We appreciate the opportunity to be here. Thank you very much.
The mission of the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada is to reduce death and disability from heart disease and stroke.
I will mention that June is our 50th anniversary.
There have been many advances in heart disease and stroke control and alleviation in the last half century. We like to think we've played a role in that; we've invested about $1.2 billion over the last 50 years in research and health education.
A new priority area for us is obesity reduction. Obviously we're coming at it because it's a risk factor for heart disease and stroke. We're very pleased that we've been able to partner with Diane's institute more recently on obesity research, the institute we affectionately call the “Institute of No More Donuts”. We've been working with Diane and her team on capacity-building, identifying research gaps in obesity, and in trying to fill them with some strategic research opportunities.
Again, we want to thank you for inviting us to speak on this critical issue. We addressed it about two weeks ago in a recent release of our document, Tipping the scales of progress: Heart Disease and Stroke in Canada 2006, talking about the progress of heart disease and stroke in Canada.
We've distributed in our slide presentation as well a number of data and statistics. I won't go through a lot of them. I may repeat a couple of the messages, though, because I think they bear repeating.
In slide 2 you can see that the burden of CVD is huge. There is good news and bad news. The good news is that mortality and hospitalization rates have been dropping for many years, but the bad news is that there are still almost 74,000 deaths annually from heart disease and stroke, and they are still the leading causes of death in Canada. I was struck by Peter Katzmarzyk's comment that while hospitalizations for CVD are coming down, obesity-related hospitalizations are going up.
There is more bad news. As you've heard, the burden is more prevalent among older age groups—and we're aging, so the burden will get worse, not better.
In slide 4 we've shown you the risk factors for heart disease and stroke. Clearly, poor diet and physical inactivity—two separate risk factors—combine in contributing to obesity as a risk factor.
I will mention, as Francy did, that unhealthy diet for us also constitutes the extremely important issue of trans fat reduction. Trans fats are in and of themselves a big risk factor for heart disease, and, as we all know, Canadians are among the highest consumers of trans fats in the world. So it's not an obesity issue. It's probably seen as an obesity issue because many of the foods that are high in trans fat are junk foods and contribute to the obesity problem.
There is more bad news still: obesity has increased over the past 25 years, if you've heard, across all age groups. So while I said we've made impressive gains in cardiovascular disease, obesity could cause us to start going backwards. Is 60 the new 70? As figure 7 shows, the trend applies to children—and I won't go through some of the incredibly impressive StatsCan data on that. Obviously we've heard obesity worsens with age among children. As Francy indicated, they are then at increased risk of remaining overweight and obese, and that's important to reinforce as adults. So these kids who are now showing signs of obesity are on the fast track to developing heart disease and stroke problems in later life.
We've included in your presentation some projections on obesity rates for men and women by income level. I won't speak to them.
We also know it's very bad news for our health that almost half of Canadians over 12 report being inactive. I was personally quite shocked by that figure. An aging population adds to the problem, since activity decreases with age.
As we also heard from Stats Canada, children who report higher levels of screen time are more likely to be overweight or obese than those who report less screen time. Some studies now have shown that this increase is not solely a result of time displaced from physical activity, but that advertising of food and beverage products during children's TV programming has had a significant impact.
Finally, we want to emphasize that there's still a lack of adequate surveillance data and other data in Canada about Canadian dietary intake and trends, about physical inactivity, and how these variables affect obesity over the course of a person's lifetime.
Stephen Samis will now provide our thoughts on how we believe, based on the evidence, the obesity epidemic in children and adults should be tackled. We're speaking only to the federal government's role. Although clearly it's not just a federal government problem, the federal government has a huge role in this area.