A young chef dubbed the 'Indian Jamie Oliver' has returned to her old Heston school to encourage pupils to follow in her footsteps.

Dipna Anand showed students at Heston Community School, where she studied between 1995 and 2002, how to whip up some of her award-winning healthy recipes.

The 24-year-old was inspired to create a range of low-fat Indian recipes as a teenager after her father Gulu, who runs the renowned Indian restuarant Brilliant in Southall, suffered a heart attack.

She developed the idea for her A-level in food technology and received the highest mark of any student in the country for her coursework.

Six years later, Dipna is assistant manager at her father's restaurant, studying for a masters in hospitality management and compiling what she claims will be the world's first low-fat Indian cookery book.

But it is her work to educate the next generation ofchefs about healthy cooking that led the Guardian to compare her with Jamie Oliver.

It is particularly pertinent to members of the Asian community, who are twice as likely as Europeans to develop heartdisease.

"Dad's never smoked or drunk but he always consumed a lot of Indian food, which may have caused his heart attack," she said. "Many Indians don't understand that the secret to a tasty curry is getting the right balance of spices, not just chucking apacket of ghee in the bowl."

Dipna, who visited Heston Community School last Thursday as part of its Healthy Eating Week, also wants to encourage more youngsters to pursue careers in catering.

"There are somany talented cooks out there but this country's not producing enough chefs because people wrongly believe the profession's all about long hours and low pay."

Her message is particularly relevant at a time when curry houses across the country are under threat from stricter immigration laws, which make it harder for them to bring in foreign chefs.

"The only way to combat the problem is to get food back on the curriculum and produce more chefs here," she said.