When Prachi Shah and Sharanya Thodupunoori first learned in 2023 that identifying as South Asian was, on its own, considered a risk factor for cardiovascular disease, they were taken aback.
“Neither of us knew that,” Shah said. “And we found that to be pretty shocking.”
Thodupunoori began looking into to the link between South Asian ethnicity and cardiovascular disease but discovered there was limited information to be found. She began to consider how she could help change this and recruited Shah to the cause.
Shah and Thodupunoori, now rising-fourth-year students at the Pritzker School of Medicine, self-published a children’s book titled “Priya, Healthy Hero” in February with the goal of raising awareness of cardiovascular health and healthy habits in the context of South Asian culture.
The book, co-written by Shah and Thodupunoori and illustrated by Shah, tells the story of Priya, a young girl who aims to help her South Asian immigrant family develop healthier habits while still remaining true to their culture. The story grew out of Shah’s and Thodupunoori’s own experiences in households and communities where cardiovascular disease risk never came up.
“It’s not something I really knew about growing up,” Thodupunoori said. “So we wanted to raise more awareness for both children and their families.”
After taking the first-year health equity course at Pritzker, Shah and Thodupunoori were inspired to bring more attention to South Asian health. Fellow members of Pritzker’s chapter of the South Asian Medical Student Association (SAMSA), they worked with other members of the group to further the conversation, eventually recruiting Namratha Kandula, MD, MPH to give a lecture at Pritzker.
Kandula, an internal medicine physician and Professor of Medicine and Preventive Medicine at Northwestern University, presented a Bowman Society lecture titled “Investigating the Multilevel Determinants of Cardiovascular Health in South Asian Americans: The MASALA Study” in 2023, highlighting her scholarly work examining heart disease in the South Asian community. It was here that Shah and Thodupunoori first heard of a link between South Asian identity and cardiovascular disease.
Thodupunoori decided to use the final writing assignment of the Foundations of Health Policy & the US Healthcare System course to pen an op-ed on the subject. The relatively little information she found inspired her to take action.
Shah and Thodunpunoori sought guidance from University of Chicago faculty, including Sonia Oyola, MD (Family Medicine), Lolita Alukreishi, MD (Pediatrics), Arti Tewari, MD (Hospital Medicine), and V. Ram Krishnamoorthi, MD (Internal Medicine), and eventually discovered the story they wanted to tell. They then began having regular hang outs to brainstorm their characters, create story boards, and learn how to self-publish.
Shah and Thodupunoori drew on experiences with their own families and communities as well as insights gleaned from volunteering at the student-run SEVA Free Clinic, which supports underserved South Asian populations on the North Side of Chicago.
“Something we try to emphasize in our story is just that being healthy and having healthy habits in your day-to-day life is something that’s accessible to everyone, and it’s something that doesn’t always look the same for every person,” Shah said. “Growing up, I remember my parents being like, ‘I can’t believe people spend so much money going to the gym’ or ‘Who has time for all this?’ and things like that.”
Those kinds of sentiments, Shah said, arise consistently in scholarship like the MASALA Study and others that highlight a belief that healthy habits as prescribed in mainstream media are incompatible with the demands of being a recent immigrant, many religious and cultural traditions, or differences in how South Asian communities are organized.
“The end goal of our book is just to show that those two things are not mutually exclusive, that they can work together, and just to start conversations in households,” Shah said.
Added Thodupunoori: “And we wanted to use South Asian characters to make it more relatable to people like us. I think growing up Prachi and I didn’t see a lot of brown characters in books or TV shows and movies, so that was something we wanted to do as well.”
The main character of the book, “Priya,” was not inspired by anyone Shah and Thodupunoori knew but rather was meant to resonate with many in the South Asian community (“We all know lots of people with this name, and we all love lots of people with this name,” Shah said.). They were also intentional about giving Priya dark skin and curly hair, pushing back against negative stereotypes they had heard in their communities growing up.
Shah and Thodupunoori agree it is still a bit surreal to have published a book, especially when they see evidence of it out in the world.
“We’ve gotten stories and pictures back of, like, our cousins reading this book to their kids,” Shah said. “Seeing pictures of it actually being shared in families is really exciting and so gratifying.”