Evidence of meeting #14 for Health in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was children.
A recording is available from Parliament.
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
Steven Fletcher Conservative Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia, MB
Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
I found all the presentations excellent. I found particularly interesting Dr. Taylor's comments about people's estimation of themselves. You may be interested to know, Dr. Taylor, if I wasn't always sitting down, that I'd be 10 feet tall.
4:25 p.m.
Voices
Oh, oh!
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
Steven Fletcher Conservative Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia, MB
This is obviously a very important issue, and this is why we're studying it. I think it would be helpful for us as a committee, as we enter this study, to frame it a little bit more concisely around the areas of financial cost and life expectancy. Those are two quantitative things. There is also the qualitative measurement, or however you would like to describe it, of quality of life for children who are obese versus children who are not obese as they go through life.
So who would like to answer that?
4:25 p.m.
Acting Director General, Centre For Chronic Disease Prevention and Control, Public Health Agency of Canada
I could begin.
In the material we provided there's a recent study showing an annual cost of about $4 billion, but I think that's an underestimate. Part of what we're worried about--and where I work our lens is a chronic disease lens--is the kind of disease that obesity is going to lead to, such as diabetes, heart disease, high blood pressure, arthritis, etc. So it's difficult to capture that actual real cost because it needs to be measured over a lifetime of exposure. So from a cost-benefit perspective, I think more work needs to be done. Someone suggested that it is very cost effective to prevent disease before it comes on.
In terms of reduced life expectancy, as you've alluded to, people with diabetes don't live as long. I'm not sure what the case is from an obesity perspective. I don't think the reduced life expectancy applies to people with obesity generally; it's the diseases they get from it that put them at higher risk of that.
4:25 p.m.
Scientific Director, Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes
What I would add to that--and I didn't come with the exact numbers about life expectancy--is that we believe the generation of children being born now and over the recent past are not expected to live as long as their parents. It's the first generation that will come to that.
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
Steven Fletcher Conservative Charleswood—St. James—Assiniboia, MB
What about quality of life of children who are obese versus that of children who are not obese?
4:25 p.m.
Scientific Director, Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes
There's little doubt that there is a lower quality of life. I brought you the statistic last time that illustrated the point with studies that compared the quality of life for children who are obese with that for children who have cancer and who are undergoing chemotherapy. They were about the same.
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
4:25 p.m.
Conservative
September 21st, 2006 / 4:25 p.m.
Liberal
Omar Alghabra Liberal Mississauga—Erindale, ON
Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you all for coming here today. The committee has accepted this very important task, and your testimony here today and your evidence are going to be very important in shaping the outcome.
My first question is to Dr. Taylor. If you don't mind, since I only have five minutes, I'd like a concise answer because I have a question to follow that is for everybody.
As I mentioned, I want to clarify one of your statements because it might have an impact on the outcome of the study. You alluded to the fact that ethnic and racial groups have a prevalence towards obesity. I'm just curious, is this for cultural or genetic reasons, or is it because of some socio-economic conditions leading some of these ethnic groups to be disproportionately represented?
4:25 p.m.
Acting Director General, Centre For Chronic Disease Prevention and Control, Public Health Agency of Canada
I think it's a combination of all those factors. The aboriginal groups are the ones we talked about specifically, but there is a combination of genetic predisposition, ethnocultural types of food they eat, and socio-economic status. There are multiple factors. Is that concise enough?
4:30 p.m.
Liberal
Omar Alghabra Liberal Mississauga—Erindale, ON
It's very concise. I was also hoping we could have some evidence about the socio-economic conditions that have an impact.
4:30 p.m.
Acting Director General, Centre For Chronic Disease Prevention and Control, Public Health Agency of Canada
There is evidence. The CCHS, the Canadian community health survey, had very good evidence because they looked at socio-economic status at the same time. Interestingly enough, men in higher income levels actually have higher rates of obesity, which is quite surprising. Women in the middle-income area tend to have the highest rates of obesity. But if you look overall, folks with less than a high school education have higher rates of obesity than folks with more than high school education.
