Bengaluru

Bengaluru's comparatively low blood-sugar, anemia and liver readings sit beside a marked B12 shortfall. Nearly half its tested B12 reports are below 200 pg/mL, so the high below-300 share is not mainly a group just under the cutoff. B12 matters for blood and nerve function, although a low laboratory result still needs clinical interpretation before it becomes a diagnosis.

The lower readings need context too. Bengaluru has the lowest overall blood-sugar share of the five metros, yet Delhi NCR is lower within four of the five adult age groups. Different age mixes help shape those totals. The useful city profile is therefore the set of measures and the people represented in each sample, rather than one overall position in a ranking.

Biomarker cities use report pincodes; survey cities use respondents' stated residence.

Bengaluru records the lowest metro reading on six of ten measures#

HbA1c is a blood-sugar measure that reflects the previous several months rather than the morning of the test; the ≥5.7% group includes results in the prediabetic and diabetic ranges, while ≥6.5% is the diabetic range. A clinician must interpret a result before confirming a diagnosis. Haemoglobin is the oxygen-carrying protein in red blood cells; a result below the threshold is classified here as anemia. It has several causes, and one low reading is not an iron-deficiency diagnosis. Any liver marker elevated means SGPT above 40 U/L, or SGOT above 40 U/L, or GGT above 60 U/L. Each row uses the threshold set on that measure's own page: the HbA1c bands on the Blood Sugar page, the haemoglobin cutoffs on the Anemia page, the B12 line on the Vitamin B12 page.

HDL is a cholesterol measure used when assessing cardiovascular risk. The two HDL rows are worth reading together. Under a single <40 mg/dL rule, 41.8% of Bengaluru reports are below the line. Under the sex-specific rule, women below 50 and men below 40, it is 58.6%, because the lower fixed cutoff counts fewer women as low. The sex-specific figure is the one to carry, and on that measure Bengaluru is still second-lowest of the five metros. HDL is one input to cardiovascular risk, not a verdict on it.

Among Bengaluru's tested HbA1c reports, 33.3% of the 729 from women were at or above 5.7%, against 28.2% of the 786 from men. The report-wide split runs the same way, 39.9% of 3,262 female reports against 37.6% of 3,826 male ones. The sexes are not matched on age in either sample, so the observation carries no further.

Bengaluru is lower than Delhi NCR only in the 30s#

Share of tested HbA1c reports at or above 5.7%, with the tested reports in each cell. The lowest rate in each group is bold.

Bengaluru is lower than Delhi NCR only among people in their 30s: 26.4% against 27.8%.

The higher threshold climbs the same way and from a much lower start: of Bengaluru's tested reports, 1.8% of the 549 in their 20s reach 6.5%, then 6.4% of 579 in their 30s, 21.3% of 164 in their 40s, 32.8% of 116 in their 50s and 36.8% of 95 at 60 or over. These diabetic-range results form a smaller group within the reports at or above 5.7%; they are not confirmed diagnoses.

For national scale, the ICMR-INDIAB study estimated that in 2021, 101 million adults in India had diabetes and 136 million had prediabetes (Anjana et al., Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, 2023). That is a population survey using diagnostic criteria; the figures below are shares of tested reports against this report's own thresholds, and the two are not interchangeable.

Bengaluru's own reading barely moved between editions: 32.8% of 341 tested reports in WHI 2025, 30.7% of 1,515 here. Its position changed more than its rate did. It placed second of the five metros in 2025 and first here, but over the same period Pune moved from the lowest rate to the second-highest, and Delhi NCR from the highest to the second-lowest.

The two editions use different city samples, so this is not a city health trend.

The metros' lowest female anemia, in this edition and the last#

Bengaluru sits at one end of this range and Mumbai at the other: 23.2% of tested female reports against 52.3%, a distance of 29.1 points and the widest between any two metros in the ten-measure table above. The male column runs the same way, from 3.8% to 16.2%. What the two columns together do not settle is why. Which reports were tested, and who the tested people are, could differ between the two cities in ways nothing here measures, and a larger sample makes a rate more precise rather than more representative.

