More thoughts on Obesity (UAE)

Obesity is a subject that keeps on popping up time and again all over the world. I have commented upon this twice before (see here and here). Gulf News alone gave 100 matches related to obesity (Jan-Oct'06), while the New York Times had 33 matched articles for the last 30 days.

As a resident, I feel there are some ready indicators which safely point towards possible reasons for obesity in UAE. Fast-food and Eating Habits are definitely two of the important reasons.

A recent online poll done by Gulf News gave some interesting results on “use of fast food outlets” in UAE (see the attached pie-chart):

1) A whopping 72% of the respondents polled in favor of eating in a fast food outlet at least once a week!
2) Almost half of the respondents definitely eat in a fast food outlet once a week
3) 6% of the respondents use a fast-food outlet everyday of the week.

A second poll threw some light on the Eating Habits (see the bar chart):
Half of the respondents said they eat because of love of food – 6.3% said they eat because of comfort, while 1.4% each eats because of greed and socializing.

Although the sample-size of the polls is not available to me, I feel the above are good indicators worth pondering upon. For example, if one considers the Emirati community today, obesity is the most alarming! Considering a vast majority of the locals is aged 15-25 years, it’s easy to understand why. Most often than not, one finds group of young men – some of them are at least overweight - are socializing in fast-food joints.

Similarly, if one looks at the subcon families, one again finds that the usual “daily outing” happens to be the fast-food joints! Parents are more often than not overweight. And some of the children are found to be excessively out of shape compared to their ages!

As expressed earlier, my personal opinion is that pricing of food, especially ready-made / fast-food need to be re-looked at, especially in UAE – if not in the whole GCC region! Tax-free income (even though salaries refuse to rise!!), expensive ready-to-wear apparels, recreation opportunities, entertainment, etc. make fast-food the last inexpensive resort to spend money upon. The result? You order more, eat more and waste more… just to have a weekend high! If the fast-food / read-made food is priced higher than usual, the excessive expenditure on fast-food is bound to reduce – thus affecting obesity too!

I know the above solution seems too simplistic or "easier said than done"! However, I open the house to readers to submit more ideas for the benefit of the young nation. Here to you, readers...

Technorati :Obesity. Emiratis. UAE. Fast-Food. Behaviour. Business