By 
The idiots who try to label us Indians as inferior
The other day, a doctor was telling me that the emphasis on Vitamin D is misplaced in India and that doctors must stop prescribing Vitamin D to people who show some level of deficiency, which is almost 80 percent of the urban Indian population now.
There was another doctor who told me that we need to establish a new “Indian baseline or standard” for Vitamin D deficiency, and that it will be much lower than the western standards.
I disagree with both doctors.
They demonstrate the same ridiculously unscientific behaviour of some doctors and nutritionists who argue that acceptable physical fitness and health standards for Indians and Indian children should be set at a lower level than what is done for kids in Europe or North America.
Baselines and standards must not be set as an average of or top XX percentile of a population that is already well below its potential.
What these misguided professionals are trying to say is that we Indians are inferior to the western races in these respects. This is WRONG!
If we were to set an “Indian” standard, here is how I would go about setting them :
1. Child height, weight and fitness – I will look for second or third generation South Asian immigrant families in America or Europe. I will look specifically for the cohort where both mother and child have completely changed their dietary habits to that of the local population. And use the statistics from that cohort as a possible standard. And when we do that, I am willing to bet that the standards will be no different from the North American or European standards.
2. Vitamin D sufficiency – I will look for the cohort of people who live and work like we used to a couple of centuries ago. Rural workers In Indian villages who are mostly bare bodied and spend a lot of time out in the sun every day. And when we use that cohort to establish sufficiency, I am again willing to bet that these will be very similar to the sufficiency standards for North America or Europe.
Lets not allow the group of cultural, race and geography apologists who call themselves scientists, to create new, unacceptable, low standards for us Indians. We do not deserve that. Our future generations do not deserve that. We are not genetically inferior. We just need to fix our nutrition. That’s all.