English Abstract
Abstract:
The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the Eastern Mediterranean Region’s food system’s fragility posing severe challenges to
maintaining healthy sustainable lifestyle.
The aim of this cross-sectional study (N = 13,527 household’s family members,
mean age: 30.3 ±11.6, 80% women) is to examine the impact of the COVID19 pandemic on food consumption patterns and household’s
A food frequency questionnaire was used to investigate the consumption patterns along with the calculation of the Food Consumption Score (FCS), a proxy indicator of dietary diversity. Data collected on cooking attitudes, shopping and food stock explore the community mitigation measures.
In the overall population, before and during the pandemic, most food groups were
consumed less or equal to 4 times per week. As evident from our findings and
considering that the pandemic may be better, but it’s not over, small to moderate changes in food consumption patterns in relatively short time periods can become permanent and lead to substantial poor dietary diversity over time. While it is a priority to mitigate the immediate impact, one area of great concern is the long-term
Hoteit et al. Dietary Diversity Amid COVID-19 Pandemic in Arab Countries effects of this pandemic on dietary patterns and dietary diversity in Eastern Mediterranean households. To conclude, the COVID-19 crisis revealed the region’s unpreparedness to deal with a pandemic. While the aggressive containment strategy was essential for most countries to help prevent the spread, it came at a high nutritional cost, driving poor dietary diversity.