National context puts the reading in proportion. The National Family Health Survey found 57.0% of Indian women aged 15–49 anemic in 2019–21, up from 53.1% in the previous round (NFHS-5, IIPS and ICF, 2021). Across this report's whole tested sample, 34.6% of 4,375 female reports and 8.9% of 5,210 male reports are below the threshold. The NFHS figure is not a scoreboard this city can be placed on: it covers a national population aged 15 to 49, uses a lower cutoff for pregnant women, adjusts for altitude and smoking, and estimates anemia from capillary blood, which its own publishers say need not be compared with results from surveys using venous blood. Read it as the scale of the problem nationally. Then read the city figure for what it is: close to one tested woman in four.

The Anemia page carries the report-wide age and relationship patterns.

WHI 2025 reported the same two ends of the range: 23.8% in Bangalore against 54.4% of 158 in Mumbai. Its male column was published for all five metros, and Bengaluru was second-lowest there at 5.3% of 513 tested reports, behind Pune's 5.0% of 343.

WHI 2025 did not state its haemoglobin cutoffs. The female bases also differ: 374 reports then and 1,131 now. Similar rankings do not establish a city trend.

Nearly half of Bengaluru's tested B12 reports sit below 200 pg/mL#

Pune and Delhi NCR are tied. Bengaluru stands clear of all four by more than the four are spread across each other, and sits above the report-wide 69.6% of 6,192 reports. It is the only measure here on which Bengaluru is outright the worst of the five metros, and it is a long way from the front.

Nearly half of the tested reports are below the lower B12 line. Of those 1,723 reports, 47.9% are below 200 pg/mL, 30.8% are at least 200 but below 300, and 21.2% are at 300 or above. So the 78.8% is not a crowd of borderline results: most of it sits in the lower band.

The split by sex is wide. 86.3% of the 910 reports from men are below 300 pg/mL, against 70.4% of the 813 from women, a gap of 15.9 points. That direction is not a Bengaluru phenomenon: the Vitamin B12 page records 76.6% of 3,229 male reports and 62.0% of 2,963 female reports report-wide. The two samples are not matched on age or on anything else, and nothing here identifies what produces the difference.

Bengaluru also recorded the highest share of the metros published in WHI 2025, on the same threshold: 76.2% of 490 tested reports, against 66.6% in Pune, 62.7% in Delhi NCR and 61.8% in Mumbai. The 2025 table lists four metros; Hyderabad is absent from it.

B12 below 200 pg/mL was 41.8% of 490 reports in 2025 and 47.9% of 1,723 in 2026. This 6.1-point sample difference does not establish worsening city health; a laboratory band alone is not a diagnosis.

Frequent eating out is most common in Bengaluru's survey responses#

The survey collected 1,826 Bengaluru responses about sleep, food, movement and stress.

One row stands out from the other metros. Bengaluru reports the highest rate of eating out or ordering in three or more times a week of the five metros, 30.0% against 23.7% in Mumbai, 21.5% in Delhi NCR, 20.6% in Hyderabad and 18.9% in Pune, and well above the all-India 23.5%. Everything else sits close to the national line: caffeine and nicotine slightly below it, stress and alcohol slightly above, sleep and exercise level with it.

Short sleep means an answer in one of the two shortest bands, "under 5 hours" or "5–6 hours". The "6–7 hours" band is excluded from the short-sleep group, and nobody was asked for a number of hours, so this is not an average duration; the Sleep page sets out the bands. The exercise row counts responses reporting no days at all with at least 30 minutes of exercise. "None of these" is a checkbox on a multi-select question about healthcare activity: routine or preventive doctor consultations, consultations for symptoms or illness, full-body diagnostic tests, company health camps or screening, and fitness assessments, and some people ticked it alongside a listed activity, so 39.7% is the share who selected that option rather than the share who did nothing about their health.

Bengaluru's survey respondents skew young and IT-heavy: 49.6% work in IT, software or SaaS, and 86.9% are in their 20s or 30s.

On sleep, Bengaluru is third of the five metros, behind Mumbai at 36.0% and Hyderabad at 31.0%, and ahead of Delhi NCR at 29.2% and Pune at 26.2%. Its nicotine rate sits at the national line. The older edition's "poor sleep" measure is not established as the same short-sleep measure used here, and its nicotine results use different published groupings. Those differences prevent a like-for-like reading of city changes in sleep or nicotine use.