Opinion

Health messages are jammed

January 07, 2018

It’s impossible to believe that there are Saudis who to this day do not know what is healthy for them and what is not. If there are such citizens who are still not up to date, then something is wrong. All the reports and surveys, all the findings of research conducted by local and international institutions on the health of the people of the Kingdom over the last several years will not be worth much if a sizeable portion of the public still leads an unhealthy and dangerous lifestyle – and doesn’t know it.

By now, Saudi health problems are well known. Obesity, diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and smoking are among the leading issues that affect a growing number of people in Saudi Arabia. The causes behind these health problems are just as clear: urbanization and car-oriented cities, poor diets and reduced physical activity.

That the Kingdom faces several health challenges is not unusual for a country with high income. What is unusual is that the trouble it takes to reach these findings does not equal the efforts that Saudis are making to change those findings. If Saudis still continue to eat all the wrong foods without increasing any form of physical activity, and all the research done on them has not changed their lifestyle, then somebody is missing something somewhere. The message is simply not getting across.

Things could be changing. A recent article on health in Saudi Arabia highlighted the push by some Saudi youth to go for healthy instead of junk food and to spread the word on social media. It’s a very admirable step but the road is long. A survey published six months ago put Saudi Arabia first in the world in terms of inactive people. The thrust of the survey was that the world is in the middle of a major obesity epidemic, that more than two billion adults and children globally - one-third of the world’s population - are overweight or obese and suffer health problems because of their weight.

But that is not what’s new. The study found that there are pockets of the global population who remain somewhat unaware of this public health crisis, despite the growth of waistlines all around them. This lack of awareness is what was surprising, if not shocking. We all know what inactivity can do to a person. Or do we? There seems to be a missing link between the extensive health-related data being accrued by some of the world’s most prominent research organizations and the target audience. Three-quarters of Saudis never have a routine medical checkup. It’s surprising that in a country with free and widely accessible healthcare, people don’t take advantage of preventive care and only see their doctors when they fall ill.

People who smoked cigarettes 50 years ago might have been excused for not knowing the dangers of smoking. There were no label warnings, smoking was depicted in advertisements and commercials as being macho and the medical world had still not unanimously given its verdict on health problems related to smoking. All that has changed. Smoking is now the world’s leading cause of preventable death. One person dies every six seconds from a tobacco related disease.

The same holds true for eating the wrong foods and having a sedentary life. Decades ago, we did not know how unhealthy these habits were. Now we do.

It’s not so much what doctors and scientists know. They can go on forever about non-communicable diseases, body mass index and representative samples. The real issue is getting all that information to the public and more importantly, for the public to recognize that a problem exists and do something about it.


January 07, 2018
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