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KARACHI:
If one has any kind of privilege, it is incumbent upon them to use it for the benefit of others, and Registered Dietician Rizwan Aftab Ahmad is ensuring he fulfills his duty.
“It is about building a legacy and continuing one to serve the country for me,” he explained in the exclusive conversation with this correspondent.
The 44-year-old is leading a movement that involves most of the top Pakistani athletes who are their brand ambassadors that can help spread awareness about health and the importance of meeting dietary needs while sponsoring them for events abroad and offering lifetime general medical treatment and specialised treatment for sportspersons.
It has been almost two years leading Pakistani stars like the Paris Olympic gold medallist and record-maker Arshad Nadeem, Paralympics multi-medallist including, the 2020 Tokyo Olympic discus thrower Haider Ali, and the Commonwealth Games record-setting weightlifter Nooh Dastgir Butt among others are all endorsing the multi-vitamin and multi-mineral supplement Activit brand.
The Activit roster of several athletes and legends includes cricketers like Salman Agha and Shan Masood along with Shoaib Akhtar as well.
At first, it looked like any other company sponsoring the leading talent, but there is more than meets the eye.
Rizwan is filling a gap for athletes as the Director at National Hospital DHA, Lahore, where he provides them with free medical treatment for life. The same free-of-charge life-time treatment is extended to the family members of these athletes as well.
One of the examples of how he has subtly helped shape the Pakistani sports landscape was by assuring Arshad received adequate treatment for his long-standing elbow and knee injuries throughout 2023 and before going to the Paris Olympics. Rizwan was instrumental in getting Dr Ali Bajwa from England on Arshad’s case.
It was a connection that Arshad and, consequentially, Pakistan hugely benefited from when the 28-year-old became the first Pakistani to win an Olympic gold medal in 40 years.
Had Dr Bajwa not come into the picture, Arshad’s recovery would have been even more painful, jeapardising his chances of winning the international accolades.
Rizwan’s empathy for the athletes comes from the fact that his grandfather Iftikhar Ahmed Shah was a trailblazing swimmer who represented Pakistan in the 1948 Olympics and his third great-grandfather Raja Ghazanfar Ali Khan served as Pakistan’s Minister of Food, Agriculture, and Health after 1947 and was the first president of the Pakistan Hockey Federation and later served as a diplomat.
Given the state of neglect by the government and even the sports bodies when it comes to athlete welfare Rizwan and his brand have been helping them to go to international events, financing those trips but mainly completely setting the athletes free of the burden of medical expenses and giving them the access to the best facilities completely free of charge.
But its vision remains that athletes can spread the awareness of a healthier lifestyle and Pakistanis too can have a shot at affordable supplements that are essential for good health, however, they do not get them due to poor quality of food products.
“The driving force behind supporting the athletes and also making this product that can help everyone is patriotism and activism, there is the need to serve my country, it has been a tradition of my family and so I am walking in those footsteps,” the Aitchisonian and Queen’s University Canada graduate told this correspondent. He has certification as a registered dietitian and men’s health specialist (Cornell University & Harvard Medical School) in his credentials, but mostly his pride comes from the rich heritage of his family that has been well-respected and even revered as Syed Ghulam Haider Shah, Rizwan’s the 4th great-grandfather from his maternal side, was a spiritual figure of Jalalpur Shareef.
Whereas from his paternal side he is related to Faiz Ahmed Faiz. The Cambridge-educated diplomat Sultan Muhammad Khan, Faiz’s father, was Rizwan’s great-grandfather.
“It is about the optimal lifestyle that people can achieve. I have seen people in their 80s and 90s who feel great but those in their 30s don’t, and there comes the difference in the diet and the nutrients they are getting from it,” Rizwan highlighted, he explained that acquiring the minerals and vitamins that go into the supplements is the key and how these ingredients are collected make all the difference in the quality of the supplement, as the quality of food available to people have degraded over the years due to soil depletion and other factors.
He added that so far, he has aimed to make Activit the world’s number-one multivitamin supplement, a feat he wants to achieve for the country.
He says that having the ingredients imported from the places that the world’s top brand does has been a focus and the secret behind the success of Activit which he formulated and put in rigorous efforts for more than six years and having 25 medical professionals and doctors onboard the company called Doctors Prescribed.
He claims that the supplement is at par with the world’s best multivitamin brand Throne, and it has been a long road for him to get to a point where he can engage the country’s best athletes to use it and endorse it.
But mostly, it is a supplement that is sold at a far cheaper price because he is not making any money from it so far.
“I work in a hospital and I see people die every day, so it gives me a perspective that we need to serve people and have empathy. In my practice, I recommend supplements to my patients but those supplements are expensive, like 70-80 dollars or so.
“Everyone needs these nutrients to live a healthy life but everyone can’t afford it. I made Activit which was the vision of a world where everyone has access to high-quality, science-based nutrition.
“For me, this is not making any money, legacy.”
He names popular nutraceutical competitors like Centrum that have superfluous ingredients that are not beneficial for the human body.
Similarly, he shed light on the darker aspects of the trade like fake tablets prepared locally in Pakistan sold at hefty prices, scamming people.
Rizwan added that his product is sold solely online and in the hospitals.
The young CEO believes that while he is serving the athletes and the people of the country through various projects with Activt Welfare Foundation, his true motivation comes from the example of his father Prof. Dr. Aftab Ahmed, who is a pioneer of orthopedic surgery in Pakistan, founder of National Hospital DHA Lahore and the first Orthopedic Wing at Services Hospital.
“I think I take great inspiration from my father who was left at the mercy of his relatives, his aunts and uncles when he was in eighth grade. He was alone but he understood that he understood that he had to study, he did his matriculation and then went to college and then to England and became one of the best surgeons in his field,” said Rizwan paying tribute to his father who he pointed out also served Muammar Muhammad Gaddafi at the behest of England’s queen.
When one looks up Prof Dr Aftab’s credentials, one finds that he served as the Chief Orthopedic Surgeon under the Ministry of Health in the 1970s. But Rizwan feels that he is doing everything he can to make sure that the government and the people can see his father’s efforts and hopefully one day recognise them with a civil award.
“Everyone in my family has achieved and has been recognised, like Faiz Ahmed Faiz and others, but I feel my father is overlooked at times, and I feel we can change that. Hopefully, I can highlight that too, but that is where my motivation comes from, all rooted in tradition, culture, and patriotism that must serve people,” concluded Rizwan who is on a mission to put Pakistan on the map of the nutraceutical world.
