Canada’s Food Guide due for overhaul
It is one of our most venerable documents, the most requested government publication after tax forms. But when Dr. David Hammond’s team asked more than 1,000 Canadians recently how much they knew about Canada’s Food Guide there were a lot of blank stares.
Fewer than half could name all four food groups. Less than one per cent knew how many servings they should have from each one.
“That’s pretty much less than chance at that point,” says Hammond, a professor in the school of public health at the University of Waterloo.
Seventy-three years after Canada’s first “Official Food Rules” debuted in wartime ads, the government’s food bible is facing a crisis of confidence.
Observers say the guide is outdated and unnecessarily complicated and has done nothing to address rising rates of “super-obesity” or the risks of diets that increasingly consist of ultra-processed, readyto-heat-and-eat, bar coded foods.
This week, Health Canada hinted it may be time for an overhaul. The agency is reviewing the evidence behind its dietary advice to Canadians, it said in a statement, and “depending on the conclusions” may update guidelines for various foods. The announcement follows reports fruit juice may be struck from the “fruits and vegetables” category.
Part of the problem is confusion about what exactly the food guide is for.
While health practitioners are decrying the massive jump in obesity among Canadians — one in four, or about 6.3 million adults, were obese in 2011-12 — federal health officials say the food guide is neither a diet or weight-loss regime.
Instead, it’s a tool designed to help people meet their nutritional needs and reduce their risks for obesity, Type-2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer and osteoporosis. Prevention, yes — treatment for a country desperate to slim down, no.
War was the motivation for the original food guide, which was released in 1942. As Ian Mosby, a postdoctoral fellow at the L.R. Wilson Institute for Canadian History at McMaster University, explains, the goal was to build “strong healthy soldiers, strong healthy industrial workers and strong healthy mothers,” despite rationing and food scarcity.
“These are the health protective foods,” the rules declared. “Be sure you eat them every day in at least these amounts.”
Today, over-consumption is the far-bigger worry. Yet today’s food guide still contains “relics” of the past, Mosby says.
For example, it recommends adults consume two to three servings of “milk and alternatives” daily. However, in an article published two years ago in the journal, JAMA Pediatrics, Dr. Walter Willett, a Harvard University nutrition expert, and Dr. David Ludwig, of Boston’s Children’s Hospital, argued humans “have no nutritional requirement for animal milk” whatsoever.
“There is zero evidence to suggest the public would benefit from having a unique contribution from dairy in their lives,” adds Ottawa obesity specialist Dr. Yoni Freedhoff.
The guide also is too soft on foods high in fat and sodium, he and others say. For example, it says consumption of processed meat should be minimized, but need not be avoided altogether, says Freedhoff.
“Trans fat, according to the head of Health Canada’s task force, is a toxin that’s unsafe in any amount and yet our food guide only says we should limit it,” he adds.
The modelling the guide uses to determine calories and energy is outdated, too, he says. Although many foods have become more calorie-dense, and even natural produce like apples are simply bigger, serving sizes have remained virtually unchanged since 1977.
Consumers might remember from grade school, for instance, they should have two servings of meat or alternatives a day, says Kate Comeau of Dietitians of Canada. But some “take this to mean ‘eat meat twice a day.’ ” Under the Food Guide, a serving of meat is a mere 75 grams, or 2.5 oz., cooked. “Having a 10-oz. steak would count as four servings of meat,” she says.
For those who check how many ounces, milligrams, tablespoons and cups a serving might be, the guide becomes unnecessarily cumbersome and confusing.
“It looks like a wonderful rainbow of colours, our food guide,” says Hammond. “But you’re going to lose people about 10 seconds into it.”
Others say the food guide’s entire classification system needs to be overhauled to reflect how food is produced and eaten today.
The four food groups in the guide — vegetables and fruit, grain products, milk and meat — are based on the origin of food, plant versus animal. But within those categories are also items like deli “meat” and breakfast cereals that are highly processed, which directly affects their nutritional quality and how satisfied they make us when we eat a regular serving.
In the past, those foods might have been rare alternatives to meals made from raw materials. But today, Canadians are among the world’s top consumers of massproduced, ultra-processed food.
“It dominates the diet,” says Dr. Jean-Claude Moubarac, a researcher in public health nutrition at the University of Montreal.
But the food guide does not specifically urge consumers to avoid these foods and industry messaging only encourages our cravings.
“It’s like the Pringles slogan, ‘Once you pop you can’t stop,’ ” says Moubarac. “This challenge that if you start eating you won’t be able to control yourself.”
Critics say part of the problem is that although 7,000 stakeholders were consulted on the last guide, unveiled in 2007, many came from industry.
There is another way: Last year, Brazil released a food guide that does away with rainbows and measuring cups, and focuses instead on how processed foods are.
The guide groups food into four categories: naturally or minimally processed foods; oils, fats, salt and sugar used for cooking and seasoning; and processed and ultra-processed food.
The beauty, says Moubarac, who was a member of the University of Sao Paulo team that developed the guide, is its simplicity. Instead of focusing on specific nutrients, it emphasizes “food synergy,” how food is prepared and combined.
Brazilians are also clearly urged to avoid salty, fatty, packaged snacks, soft drinks, sugary breakfast cereals, instant noodles and other ultra-processed foods.
The guide also warns them to be wary of food marketing and advertising. And it encourages them to eat regularly and, whenever possible, with other people, to increase “the enjoyment of food” and not to eat while working, standing, driving, talking on the cellphone, watching television or amid other unhealthy distractions.
Like most conventional food guides, Canada’s Food Guide mostly ignores the context of eating, Moubarac says. “The most important thing in nutrition is not just what you eat, but how and where and with whom you eat.”
A recent study by Hammond and his colleagues at the University of Waterloo found only half of students in Grades 9 to 12 said they ate with family members daily, while 68 per cent of grade-schoolers ate in front of the TV at least once a week. Adults are eating in their cars in drive-thru lines, Moubarac says.
Lost is the experience and sheer pleasure of eating. “When you eat together, when you share food, you might eat less, you might eat more slowly, which is good for your digestion,” he says.
The Brazilian guide also encourages people to eat meals made from scratch. This is not only healthier, but processed, branded foods don’t carry any sense of symbolism, or culture. “It’s important that someone has cooked the food — that it’s handmade, and not factory made,” Moubarac says.
Pushing more home-cooking isn’t an easy sell, because the burden often falls on women. Moubarac says when he met nutritionists from Health Canada to discuss his work on the Brazilian guide, the reaction was strong.
“They told me, ‘Look, women are not going to go back behind the oven,’ ” he recalls.
“I’m not saying that. We’re trying to promote the whole family to be involved in preparing food and cooking.”
Hammond and others agree the Food Guide needs to “hammer home” fundamental messages in an environment where the worst choice is often the easiest one, and where a billion-dollar food industry has done a masterful job in designing foods that are optimally seductive.
“I think it’s tough for us to say, slow down, don’t make your life so busy, try and set more time aside for eating,” Hammond says. “Those things are tricky and we’re going to have a hard time reversing those social patterns.”
“But I certainly think that we can give people some discreet, actionable messages,” he adds, pointing to the new rules from Brazil: Eat fresh, minimize pre-packaged foods and make it yourself if you can.