The rise in diabetes cases comes hand-in-hand with an economic boom in China and India that has brought prosperity to many poor families.

The growing affluence among many in the world's two most populated countries, experts say, could be causing the jump in diabetes cases as people in China and India have more money to spend on food and are less likely to toil in fields.

"There is a theory that famine actually protects people from diabetes," said Kirpal Marwa, a diabetes expert in Britain. Cockram agrees.

"The human organism has evolved with a lot of protective mechanisms that are basically developed over millennia to protect us from starvation and deprivation and from being hunted down and killed," Cockram said.

"They are not there to protect us from the effects of the current environment which is the exact opposite, where we have plentiful supply of food," he added.

According to his "thrifty gene" theory, a malnourished foetus is likely to have smaller pancreas that would be less able to cope with a plentiful and sugar-rich diet later in life. The pancreas produces insulin, which helps to use or store sugar.

But when the body doesn't make enough insulin or can't properly use insulin, sugar cannot be properly stored or used and it builds up in the bloodstream, resulting in diabetes.

The most common type of diabetes is type 2 diabetes. There are now 246 million such cases worldwide and the figure will hit 380 million by 2025, according to the International Diabetes Federation.

That figure was 194 million in 2003. Three million deaths worldwide are attributable each year to diabetes.

Karen Lam, a professor at the University of Hong Kong's Department of Medicine, said the solution is the same regardless of the theories about Asians' susceptibility to diabetes.

"At the end of the day how you tackle it is still the same. You eat less, you may have plenty, but you don't need to eat all of it, and you do more exercise," she said.