Beat Obesity, Lower Diabetes is South First’s attempt to keep the lens steady; week after week analysis on what is changing, what is not, and what must.
Published Jan 05, 2026 | 11:42 AM ⚊ Updated Jan 05, 2026 | 6:12 PM
Obesity is rising fast, diabetes is following close behind, and India is sleepwalking into a metabolic health emergency. Unlike communicable diseases that arrive like a wave, these non-communicable diseases (NCDs) flood lives quietly through fatty liver, PCOS (Polycystic Ovary Syndrome), hypertension, heart disease, and other complications, which were once associated with old age.
That’s exactly why South First is launching BOLD: Beat Obesity, Lower Diabetes, a year-long editorial commitment to report this NCD crisis with the urgency it deserves, and to push the conversation beyond blame and “willpower” clichés.
The campaign comes at a moment when metabolic health problems are no longer confined to a narrow demographic. Obesity is increasingly visible across age groups, while diabetes — once considered a disease of later life — has become a familiar diagnosis in working-age adults, with a growing shadow of related conditions such as fatty liver, hypertension, PCOS, dyslipidaemia, and early cardiovascular risk.
Globally, the scale is already staggering: The WHO says “one in eight” people worldwide were living with obesity in 2022.
And India’s own national burden is immense. An ICMR–INDIAB (Indian Council of Medical Research-India Diabetes) analysis published in The Lancet estimated 101 million people with diabetes and 136 million with prediabetes, alongside high levels of obesity and hypertension.
South First’s focus will be to report this crisis in depth — tracking what’s changing, what isn’t, and why millions are being left to navigate a system that still treats metabolic disease like an individual failure rather than a structural problem.
Metabolic disorders rarely arrive like a sudden outbreak. They accumulate quietly: A little weight gain each year, creeping blood sugar, disrupted sleep, breathlessness on stairs, a fatty liver noted “incidentally” on a scan, a blood pressure reading that’s “slightly high”.
Many people recognise the danger only when complications show up — heart disease, kidney damage, neuropathy, vision issues, or a cascade of medicines that becomes hard to reverse. By then, treatment is not just about “control”; it becomes about preventing decline.
What makes this moment especially urgent is that the burden is becoming broader and more complex.
The urban story is often about sedentary work, ultra-processed food, stress, sleeplessness, and combined diseases like fatty liver, etc. The rural story can look different: Fewer specialists, undernutrition, delayed diagnosis, limited screening, fast-changing diets and lifestyles, irrational PDS (Public Distribution System) and inadequate healthcare access.
Unlike a short series or a one-week package, BOLD is planned as a sustained newsroom commitment. Over the next year, South First will publish features and explainers that connect obesity and diabetes to the larger metabolic health ecosystem, how these conditions interact, why they are difficult to manage, and what evidence actually supports prevention and treatment.
A central pillar of the campaign will be weekly podcasts, designed to bring listeners into conversations with doctors, researchers, experts from the big pharmaceutical companies, nutrition scientists, mental health professionals, fitness experts, community health workers and patients. The idea is to translate complex science into simple terms without reducing it to motivational slogans.
The newsroom will also hold webinars and interactive sessions that allow audiences to ask questions directly, clarify myths, understand what is known, what is debated, and what is changing in the field.
Alongside this, the campaign will also feature authored articles by “who’s who” voices in the obesity, diabetes and metabolic health space: Clinicians, researchers, public health experts and allied professionals offering insight into emerging evidence, clinical practice, and the gaps in India’s healthcare response.
South First’s campaign will not be limited to expert voices. BOLD will build its reporting around case studies — individual and family journeys that highlight what living with obesity and diabetes actually looks like in India.
That includes the decisions people make under pressure: When to start medication, whether to stop it, what a diagnosis does to mental health, how stigma shapes healthcare-seeking, and how affordability affects continuity of care.
The reporting will also map the urban–rural divide and the layered inequities within cities and towns, where access to diet advice, safe exercise spaces, early screening, and specialist care can differ sharply by income, gender, neighbourhood and job type.
This campaign is being launched at a turning point in obesity and diabetes care: The global rise of GLP-1 (Glucagon-Like Peptide-1) based therapies and related incretin drugs, which have reshaped what medical weight management can look like for some patients. Also dubbed a miracle drug, they ignited debate over access, misuse, safety and long-term follow-up.
In India, that shift is no longer theoretical. Danish multinational pharmaceutical company Novo Nordisk launched Ozempic (semaglutide) in India in December 2025, positioning it for a market shaped by high diabetes prevalence and rising obesity. The company has also been pushing its obesity drug offerings, with partnerships to expand reach.
At the same time, global and domestic attention has accelerated around the wider “weight-loss injection” boom — along with medical concerns about unsupervised cosmetic use and the need for regulation and appropriate prescribing.
Crucially, India is also entering a phase where domestic companies and Indian scientists with pharma R&D are racing to build indigenous capacity, from manufacturing and device know-how to generic and next-wave versions as key exclusivity periods near their end. An IQVIA analysis noted semaglutide’s loss of exclusivity in multiple countries in 2026, including India.
Indian business reporting and court filings around semaglutide have already highlighted how local firms are preparing for this moment — manufacturing for export now and gearing up for domestic launches once barriers are lifted.
BOLD will track this “GLP-1 era” the way it deserves to be tracked: Not as hype, not as a miracle narrative, but as a public-interest story. Who is it for? Who is it being sold to? What does evidence say about benefits and risks? What does safe prescribing look like? And as Indian firms prepare cheaper alternatives, will access actually widen beyond metro pockets, or will affordability remain a mirage?
A distinctive element of BOLD is South First‘s plan to periodically turn reporting into curated public events every few months, bringing together stakeholders in the same room — policymakers, researchers, clinicians, public health voices, and industry leaders, including pharma companies.
The aim is not spectacle, but accountability and problem-solving: To place evidence, lived experience and policy choices in direct conversation and to test what changes when decision-makers confront realities on the ground.
These convenings will focus on interventions that matter at scale: Prevention policies, food and advertising environments, school health, workplace design, screening pathways in primary care, insurance and affordability barriers, and access to effective treatment, while also questioning hype, misinformation and one-size-fits-all claims.
The timing of this campaign is not accidental. India is at a juncture where the metabolic health burden is rising, and the choices made now by governments, health systems, schools, employers and industry will shape disease patterns for decades.
At the same time, the science and the market are shifting. New therapies are changing what treatment can look like, while Indian pharma is preparing a generics wave that could redraw pricing and access.
However, without public understanding and stronger policy frameworks, breakthroughs risk becoming either misunderstood magic bullets or benefits reserved for a limited few.
Beat Obesity, Lower Diabetes is South First’s attempt to keep the lens steady; week after week analysis on what is changing, what is not, and what must.
If obesity and diabetes are rising together, the response cannot remain fragmented. And if a public health emergency is unfolding, the job of journalism is to make it impossible to ignore until prevention, care and healthcare access become easier to demand and harder to delay.
