Princess Haya Bint Al Hussein has urged Middle Eastern governments to take more action to tackle the region’s unhealthy youth by pushing the importance of sport.
“We’ve seen throughout the region now incredible statistics that are going frighteningly on an upward curve every day of diabetes, of heart disease among our youth,” she told Dubai One TV’s ‘Dubai Tonight’ programme.
“The lifestyle that we should be promoting is now becoming as urgent as some of the things we prioritised before. Really sport is now a necessity. It’s a necessity to tackle non-communicable diseases, it’s a necessity to ensure the safety and security of our youth and their future.
“For that simple reason alone, it’s at the government level, through ministries of education, through ministries of health, that this now has to be accepted as a top of the agenda.”
Last week, her husband, Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, the UAE’s Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai, said the spread of diabetes among children in the country’s was “unacceptable”.
During an interview given to coincide with Dubai’s hosting of the SportAccord convention, he said the important role sport played in the future health of the nation was “one way to address those problems”.
“About 40 percent of our children have diabetes. That is unacceptable. Sports is one way to address those problems,” he said.
Now compare this with the comments of the Kuwaiti parliamentarians and mess that the Kuwait Olympic Committee is in; which all goes to say how sports (and especially among women) is treated in Kuwait, given the fact that over 60% of the population is considered as “OBESE” according to world standards.
