseases at lower body mass index values than Caucasian populations,” Ramachandran said. “Indians appear genetically at higher risk of getting diabetes.”

While there was no visible action from the Indian government, a doctor said, at least one foreign institution began to use the revised values on Indians more than three years ago.

Clinical guidelines from the Joslin Diabetes Centre at the Harvard Medical School in Boston, US, in September 2005 would classify any Asian Indian or East Asian with a body mass index higher than 23 as overweight.

“Health authorities probably didn’t anticipate the flare-up in obesity and diabetes,” said one senior scientist at a government research institute who said his suggestion to track obesity nationwide made eight years ago had elicited little action.

Doctors believe the dissemination of the revised guidelines will prompt individuals as well as general practitioners to reassess fitness. “Although some doctors may already be practicing this, the revised cut-offs are not yet part of medical curriculum yet,” Pradip Roychowdhury, associate professor of endocrinology at the Medical College, Calcutta, said.

“The message from the research studies was very clear — this left us wondering whether there were no trained eyes within the government to take notice and act,” said one diabetes specialist who requested anonymity.

A senior scientist at the National Institute of Nutrition, Hyderabad, said while the new values may be “somewhat justified”, ideally, they should have been adopted after a truly nationwide survey had validated them.

But medical experts believe the revision will prompt people to reassess their fitness.

“I would think more people are going to opt for gyms,” said Nina Singh, a senior nutritionist at the BP Poddar Hospital and Research Institute, Calcutta.