Health committee  Certainly I can answer that question. There are different kinds of data, first of all. There is the kind of data you would collect through surveillance processes, which is primarily under the province of Statistics Canada and the Public Health Agency in Health Canada. CIHR funds small surveillance-type projects, but not necessarily the larger surveillance projects, although we work with our partners.

Health committee  We certainly know that watching television supports, if you will, junk food consumption. It does it in two ways. One is through its sedentary nature; there's a habitual behaviour. But also, advertising does stimulate one to, I guess, move away from the TV and go into the kitchen.

Health committee  I refuse to answer that question.

Health committee  One comment is that we haven't actually waited that long. The CIHR Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes, under a different government, actually started its primary focus on obesity and healthy body weights back in 2002. One of the things that are critical here is that, as you suggest, we have to close the evidence gap.

Health committee  I guess data's my business. Yes, absolutely, and I think the members have articulated very clearly the data gap or the knowledge gap. Sometimes we have knowledge about what the problem is, but we don't actually have knowledge about what works and what the solutions are. In reference to the previous comments about front-of-pack labelling, we have very little information about what kind of front-of-pack labelling would actually stimulate consumers to make the healthy choice.

Health committee  Those studies were both funded for a year, so by the middle of next year we should have the beginning knowledge of the impacts of the initial advertising campaigns or social marketing campaigns, for ParticipACTION and for several other programs that are what we would call natural experiments.