Thank you.
I'm Pat Vanderkooy, and I'm here with Dietitians of Canada. We're the national professional association for our regulated health profession. We provide leadership in shaping food and nutrition policy.
We too congratulate the government on leading in the development of a food policy for Canada. We're very excited about that. To ensure the mandate and vision for a food policy, we offer today five recommendations. I'll probably spend the majority of my time on the first two.
Our first recommendation is that a food policy for Canada must include nutrition and health as key policy drivers to ensure a sustainable food system that promotes healthy diets.
Change is needed in our food consumption patterns to reduce the burden of diet-related disease. We need full policy integration with a common vision for population health and sustainability of the food system in its social, environmental, and economic aspects. High-calorie intakes and over-consumption of food and beverages that are high in sodium, sugars, saturated fat, and trans fat contribute to these diseases. These diseases have further complications that impact physical and mental health, decrease capacity for work, and increase premature death, so they have impacted our economy very directly.
We need more change in our food supply, specifically in the composition of the value-added portion of our food supply. Evidence from the past five decades shows how consumer eating habits have changed, with serious consequences to health and substantial costs to the health system and the environment. These are external costs. The food system players that we often mention in agriculture and agri-food are not paying directly for these costs. Consumers need healthy food environments where healthy choices are the default, where I can buy a can of tomatoes without salt as the default price instead of having to pay extra for the privilege of the salt withheld, so to speak.
What are these costs of diet-related diseases? In Canada we estimate that the five main diet-related diseases in Canada cost $26 billion annually in direct and indirect health expenses alone. PHAC has estimated that the total expenses, when they talk about the cost to the workforce and premature death, are around $68 billion. We're paying for that. All of us are paying for that. We're paying for it in money and we're paying for it in the costs to our society, really. As you know, once you get involved with the health care system, it's time-consuming. It's a lot of anguish. Our health system is overburdened. We're having to make more and more difficult choices.
The revenue that we put toward our publicly funded health care is in contrast to the revenue we get from food manufacturing firms, which provide an injection of $21 billion into the Canadian economy on an annual basis. I'm getting these cost estimates from the nutrition labelling cost analysis that was put forward when the nutrition facts table was updated. Compare $26 billion, or a total cost of $68 billion, with the $21 billion that is injected from the food industry. That's not really a sustainable business case.
I'm not suggesting that we could get rid of all diet-related disease, or that it's all due to what we have done within our agri-food industry. I am saying that there's an urgent need here to re-examine the priorities within our food system and to change the composition of our food supply—what we emphasize in growing, what we emphasize in producing, and how we produce it—to make the healthy choices the default choices. Today's agri-food industry must keep on reformulating, wherever and whenever possible.
I need to emphasize that this is work that is already being done and that needs to keep on being done. That's why we support Health Canada's mandated healthy eating strategy. It's a mandate just like the food policy is a mandate.
We're working toward healthier food products. That includes a shift to eliminating trans fat, monitoring sodium, initiating extra labelling in the form of front-of-pack labelling, and restricting child-directed marketing. Within “A Food Policy for Canada”, the new dietary guidance, with evidence-based guiding principles and environmental considerations, must inform the policy direction.
Our second recommendation is that a food policy for Canada must address the urgent challenges and unique food systems in northern and remote communities, and especially food insecurity amongst indigenous peoples.
Household food insecurity affects one in eight. I think one in eight is also what we say about the impact from food safety concerns. In fact, when you look at the prevalence in the population, one in four is the impact from just one diet-related disease—diabetes and prediabetes. When thinking about that one in eight being affected by some degree of household food insecurity, where we talk about food affordability, that first pillar, it's about the sufficiency of income.