As diabetes spikes in Kashmir, the health lens turns to the fabled wazwan

A cook readies one of the wazwan dishes during a wedding in Srinagar.

The Kashmiri wazwan, an array of dishes adding up to 4,500-5,500 calories partaken during festivals and weddings, is one of the key cultural factors contributing to a spike in cases of diabetes in Kashmir, experts said.

Kashmir’s social life is organised around large, meat-centred feasts, most visibly the wazwan served at weddings or on Eid. Diabetes Simplified for Kashmir, a book released on World Diabetes Day (November 14), said the multi-course meal can run to over 30 mutton and chicken preparations, with the calorie intake “several times the average daily requirement”.

“Such exposure accumulates rather than occurs in isolation, and repeated post-prandial glucose and lipid excursions of this magnitude plausibly contribute to the region’s rising dysglycaemia burden,” the book, co-authored by endocrinologists Mohammad Hayat Bhat and Shahnawaz Mir, and cardiologist Nasir Shams, stated.

Degchis (traditional heavy-bottomed cooking pots) filled with wazwan dishes at a wedding feast in Srinagar.

J&K has witnessed a spike in the incidence of diabetes in the past three years. The Union Territory screened more than 2.15 million people for diabetes; 48,623 individuals have been diagnosed to have diabetes, according to data from the Union Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. In 2025-2026, 2.84 million people were screened and 85,948 were found to have diabetes. “In the past three years, J&K added 2.18 lakh new patients to its diabetes burden,” the Ministry’s data suggested.

Apart from more universally seen factors, including poor physical activity and consumption of tobacco, the book identifies Kashmir’s unique lifestyle among the contributing factors.

“Kashmir’s daily plate remains rice-centric with rice typically supplying the bulk of meal volume and carbohydrate load. Large portions of rice translate directly into high postprandial glycaemic load,” it said.

“Type 2 diabetes prevalence in Kashmir has risen sharply within a single generation. A survey in 1999 found known diabetes in just 1.89% of adults, with 4.25% undiagnosed. Recent Indian Council of Medical Research-INDIA data show 7.8% prevalence,” the authors said, attributing the rising incidence of Type 2 diabetes to lifestyle in Kashmir.

The book noted that such a rapid shift cannot reflect genetic change. “It points instead to a compressed nutrition and lifestyle transition, as subsistence agriculture and labour-intensive living have been replaced by urbanisation and declining physical activity, while traditional dietary patterns — rice-centric meals, salt tea, preserved winter foods, and elaborate festive feasting — persist largely unchanged,” the experts said.

They also attributed the rise in cases of diabetes to Kashmir’s winters. “The glycaemic and fat load of the traditional meat and generous portion sizes do not act in isolation. Their convergence with a pronounced winter sedentary period appears to produce a compounding rather than merely additive metabolic burden across the Kashmiri annual cycle, in which periods of highest intake coincide with the lowest levels of expenditure,” they added.

Seasonal confinement and winter lifestyle patterns in the Kashmir Valley’s prolonged winter, which are marked by heavy snowfall and sub-zero temperatures for several months, compress daily life to indoor spaces, warmed by the hammam, a built-in masonry hearth, and the kangri, a portable wicker-encased firepot carried beneath the pheran, a long woollen robe.

“Large meals could be risky or other sudden triggers for heart attacks. Overeating should be considered as a heart attack trigger, much in the same way that extreme physical activities and severe anger episodes can provoke an attack,” the doctors warned.