India's Metabolic Crisis: Why Affluence Fuels Diabetes, Expert Warns

Across India's most prosperous states, one in four adults now lives with diabetes — a figure that traces not the arc of disease but the arc of development itself. Over twenty-five years, economic liberalization, urbanization, and the arrival of processed food have collided with a biological reality: South Asian bodies accumulate visceral fat more readily than European ones, and that fat inflames, resists insulin, and attacks the heart. The crisis is arriving earliest where prosperity arrived earliest, and it is arriving in the young — heart attacks in the twenties and thirties, abdominal obesi