رژیم گیاهخواری و خطر کاردیو متابولیک در بین سرخپوستان آسیایی Vegetarian Diet and Cardiometabolic Risk among Asian Indians in the United States

1. Asian Indian Population and Vegetarianism According to the 2013 statistics, the US is home to nearly 3.1 million Asian Indians (AIs), the second largest immigrant Asian after the Chinese Americans [1]. They are among the most socioeconomically successful minority ethnic groups but have higher rates of diabetes and cardiovascular disease when compared to the general US population [2–4], despite the consumption of a traditional predominantly plantbased diet (with the inclusion of some dairy). Research has shown that vegetarians have a lower risk for chronic diseases [5]. However, the role of the Asian Indian vegetarian diet in chronic disease incidence in this population remains unclear. Although a couple of recent studies in the subcontinent have examined associations between types of vegetarian diets and chronic diseases using a large, nationally representative sample [6, 7], there is paucity of data among immigrant Asian Indians. Contrary to the popular notion of the homogeneity in socioeconomic, cultural, and health characteristics—the “model minority myth” in the sixties and seventies [8, 9]— there is much geographic, linguistic, educational, religious, and socioeconomic heterogeneity in the Asian Indian migrant population today in the US [10, 11]. Several studies based on small, nonrandomized convenience samples have now enumerated the high prevalence rates of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) among Asian Indians in the US [3, 12–14]. More recently, the Diabetes among Indian American (DIA) study nationwide cohort of Asian Indians brought attention to the high prevalence of diabetes, prediabetes, and metabolic syndrome in this immigrant group and to the importance of early interventions to prevent NCDs [12].