India is getting fatter. While estimates vary, it is widely accepted that genes, diet and a sedentary lifestyle are making more Indians overweight than before. New Delhi’s Nutrition Foundation of India suggests that 29 per cent of urban India’s adult male population (roughly three out of 10) is overweight. The number for women is higher at 45 per cent.

“The incidence is definitely on the rise,” says Mumbai-based diabetologist Siddharth Shah who is seeing an increasing number of overweight people walk into his clinic with associated complications like diabetes. Shah suggests that one in six Indians is clinically obese — where the body mass index (BMI), which is weight in kg divided by the square of height in metres, is more than 30. Incidentally, overweight is defined as having a BMI of over 25. This mirrors the global trend and is seen as one reason behind India’s dubious rise as the diabetes capital of the world. According to the World Health Organisation’s fact sheet on obesity and overweight, the likelihood of developing Type 2 diabetes and hypertension rises steeply with increasing body fatness. It points out that India and the Middle-East are set to have the highest number of diabetics by 2025.

The good news is that more Indians are now trying to lose their extra kilos, which is evidenced in the explosion of fitness clinics and brown bread vendors in the market. And if developments in the past couple of weeks are any indication, decibel levels on cutting flab will only rise in the following months.

On 16 May, Mumbai broadcaster SaharaOne Media & Entertainment launched a reality show on national prime time television. Biggest Loser Jeetega has 16 overweight contestants competing to shed the most kilos through diet and exercise over 16 weeks. Rajeev Chakrabarti, SaharaOne’s marketing chief says the trigger was a “shift in consumer thinking” on obesity and an awareness of health problems such as diabetes and heart disease that it engenders. “People want to sit up and take control of their lives before it is too late,” he says. Promotional activities are in full swing using radio and billboard advertising, among other things. “We think (the show) will create a movement towards healthy living,” he says.

As the show’s contestants go through the paces, sales people at some of India’s leading drugmakers are fanning out across the country to promote a new weight-loss pill to doctors. The medicine, rimonabant, works on what an executive in one company calls the ‘pleasure centre’ in the brain. The result is a decreased craving for food. Torrent Pharmaceuticals in Ahmedabad claims that it has tested rimonabant on over 200 volunteers weighing 90 kg on an average in the country’s hospitals. It saw an average weight reduction of 6-8 kg in the first few weeks, it claims. Zydus Cadila Healthcare, another drug company in the same city, announced its own brand of the medicine the same day as Torrent. “We are getting news of prescriptions from all over,” claims Ashok Bhatia, senior vice-president, Zydus Cadila.

There are other weight-loss medicines in the domestic market. But companies say that rimonabant works better and has fewer of the side-effects such as diarrhoea and high blood pressure that others cause. In fact, so much store is being set by this product that it is expected to almost single-handedly drive sales for the anti-obesity pills market to over Rs 100 crore by 2010 from a relatively paltry Rs 23 crore now, according to Ruchir Modi, vice-president (marketing), Torrent. More drug companies are expected to market this pill by then.