Abu Dhabi hotel menus must now include a healthy option

For the families who check into Abu Dhabi’s hotels this season, ordering a meal now comes with a quiet change: every section of the menu, from appetisers to desserts, must include at least one option that meets the emirate’s new “Sehhi” nutritional standards. The word Sehhi means healthy, and the criteria behind it are straightforward. Such foods are low in fat, sugar and salt, and carry higher nutritional value. Children’s menus are held to an even stricter test, with at least half of their offerings required to meet the same criteria.

The mandate, which came into force last Thursday, applies to hotels and tourism-licensed restaurants across the emirate and was developed by the Abu Dhabi Public Health Centre. For parents dining out with children, it means the healthier choice is no longer buried at the bottom of a list. It sits alongside everything else, available without extra effort.

That principle, making the good option the easy one, runs through policy across the UAE. Abu Dhabi has already tightened what children can bring into schools this year, placing foods high in sugar, fat and artificial additives on a prohibited list. From next year, supermarkets across the emirate will have to move unhealthy food away from high-visibility areas, the shelves where impulse purchases happen. A tiered excise tax on sugary drinks, part of a UAE-wide drive to encourage people to cut back, is already in place.

Policymakers have framed these steps around a simple recognition: individual responsibility matters, but so does the environment in which people actually make their decisions. The goal is not to take choice away from residents. It is to ensure that healthy habits do not demand extraordinary effort, whether someone is shopping for groceries, packing a school bag or sitting down at a restaurant table.

Convenience is usually blamed for the health problems of modern life. Fast food is convenient. Home deliveries are convenient. Processed snacks sit prominently on supermarket shelves for the same reason. The UAE’s strategy, deliberately multi-pronged, turns that logic around, making healthier options just as easy to reach.

Meanwhile, the same thinking extends to exercise and to the practical realities of daily life in the country. Summer heat can make outdoor activity difficult for months at a time, so the UAE has built around that constraint. Climate-controlled gyms and sporting facilities are widely available, and community sports programmes, such as those running at Zayed Sports City at this time of year, give residents structured ways to stay active.

The Dubai Mallathon takes the idea further. Launched last year, it turns malls across Dubai into running and walking tracks. This year, more than 160,000 people took part in the three-month programme, which culminated in a full marathon inside Dubai Mall. For residents, it offered a way to keep moving through the summer without facing the heat. Once again, the organising principle is convenience.

Taken together, the measures embed public health into urban planning, education, hospitality and everyday community life, rather than leaving it to hospital visits and medical care, which can be stressful and expensive for everyone involved. There is also a macroeconomic case for the whole-of-government effort. The World Obesity Federation, a non-profit group, estimates that obesity could cost the UAE almost 5 per cent of its gross domestic product by 2035.

For the people these policies are designed around, the changes are cumulative and gradual. A healthier option on a hotel menu, a sugary drink priced higher, snacks moved off the eye-level shelf, an air-conditioned place to walk in August. None of these alone transforms anyone’s life. The overall impact, officials and observers acknowledge, could take years to become clear.

But the direction is deliberate. By systematically reducing the friction around good habits, the UAE is stacking the odds in favour of longer, healthier lives for its residents. If convenience helped create some of modern life’s health problems, the country is betting it can also help solve them. Whether that bet pays off will show up, slowly, in the choices families make at the table.