Arabic Website Offering Scientific Information Is Nominated for Akhlaquna Award

Millions of Arabic speakers surf the Internet in search of information in various fields, including medical or therapeutic nutrition. But getting credible information becomes hard due to the barrage of disinformation and lack of reliable scientific sources that are translated accurately.

So, how can Arabic speakers access scientific information if there has been no Arabization of scientific research?

Maha Ghassan Homos – one of the three finalists of this year’s Akhlaquna Award – worked to find a solution to this challenge. In 2016, Homos founded Nutripedia, an educational platform that seeks to enrich scientific content in the Arabic language; provides information necessary for health education related to nutrition; and offers information and articles from medical sources based on research and scientific evidence.

Nutripedia is the first and only Arabic website to provide evidence-based nutritional articles and information written by doctors, nutritionists, and professors. All articles on the website are written in simple Arabic so that everyone can understand them, and Homos aspires for the website to become the largest nutrition platform, and the most reliable for all students and nutritionists in the Middle East. The website can be visited at: www.nutripedia.online.

Homos started working on this platform when she was a student at Qatar University with the aim of providing reliable information on medical nutrition, such as a vegetarian diet, child nutrition, pregnant nutrition, and others.

"It all started as a simple Instagram page when I wanted to provide scientific evidence for people to fight wrong diets, and I had to write in Arabic because I provide content to native speakers,” Homs said. “Each post took several days because I had to translate all the scientific terms into Arabic language.”

Homos decided to use Arabic articles as references instead of translating English articles, and to her surprise she did not find a single website that offered Arabic articles in evidence-based nutrition.

“I found the gap, and I had the necessary skills to fix it, and that's how it started," she said.

For Homos, the creation of this website stemmed from her sense of duty towards her community, noting that her initiative is not-for-profit, and aims to encourage people to follow a healthy lifestyle, instead of following modern diets which can have detrimental effects that may lead to deteriorating health."