The high rates of obesity in many Middle East markets are no secret – according the UNICEF 2025 Child Nutrition Report ‘Feeding Profit: How food environments are failing children’, global numbers show 5% of all children under five years of age and 20% of those aged five to 19 years old are overweight. Within these, the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region has a prevalence that already exceeds 30% and is on a trajectory to rise further.
The situation is much the same for adult overweight and obesity rates here, hovering around the 42% mark.
An overload of processed foods high in fat, salt and sugar are often cited as the main culprit here, and indeed anyone who has tried a traditional Middle Eastern sweet would know that sweetness is very important in the region.
As such, the cultural and taste barriers are major hurdles for the region if it hopes to truly wage war on the overweight and obesity epidemic.
However, with the issue rapidly growing in seriousness and public health spend steadily rising due to NCDs such as diabetes and hypertension — the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for instance has an average one-third of all adults suffering from obesity, with the market losing almost US$12bn in associated health costs annually — governments across the region are making attempts to reverse this trend.
One of the earliest attempts was the implementation of sugar taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages, which is still in place in markets like the UAE and Saudi Arabia, as well as a focus on improving school food programmes and mandating healthier meals in schools to target younger consumers early on.
But the most recent measures have moved into all-encompassing, national level strategies impacting not only food manufacturers or educational institutions, but food and health ecosystems as a whole.
One such example is the UAE’s National Nutrition Startegy under the umbrella of its Ministry of Health and Prevention (MoHAP), which looks at early monitoring in schools and public health campaigns, as well as MoHAP’s National Clinical Guidelines for Weight Management and Prevention of Adulthood Obesity targeting adult consumers.
“Addressing obesity demands a comprehensive and integrated approach that combines public awareness, medical guidance, and targeted interventions,” Assistant Undersecretary for the Public Health Sector Dr. Hussain Abdul Rahman Al Rand stated.
“It is a pressing public health challenge that affects all segments of society, so we are committed to equipping professionals with the latest globally recognised knowledge and tools to support individuals in achieving and maintaining a healthy weight sustainably.”
In Saudi Arabia, the Saudi Food and Drug Authority and local Ministry of Health have laid out its own National Health Transformation Programme in which obesity prevention is a key target.
It is not yet known whether there will be a major role for weight-loss medications such as GLP-1 to play in this region, but given its widespread success in the United States, this looks highly likely.
Just how serious is the obesity crisis in the Middle East?
A 2025 large-scale study of over 440,000 subjects in the UAE published in Lancet confirmed that 63.4% of the studied population are either overweight (35.4%) or obese (28%).
“Obesity is especially common in UAE nationals and older females, such that about half of [all] female UAE nationals aged 40 or older live with obesity, and about one in five of this population live with class II or class III obesity,” said the authors.
“Significantly more UAE nationals (68.3%) are either overweight or obese, compared to nationals from South East Asian countries (59.7%) or elsewhere (63.6%) who are living in this region.”
Similar findings have been published about other markets in the region, including Saudi Arabia.
“Obesity has become a serious epidemic in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA)escalating to become a potentially fatal public health emergency,” stated a recent 2026 study investigating national obesity statistics and drivers in the country.
“Across the country, 35.6% of Saudi adults are obese and 69.7% of all adults are either overweight or obese, which is a much larger number compared to what previous studies in the country have revealed. There is a particularly troubling rise in young adults aged 18 to 24, where 21.5% are obese.”
The UAE and Saudi Arabia are among the most economically developed markets in the region and the rise of obesity is believed to have some connection with urbanisation and westernised diets in this regard.
Another example here is Qatar, which is also actively seeing a change in nutrition and diets, and not necessarily for the better.
“The rapid economic development experienced by Qatar over the past five decades has transformed food production, food availability, and dietary behaviours. Historically, traditional Qatari diets were centred on minimally processed foods and [meals] were predominantly prepared at home,” researchers at the Weill Cornell Medicine school in Qatar said.
“However, economic prosperity, urbanisation, globalisation, and increased reliance on imported foods have driven a marked nutrition transition [towards] Westernised diets characterised by greater consumption of fast foods, sugar-sweetened beverages, packaged snacks, and ready-to-eat meals [alongside other behavioural and environmental changes that have] created an obesogenic environment.”
As a result, Qatar has among the highest numbers of childhood overweight and obesity in the region, with around 27.7% of children between five to 14 years of age living with obesity.
The marketing perspective
Given the high numbers associated with childhood obesity, many experts are now highlighting junk food marketing bans as a key area to prioritise, as these tend to have strong influence on younger consumers.
“We still see heavy promotion of high-sugar, high-fat foods [across the region], while regulation remains uneven,” Rain Stella Technologies CRO Khalid Ghaloua Adine said.
“[There is a need to] extend mandatory, nutrient-based rules [such as] the restriction of unhealthy food advertising around schools [to a] region-wide scale.”
Some crucial areas that need to be addressed include digital advertising both online and on traditional media, as well as any form of misleading promotions.
“Interventions should focus on improving the nutritional quality of school food environments, reducing children’s exposure to marketing of ultra-processed foods, encouraging consumption of minimally processed traditional foods, improving nutrition literacy among families, and supporting healthier food choices through national policy initiatives,” the Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar researchers added.
