Introduction:
The basic health indices in India have widely improved since we became independent in 1947, the average life expectancy has gone up, the infant mortality rates and maternal mortality rates have improved a lot but we still have a long way to go before we achieve developed or European standards.
These improvements happened because of improvement in education, sanitation, health care facilities and increase in disposable income resulting in general improvements in living standards across the board.
Today we are producing more cereals, pulses, fruits, poultry, fish and also consuming more as a result the availability of protein in our diet has improved very much resulting in taller and healthier Indians.
But along with increase in disposable income and increasing living standards there is increase in consumption of alcohol, tobacco, red meat and fatty foods.
The increase in affluence and affordability of new technological gizmos has made us more sedentary and dependent even for smallest and easiest of the job; today we tend to use mobile phone from the comforts of our home to contact grocer, pharmacist, maid, electrician, mechanic, etc.
And instead of walking to nearest convenience store, we tend to use vehicle and instead of walking or cycling for moving-around in our neighbourhood we take motorised vehicle.
Many of us will have trouble remembering last time we walked a distance to catch an auto rickshaw or taxi today we tend to book taxi and it picks us up from our door step.
Which along with unresponsive or indifferent civic management has resulted in unplanned development across most of the urban centres where availability of potable water, sanitation services are under stress along with increased and unmanaged vehicular, industrial, ground, noise pollution.
In 2012 GOI with Indian council of medical research released an updated cbd boss us of overweight and revised the figures to:
If BMI (Body Mass Index) is between 18-22.9kg/m2 person is of normal weight
If BMI is 23-24.9kg/m2 the person is overweight.
If BMI is more than 25 kg/m2 the person is OBESE.
In 21st century obesity has taken epidemic proportion in India and more than 5% of population comes under definition of OBESE.
While studying of 22 SNP ( single nucleotide polymorphism) near to MC4-R-gene, scientist have identified a SNP 12970134 to be mostly associated with waist circumference. In this study nearly 2000 people of Indian origin participated and this SNP was found to be most prevalent in this group.