Jackson Heights Life

The New York Times
Bedeviled by the Sugar Sickness
By ALEX MINDLIN
Published: March 2, 2008

SEVENTY-FOURTH STREET, the main drag in the South Asian section of Jackson Heights, Queens, is something of a sucrose alley. There are New Aladdin Sweets, Al-Naimat Sweets and Restaurant, and Delhi Palace Sweets, whose fogged-up window is stacked high with steaming trays of desserts.

But few of these items are selling briskly these days. At Shereen Mahal Sweets and Restaurant, for example, the rice puddings and cardamom-scented dough balls have been languishing in the display case.

“So many of my customers say, ‘Oh, we are diabetic,’ ” Tasawar Hussain, the owner, said the other day as he ladled goat stew into a takeout container. “They say: ‘Don’t give us the sugar. Do you have oil in this one?’ ”

In New York, efforts to fight Type 2 diabetes, known as adult-onset diabetes, have focused on poor, predominantly black and Hispanic neighborhoods like Mott Haven in the Bronx and Bushwick in Brooklyn. Those two communities had the city’s highest and third-highest death rates from the disease in 2004, the most recent year for which statistics were available.

But Type 2 diabetes strikes a sixth of the more than 200,000 New Yorkers whose families are from the Indian subcontinent. That gives them the highest rate of the disease among the city’s major ethnic groups.

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