Health Committee on Sept. 21st, 2006

[Janet Beauvais]

It's all considered food. I think it's just a changing pattern of what's available in the food supply and our familiarity with what those products may have in terms of calories, fat, nutrients, or lack of nutrients. That's where nutrition labelling may help Canadians, as Mary said, to better acquaint themselves with the nutritional value of these foods and better compare.

[Tina Keeper, Liberal, Churchill, MB]

Gregory mentioned there's a correlation between the increase in chronic disease as well. We're seeing a pattern that goes across the board.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Madam Gagnon.

[Christiane Gagnon, Bloc, Québec, QC]

It is true that we are constantly being encouraged to consume food which, in many cases, contains many calories but no nutritional value.

I have been asking myself a few questions. When we are on holiday we are less stressed. Earlier we were talking about physical environment, but the psychological environment in which we are working is also important. Children also experience stressful situations, for example, when they go home and are alone in the house.

Is this something you have considered in your studies on obesity?

[Dr. Gregory Taylor]

Stress and mental health I guess is what you're alluding to, and how it relates to that clearly is an indicator that's related.

Did you want to speak from a scientific perspective, Diane?

[Dr. Diane T. Finegood]

Certainly there are correlations between stress and obesity, and the stress hormones contribute to the problem. I think underlying that, again, is this issue around access and exposure and advertising and things like that. We have to keep in mind that our least nutritious foods, our most energy-dense foods, are the ones that are most available. It's that relationship between cost and energy density, cost and nutrition, that is the underlying driving force of why the exposure is so great and why the access to that kind of food is much greater than the access to healthy food.

A recent effort has been to not just rate the energy density of food, but to rate the nutritional quality of food by coming up with a simple index that actually gives the consumer an idea about how nutritious and how energy-dense the food is. It goes back to Ms. Keeper's comments about what's food. Well, healthy food has both nutrient content and low-energy density. We have to get people to understand that, but even understanding it won't solve the problem of access and exposure to advertising.

[Mary Bush]

I would make one more comment.

As we're evolving the food guide, we're trying to put together a pattern of eating that has a conservative level of energy for each age and sex group. In order to eat and stay within that energy level, you're eating very basic foods. We're urging people to make sure they're making choices with little or no added fat, sugar, energy. We have to drive the message at every food group level or we end up having a pattern that delivers more energy than is appropriate for Canadians.

It's a huge challenge. Looking around at the food environment, and a couple of examples have been used, whether you call them real foods or not, they're foods that are just ubiquitous right now. It's not a case of people thinking of food as, oh, I'm going to go and get carrots, lettuce, and start into my preparation. It's pick a package. Not that you can't pick a package. One of the largest fast foods is bagged salads--yay! There are some good examples out there, but there are also real efforts that need to be made. The food supply that we're all accessing because of the way we conduct our lives has changed profoundly.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

To follow up on that, when will the updated food guide be done?

[Mary Bush]

Late this year or early next. I say it that way because it will come out in 2006 or probably January 2007.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

We'll finish our questioning with Mr. Batters. I think he has a short announcement after a very short questioning.

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

Perfect.

How long for questioning, Mr. Chair--a couple of minutes?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Yes.

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

I'm sitting here realizing my own ignorance in terms of food, nutrition, and density. I think this is something this committee has to address. I'm happy to hear there's going to be a new guide, and I hope it's the simplest document known to man because that's what we need. We need something that is one or two pages, really user friendly.

I have no doubt that for Canadians who want to proactively seek out good eating habits by asking their physician or doing research, the information is there and easily attainable. It's the fact that no one bothers to take the time to do this. How can we make sure it's ingrained in people? It starts with educating our kids, and we're here talking about childhood obesity.

I'd like to know from each of you your opinions. Do you believe this is taught pretty much uniformly in schools? If not, that's something we definitely need to look at. Do we have material that is easy to use and user friendly for our kids as well? Heck, some of this stuff is complicated enough for adults, let alone teaching our children.

That's my question to each of you. Is this taught in our school system--how to eat healthily, what the major food groups are, and examples of healthy meals? I just don't believe the education is there.

[Dr. Gregory Taylor]

Sorry, I'm not an educator and I can't give you the details, but that's the purpose of setting up the Joint Consortium for School Health, with education and health at the same table.

[Mary Bush]

Just at the time that there was a national plan of action called Nutrition for Health: An Agenda for Action in which key things were identified to try to improve the nutritional health of Canadians, one of which was to teach food preparation skills--kids today don't even know how to cook--what did we do across the country? What was termed “home economics” is no more. There isn't that in the educational system right now. It's absolutely gone. Do we even teach appropriately how to eat? It's all melded in different ways across the country. There has been a lot of effort put in, in different provinces, to try to have curriculum that goes to health. It's a very significant issue you touch on.

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

I have no doubt there are all kinds of materials, a wealth of materials, developed by the federal government. It's a matter of getting them into people's hands. If you don't proactively go down to your local Service Canada office and pick up the pamphlet, then no one sees this good material.

