DOHA: The Supreme Council of Health (SCH) is seeking new regional standards for fast food items to prevent their harmful effects on public health, a senior SCH official has said.
The move apparently is prompted by the high rate of obesity in Qatar, with a survey released by the SCH last year showing that 70 percent of the Qatari population were overweight, of whom over 41 percent were obese.
“Now we are working with the GCC standards (organisation) to modify the specifications of fast food in supermarkets and restaurants to get rid of the (high content of) fat that could harm human health,” a local Arabic daily quoted Sheikha Al Anoud bint Mohammed Al Thani, Director of Health Promotion and Non-Communicable Diseases at SCH, as saying in an interview.
She said the SCH was also seeking support from the Qatari Standards and Specifications Authority in this regard. “We are in talks with the Ministry of Economy and Commerce, Consumer Protection Department and the Ministry of Municipality and Urban Planning. We are going to work together on this issue but we need support from the standardisation (authority) because without having a law, we can not impose specifications on companies,” she added.
Al Anoud said that a health awareness campaign being waged by the SCH in independent schools had started delivering results and there is a plan to expand it to work places.
“We are planning to include work places in the campaign starting next month to create a healthy environment there and make them free from everything that would harm the physical and psychological health of the employees,” said Al Anoud.
She said this programme will start from SCH employees on a trial basis.
“Feedback from this experiment will help us identify the weaknesses. We started the ‘We are Healthy’ campaign with 15 schools and then expanded it to more schools,” she said, indicating that a similar pattern would be followed in work places.
The official said there is also a plan to conduct a comprehensive study on prevalence of diabetes and obesity among schoolchildren in Qatar and prepare a complete health record for each student.
“Next month we are going to conduct a training workshop for school nurses to monitor the health condition of students aged 5 to 18 years through a complete health record, starting from the day they join the school until they complete studies,” said Al Anoud.
