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What are the specific challenges of a South Asian diet with Diabetes?
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What are the specific challenges of a South Asian diet with Diabetes?

Abdul Rais talks about specific cultural issues which may make living with Diabetes a challenge. He advocates education as a way to overcome these issues.

Transcript (auto-generated)

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors.

The challenge is really trying to get people to change their eating habits and timing of, for example, the evening meal is often consumed quite late at night after which they go to sleep and there is no activity and therefore that doesn't do a lot of good. Also, everything seems to be based around flour, carbohydrates, big time, complex carbohydrates. So, you know, breakfast would start sometimes with burratas and lunch would be chapattis and curry and evening meal would be pretty similar to that, perhaps combined with rice. And the other thing also is the sweets. People, there often doesn't seem to be much control over sweets like sweetmeat or other puddings and there also seems to be this insistence that if you are eating less something is wrong with you and you're actually, sometimes out of being hospitable if you're a guest at somebody's place they would love to see you fill your plate up I've often had the case where I've put in the amount I want to and a relative or a friend would say, no, no, no, that's not enough. And then they would pour some, put some more on the plate. And that's, you know, that's another cultural thing that they don't want you to. And sometimes people do get offended as well. If you don't eat as much as they would like you to eat, they think you probably didn't like their food. So I think education is needed on that side of things as well.

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