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. 2021 Jul 12;16(1):155-159.
doi: 10.1177/15598276211026590. eCollection 2022 Jan-Feb.

Scoring Lifestyle Medicine Goals With FIFA 2022-An Opportunity to Strike Big!

Sathyanarayanan Doraiswamy  1 , Sohaila Cheema  1 , Javaid I Sheikh  1 , Ravinder Mamtani  1
Affiliations

Scoring Lifestyle Medicine Goals With FIFA 2022-An Opportunity to Strike Big!

Sathyanarayanan Doraiswamy et al. Am J Lifestyle Med. .

Abstract

Qatar is one of the few countries in the world with a dedicated national sports day. Qatar believes that sport is one of the best tools to promote a healthy lifestyle to help curb the growing burden of non-communicable diseases (NCDs). With the well-established positive health effects of soccer on cardiovascular, metabolic, and musculoskeletal conditions, the vision of the FIFA World Cup 2022™ hosted by Qatar to use the power of soccer to "open the door of an amazing world experience" is praiseworthy. With NCDs accounting for 70% of deaths in Qatar, there exists a perfect opportunity to promote healthy lifestyles to prevent, treat, and reverse NCDs. We believe that the FIFA World Cup 2022™ presents an opportunity that could contribute to generating valuable evidence on the lifestyle benefits of such large-scale events. This event comes at an opportune moment for countries in the region to make their health systems lifestyle-sensitive. FIFA World Cup 2022™ could just be the tipping point in the region that establishes the role of sports in mitigating the burden of NCDs. With the impact of COVID-19 on persons with pre-existing NCDs, the urgency for addressing the "syndemic" cannot be overemphasized and sport can be the lifestyle medicine.

Keywords: health policy; non-communicable diseases; physical activity; soccer; world cup.

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Conflict of interest statement

Declaration of Conflicting Interests: The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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