Research Article Vegetarian Diet and Cardiometabolic Risk among Asian Indians in the United States Ranjita Misra , 1 Padmini Balagopal, 2 Sudha Raj , 3 and Thakor G. Patel 4 1 WVU Public Health Training Center, 3313A, Robert C. Byrd Health Science Center, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV 26506-9190, USA 2 Clinical Nutritionist, Early Intervention, 1901 JFK Blvd, Philadelphia, PA 19103, USA 3 Department of Public Health, Food Studies and Nutrition, 562 Falk College, Syracuse, NY 13244, USA 4 Department of Medicine, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, Bethesda, MD, USA Correspondence should be addressed to Ranjita Misra; ramisra@hsc.wvu.edu Received 3 July 2017; Accepted 22 November 2017; Published 18 February 2018 Academic Editor: Eusebio Chiefari Copyright © 2018 Ranjita Misra et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Research studies have shown that plant-based diets confer cardiovascular and metabolic health benefits. Asian Indians (AIs) in the US (who have often followed plant-based diets) have elevated risk for chronic diseases such as diabetes, metabolic syndrome, and obesity suggesting ethnic vulnerability that imply genetic and/or lifestyle causative links. This study explored the association between this ethnic group and diabetes, obesity, and metabolic syndrome after controlling for demographics, acculturation, family history of diabetes, and lifestyle and clinical risk factors. The sample comprised of 1038 randomly selected adult AIs in seven US sites. Prevalence and metabolic syndrome was estimated, and obesity was calculated using the WHO Asian criteria. Multivariate analysis included multinomial logistic regression. The mean age and length of residency in the US were 47 and 18.5 years, respectively. The majority of respondents were vegetarians (62%) and educated. A vegetarian lifestyle was associated with females, food label users, respondents with poor/fair current health status, less acculturated, and those who reported their diet had not changed after coming to the US. Vegetarian status was a protective factor and lowered the risk for diabetes but not for metabolic syndrome and obesity in the regression model. Results provide a firm basis for educational programs. 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 plant- based 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 enu- merated the high prevalence rates of noncommunicable dis- eases (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]. Hindawi Journal of Diabetes Research Volume 2018, Article ID 1675369, 13 pages https://doi.org/10.1155/2018/1675369