Health committee  In the totality of evidence that's out there, I would respectfully disagree with that. Certainly, when we are looking at our dietary reference intakes, this is something where we work in partnership with our American colleagues and the National Academy of Medicine. We are not looking at that particular one right now, but those are the criteria.

Health committee  It's actually the other way around. We work very closely to prioritize the ones where it seems like there is more evidence moving in a particular direction. Then we work with our American colleagues to get studies done and come up with the new dietary reference intakes, which we then incorporate into our guidance.

Health committee  No. Obviously, as I mentioned earlier, you can go out there and find the answer you are looking for, not just about nutrition but about any part of research.

Health committee  Yes. We don't want you to knock yourselves out completely, of course, which sometimes happens.

Health committee  Yes. When I think of the input we got when we did the whole evaluation of the use and what people are understanding about it, what we got certainly for your Canadian is that when you are concentrating on so many servings of this particular size, it just becomes confusing. That's where we're trying to figure out how we can go beyond that and have actionable guidance that can be brought into your everyday life, so that when you are out shopping, you have the basic principles that make you choose those foods that are better for you; when you are at home, you know how to do the preparation; and when you are out in restaurants, you have the concepts.

Health committee  Yes. We have established what we call an evidence review cycle, and we are committed to redoing this every five years.

Health committee  We've already committed to that for the evidence review as well. I hate to say we're going to do a food guide every five years because it depends on the evidence.

Health committee  This one is pretty simple for me. It's a simple “no”. That is not an aspect that we will be bringing into the food guide. The reason for that is fairly simple. When one looks at the available evidence—and the connection with health is not there—it's not something where we have a strong evidence base for us to be able to bring it into our dietary guidance.

Health committee  Welcome to my not quite nightmare but the dilemma we are always in as well. How do you keep something simple but make it so it also reflects the great variety of differences and the diversity we have in Canada? Obviously, that's something we are looking at. With respect to the basic requirements for different sorts of nutrients, from all of our evidence reviews, I think that as a human species, we're fairly close with respect to the basic environments and I think there's enough latitude that there can be adaptations for different groups, from a straight macronutrient and micronutrient perspective.

Health committee  Tax forms might take a bigger hit. Mind you, I don't know who downloads tax forms anymore either. I'm not sure.

Health committee  I can say that we are basically joined at the hip on this. With the whole healthy eating strategy, which of course is a combination of regulatory approaches, standards approaches, guidance approaches, we have a team that used to meet three times a week—I think we're down to twice a week—to follow this progress as we go along.

Health committee  As part of the healthy eating strategy, one of those has to do with the development of front-of-pack labels. Once again what we're doing there is focusing on these three nutrients of public health concern, one of them being sugars. The idea is that on the front of all packaged foods, if they have high amounts, if they're high in any of those things, you would have a label that would point that out.

Health committee  Yes. I think with the latter, we can certainly do a better job at that. When the last food guide was done, based on the census and who were the most recent people who had arrived, there were two sorts of things that we did. We did translations, of course, but straight translations based on the top 10 recent immigrants over the last 30 years.

Health committee  With respect to milk products, I want to point out that in our consultation we recommend milk foods. When we're talking about proteins, we are encouraging people to have more eggs, fish, shellfish, poultry, lean meats, lower-fat yogourt, cheeses that are lower in fat and sodium, and lower-fat milk as well.

Health committee  I sometimes think the response we got in the media took away from the words we actually had in the consultation, but it has become obvious to us that there was a problem of interpretation. We are taking the advice we've heard, and we've heard it from other places as well. We're looking at that.