I'd suggest as well that the GP's office, the family doctor, would be an ideal place to mass distribute this stuff. Put this information into the hands of parents early in the going, the first time a parent comes in. Maybe this is covered in parenting classes or something. We have to get this into the schools. Maybe we could have a massive public education campaign, with continual advertising with examples of meals. I think there's so much ignorance out there. I'm speaking from experience.

[Dr. Diane T. Finegood]

I'm not sure the evidence supports that people are as ignorant as you're articulating. I certainly agree that public education is important, but we know the evidence tells us that public education alone is insufficient.

I'll just give you one anecdote. I'm just back from the International Congress on Obesity in Sydney and a very interesting study was presented in which they looked at school-aged children. They asked them in this case about advertising and whether they thought advertising was actually information, and they tried to understand whether kids thought advertising was real. Of the kids, 100% understood that this advertising was propaganda and that it was not real information, but 75% of those kids still asked their parents to buy the items that were being pushed on them as junk food.

While attitudes and awareness are important, the environment that those individuals live in is also critical.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

All of these good questions, and good answers, by the way, have promoted more questions.

Madam Demers, you have a short one. Then we have Omar with a very short one, and then we'll do a quick announcement.

[Nicole Demers, Bloc, Laval, QC]

I don't think it is acceptable to put our heads in the sand simply to spare people's feelings, for example, by speaking about healthy living—a term you used earlier—rather than obesity. I myself am obese. I am not plump, as some would have me believe. When people tell me that I am simply plump, then I forget the problems I have because of obesity.

I think we have to stop acting in this manner. Education, information, and awareness-raising are very important. We have to acknowledge these problems for what they are. Otherwise, we end up avoiding them and avoiding calling them by their name, because we are afraid of hurting people's feelings. Once we start telling the truth we may start getting results.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Thank you for the comment. That's very well taken.

Omar.

[Omar Alghabra, Liberal, Mississauga—Erindale, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Just as a comment, I'm one of those people who are really benefiting from the labelling that started a couple of years ago.

One of the things that I think my colleague Mr. Batters has also brought up is the fact that some of the food information that's available is quite complicated.

May I propose something like where you have an awareness campaign, where you have some illustrations, 10 dots per day, and each pre-packaged food, whether it's prepared at a restaurant or sold at a store, has a number of squares on it associated with the number of calories or the fat content? If everybody is aware that they should only have 10 squares a day, it becomes easier to keep track of that calorie content.

I hope the committee might consider something like that. Thank you.

[Dr. Diane T. Finegood]

There is evidence to support programs such as what's called the “red light, green light diet”, where there are red light and green light labels.

If you label food in relatively simple ways, where people can understand what's a healthy food that you can probably eat almost as much as you want of, what's an okay food to eat occasionally, and what's a food that you should only select on rare occasions, that really does help consumers make choices. So that kind of work has been done.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

Thank you very much.

I'm nervous about this, but nonetheless, Mr. Batters has asked to make a quick announcement. Let's let him do that, and then we'll call the meeting.

Go ahead, David.

[Dave Batters, Conservative, Palliser, SK]

There's nothing at all to be nervous about, Mr. Chair. Just give me five seconds for what I have to say.

I do not use the labeling. I find it immensely complicated. I have no idea of what's going on there. So I hope the powers that be develop a nice, simple labeling scheme for people like me.

I would like to respectfully make a suggestion to this committee. We are already scheduled to meet on Tuesday, October 31. That day, the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation will have a bunch of kids in Ottawa. I guess we'd call it their lobby day. They call it Kids for a Cure.

I've been told that a number of kids from a number of our ridings--46 kids from across the country--will be here. This is an issue that we identified in the spring as being an important one. I would suggest that, being as we have the 46 kids here, we dedicate that meeting to the issues surrounding juvenile diabetes research.

I don't know how many other members have been visited by kids in their riding, but they tell a very compelling story about what it's like to live with juvenile diabetes, and it could be very enlightening for this committee.

The reason I propose this is because this happens only once a year, and it happens to coincide with one of our meetings. By my count, it may be at the end of the eight meetings. We may not even have an interruption. I think we would have just completed the study on childhood obesity.

I don't know if I have to make a motion or just put that on the table.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rob Merrifield]

In fairness, why don't we just leave it and discuss it at the next meeting? We have it as information for now. Is that fair enough? Okay.

I want to thank the witnesses for coming in. I thank the committee for their excellent questioning, because I think it was a very good dialogue today. We have a tremendous task ahead of us as a committee and as a country.

If you remember, just a few short years ago it was seat belts. They used to go underneath the seat instead of around our lap and over our shoulders. Now, a six-year-old getting into a car with his or her father will say, “Daddy, buckle up.” So we've come a long way on that, and we have to do the same on this one.

I appreciate you coming in and vaulting us into a very exciting opportunity ahead for us, and the country, hopefully. Thank you.

The meeting is adjourned.