-The Times of India   One in every five Indian adults living in urban cities suffers not only from hypertension but also diabetes. In Maharashtra, more disturbingly, one in three persons is struck by the twin epidemic. These are some of the highlights of India's largest clinic-based survey to assess the prevalence of diabetes and hypertension. The findings of the study, called Screening India's Twin Epidemic (SITE), were announced on Monday in...

Boiling milk several times before drinking and that too at high temperatures, which reduces its nutritious value, is highly prevalent among Indian women. A first-of-its-kind Milk Boiling Habits study that involved 2, 400 women across eight major cities has found that Chandigarh leads the pack, boiling milk more than three times a day. While, 84% of women surveyed in Kolkata always boiled milk for over five minutes. About 46% of women...

The verdict on yoga guru Baba Ramdev's weight loss drink, lauki juice, is out. First, slice a piece from lauki (bottle gourd), taste if it's better. If it's bitter, discard it immediately, says an expert panel commissioned by the Indian Council of Medical Research ( ICMR). The panel - headed by professor S K Sharma, who is the head of department of medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences -...

Urban India's greatest comforts are the cause of a super-size health problem: obesity. Easy access to high-calorie packaged foods, sedentary lifestyles and a predilection for gizmos have resulted in almost 70% Indians in mega-cities such as Mumbai, Delhi, Bangalore or Chennai being overweight or obese, says a new multi-city survey. The profiling of 46,000 urban Indians-all of whom have access to the internet-showed that 49% were obese or had a...

The head of the United Nations World Health Organization (WHO) warned today that the “slow-motion catastrophe” of non-communicable diseases could overwhelm even the wealthiest nations if the root causes of the epidemic, mostly lifestyle decisions, are not addressed. Margaret Chan, the WHO Director-General, told delegates at the First Global Ministerial Conference on Healthy Lifestyles and Noncommunicable Disease Control in Moscow that the fact the many of the chronic non-communicable illnesses in...