Abu Dhabi has banned the advertising of fast food in a bid to improve the health of people living in the emirate.
The ban is in place across the entire emirate and was introduced as part of a major health drive aimed at tackling obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases.
Dr Ahmed AlKhazraji, executive director of Healthy Living Abu Dhabi, the body behind the scheme, told The National the restrictions on advertising junk food were introduced to help people make better choices when it comes to personal well-being.
“If you drive across the emirate of Abu Dhabi you're [now] not going to see unhealthy food and beverage promotion,” said Dr AlKhazraji. “We're doing this to influence people's daily lives, so that it's easy and accessible for all citizens and residents to be healthy.”
This month, Healthy Living under the Department of Health introduced a health drive ranging from new front-of-pack food labelling through Nutri Mark and tighter rules on unhealthy food advertising, to changes in supermarket layouts, expanded community fitness programmes, and stricter nutrition standards in schools and workplaces. Earlier this month, it was revealed that children's school lunches are being spot-checked to make sure they are eating healthily.
Food reform is one of the most significant aspects of the programme. Nutri Mark front-of-package labels will grade packaged food from A (healthiest) to E (least healthy) based on nutritional value, while a new policy launched by Healthy Living limits the advertising of unhealthy food and drink by media across the emirate.
Supermarkets will also remove unhealthy products from high-traffic zones including store entrances, ends of aisles and checkout areas, as recently mandated by the Department of Economic Development.
The aim is not to force people to behave differently, but to change the environment around them and at the same time raise their health awareness so they make the right choices themselves.
“The goal is to make health easy and accessible for every person in society, regardless of nationality, age, gender … any demographic,” said Dr AlKhazraji.
Health, he said, has to exist where people already are. “We’re embedding health into schools, workplaces, communities – into all the settings people interact with day to day,” he said. “The strategy rests on four areas: physical activity, diet, mental well-being and sleep.”
Dr AlKhazraji was careful not to frame the problem as one of personal failure. “I don’t blame anyone,” he said. “This is multifactorial.”
Modern working life is part of the picture when it comes to tackling personal health, he added.
“People are busy. They're in back-to-back meetings. They have emails throughout day. And they have very small windows of time to eat,” he said.
“And during these small windows, they’re not going to sit and analyse the nutritional profile of everything in front of them. The real question is: how do we design systems where what’s available in that moment is the healthy option?”
Personal experience
When Dr AlKhazraji talks about prevention, he is speaking from experience shaped in hospitals, not policy documents.
“I started my career as a clinician, seeing patients every day,” he said. “Then I moved into leading clinical teams and then into medical operations – understanding how patients come into hospitals, how they move through hospitals and why they come in in the first place.”
Over time, a pattern became hard to ignore, he said. “What I started to see – and what I was not very happy with – was the health of the population,” he said. “You’re seeing diseases in younger people that should be appearing at older ages. You’re seeing them younger and younger.”
One case in particular stayed with him. “There was one story I remember that really upset me. There was a young man in his late 20s who came in with a very bad headache that wouldn’t go away,” he said.
“When they took his blood pressure, it was extremely high – a hypertensive emergency and he also had three out of his four coronary arteries almost fully clogged.”
Doctors told the man he needed to stay at the hospital.
“He refused, saying, ‘I just have a headache. You just want to keep me here to take advantage of me.’”
At the time, Dr AlKhazraji was asked to speak to him. “I started to get to know him – his background, his lifestyle,” he said. “And he didn’t see the way he was living as a problem at all, even though he was essentially doing everything you’re not supposed to do – staying sedentary, eating poorly, smoking heavily.”
The man left but came back a week or two later with a massive heart attack and almost died. What troubled Dr AlKhazraji most was not just that case, but what it represented.
“I remember thinking there are so many more like him. He was just the one I saw. This is happening in our society at such a young age,” he said.
That was when he began to question the limits of working inside a single facility. “You can only do so much within one hospital,” he says. “That’s when I decided I wanted to work at a health-system level.”
What he describes is a shift away from treating illness and towards preventing it.
“Health care has been reactive,” he said. “It waits for people to be sick, and then we treat them. But health is shaped much earlier, long before anyone walks into a hospital.
“What we’re doing now is intentionally moving away from waiting for people to be sick,” he said. “We’re moving towards proactive health.”
