Indian-Americans and the Killer Belly

Lavina Melwani in Little India, via New American Media, via Time to Blog:

Screenhunter_29_jul_26_0229Here’s a life-or-death test for you.

Pick up a tape measure. Wrap it around your waist at navel level.

If you’re an Indian woman and measure more than 32 inches or an Indian man over 35 inches, brace yourself.

Within the next 10 or 20 years you are almost certain to get diabetes or heart disease – or both.

You have the killer belly, a condition that specially afflicts Indians.

While heart disease declined 60 percent in the last 30 years in the United States, it has escalated by 300 percent in India. U.S. studies have found that Indians in the United States have three to four times the heart disease rate of the mainstream U.S. population.

More here.