Why revamping Canada’s Food Guide is so crucial

This editorial originally appeared in The Hill Times (November 7, 2018).

It is difficult for most Canadians to eat healthy. The places where we live, work, and play surround us with the types of food that make for unbalanced, highly pro­cessed diets. Further aggravating Canadians’ efforts to eat well, the governmental approach to ad­dress this challenge has been to focus largely on educating peo­ple to eat better, while blaming them for making poor choices. This approach, based on individ­ual choice, has universally failed.

By contrast, and because of the extensive personal and societal burden associated with unhealthy eating, other coun­tries are implementing policies to ensure healthy food is readily available and affordable to their populations, while simultane­ously taking steps to reduce the consumption of unhealthy fare. Such policies are strongly encouraged by national health and scientific organizations in Canada and globally. Not sur­prisingly, the recommended poli­cies are similar to the successful approaches used to tackle other major public health concerns such as tobacco and alcohol.

But despite urgent calls for stronger food policies, Cana­da has failed to address this problem effectively. Fortunately, Health Canada is in the midst of developing a new national food strategy that will force a major rethink of its approach to unhealthy eating. The centrepiece is a new Canada’s Food Guide, which is expected to be released before year’s end and provide an up-to-date evidence-based perspective on the type of food Canadians should consume.

The broader strategy also proposes policies that would enable healthier eating, in­cluding through a ban on trans fats, restrictions on marketing unhealthy foods to children, and requiring front-of-pack­age warning labels for sodium, simple sugars, and saturated fat content on processed food.

Targets and timelines are also being developed to guide restau­rants to reduce sodium in their foods. But there have already been setbacks, such as with the ban on trans fat being pushed back years.

Heart attacks, strokes, cancer, hypertension, diabetes, and high cholesterol, are all associated with unhealthy diets. The result­ing human cost is tragic, with as many as six million Canadians suffering with hypertension and up to 80 per cent of those cases being directly or indirectly (through obesity) caused by bad diets.

A significant problem lies in that most of us think we eat a healthy diet. However, when ob­jectively assessed, few Canadi­ans eat well. Our diets are large­ly based on processed food and are a complex mix of excesses in calories, sodium, simple sugars, trans and saturated fats, and deficiencies in nuts, seeds, le­gumes, whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. The Canadian public thinks they eat well, while be­lieving that everyone has access, and the means with which, to eat in a healthy manner.

In fact, unhealthy eating has become so normalized that Cana­dians’ views of what they eat and what is healthy are now dangerous­ly distorted. The result is that risks associated with unhealthy eating were estimated to cause more than 50,000 deaths in 2016, leading all other preventable health risks, and accounted for more than 800,000 years of disability.

Addressing Canadians’ mis­conceptions of what constitutes a healthy diet was one of the driving reasons behind a public conference held by the Univer­sity of Calgary earlier this year. It examined the public health risks associated with bad diets, as well as the policies being proposed to enable healthy eating in Canada. The result was the Calgary Statement, which calls on government to adopt science-based policies to enable healthy eating, and for Canadians to stand behind those policies.

The statement calls for nu­tritious foods and beverages to be accessible and affordable to all Canadians, especially the so­cioeconomically disadvantaged or those who live in remote communities. The statement also calls for eliminating unhealthy food and beverage marketing to children, and for kids to have access to nutritious meals and snacks where they learn and play.

It calls for front-of-package warning labels for processed foods and beverages, including those obtained in restaurants, and for public funds to not be spent on un­healthy fare. Finally, the statement recommends that health and socie­tal costs associated with unhealthy diets be recovered through the taxation of unhealthy foods, and for food industry influence on gov­ernment policy to be minimized.

In the end, the Calgary Statement is an opportunity for Canadians to change the food policy landscape for the better.

The evidence supporting the new Canada’s Food Guide, and upon which the Calgary Statement stands, is solid and proven, but implementing systems- and soci­etally-based measures to ensure healthy eating requires political will and the backing of Canadians.

The reality is that Canadi­ans are beleaguered by chronic disease due to bad diets. As such, they must ensure that the Canada’s Food Guide is effective in keeping Canadians healthy. To have a healthier, more produc­tive society freer of heart attack, stroke, cancer, diabetes, hyper­tension, and high cholesterol, individual Canadians must get involved.

Dr. Norm Campbell is a general internist, professor, and member of the O’Brien Institute for Public Health and Libin Car­diovascular Institute of Alberta at the University of Calgary. He is currently an executive mem­ber of the World Hypertension League, and the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Panel on Nutrition. Pablo Rich­ard Fernandez is the commu­nications lead for the O’Brien Institute for Public Health at the University of Calgary.