4:30 p.m.
Liberal
Omar Alghabra Liberal Mississauga—Erindale, ON
Thank you.
This is a question for all of you. In order to help us come up with recommendations, I would like each of you to give me three recommendations you would like us to come up with if you were sitting in our seats, because you've shared with us a lot of the work you have been doing--and a lot of it is excellent work--but we want to know what we have to do to move forward.
4:30 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rob Merrifield
I can see they're all really eager to answer that. We'll just take one at a time.
4:30 p.m.
Scientific Director, Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes
I guess I'll give you the recommendation that I got when I asked the world's authority on pediatric and child obesity, who also works for the U.S. federal government, that exact question: what's the role of a federal government in dealing with this problem?
His response was that the role is to seed the work that needs to go on in local, provincial environments. That's really where the work has to happen, because populations vary by where they live and what their circumstances are. So we need to seed that, but we also need to ensure that as we do that seeding of that activity, we do it in a way such that we learn from it and then we disseminate appropriately that information. That was his recommendation for the role of a federal government, and I think it's completely appropriate.
We don't know enough to blanketly say, “Here are the actions we should take.” So let's take the ones that are the most promising and learn from those actions so that we can do it even better as we continue to go forward.
4:30 p.m.
Director General, Health Products and Food Branch, Food Directorate, Department of Health
From the perspective of the food directorate, we set standards, policies, and regulations concerning food safety and nutritional quality. We certainly would like to continue monitoring the effectiveness of nutrition labelling regulations. It's a fairly new regulation, not fully implemented, and I think we would like to understand the real impact it's having on helping Canadians make better choices, or are they actually changing their eating patterns in relation to this information? Certainly we'd be interested in understanding evidence to support the development of any other policies or regulations that can support action on childhood obesity.
4:30 p.m.
Director General, Health Products and Food Branch, Office of Nutrition Policy and Promotion, Department of Health
I guess what I would want more than anything else is a recognition that this is a very complex issue. It doesn't ascribe to simple solutions. It needs to be comprehensive in the way you come back. I think there needs to be a very clear indication that this is serious, that this is about resources, this is about resource reallocation within a health system delivery, this is about making sure you have capacity to do what we all talk about, that you have resources to implement things that we've already created in terms of strategies, and that there is a real need to move forward.
I'm always struck that it's very true, when I build on what Diane Finegood said, that you really want to make sure that whatever you do the role of a government is to seed and then make sure we learn from that. We've learned a great deal. I think we could learn a lot from some of the examples that are out there now, such as has happened in Nova Scotia--comprehensive school intervention, robust research. Out of that comes reallocation of resources. There are wonderful examples of things going on, but as a country we need to take it seriously and start the resource reallocation process.
4:30 p.m.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rob Merrifield
Thank you very much.
I have to apologize to Penny Priddy for missing her in the order.
Ms. Priddy, you have the floor.
4:35 p.m.
NDP
Penny Priddy NDP Surrey North, BC
Thank you, and thank you to the witnesses for your presentations.
Janet, I'm interested in the fact that you say you want to do follow-up around the labelling. That was part of what one of my questions was about--and I'll do this quickly.
We can label as much as we like, but I'm interested in whether you have any sense as yet of the percentage of the population, and I realize you'd be just guessing, who do not at this stage have enough education--and by the way, it could be any of us in the room, so it's not necessarily about education level--about what those nutrients mean, or secondly, the percentage of people who are not literate and for whom labelling will make no difference, and whether you've thought about how we'd get at that one. That would be the first question I would ask--and we'll just get through as many of these questions as we can.
My next question is, what would we do for better data? I think, Kathy, you, or somebody, said we didn't have as much data as we would like. What do we need to do to get better data?
Lastly, because what we're looking at is federal responsibility, are there any direct resources on reserve for people in regard to diet counselling, diet assistance, etc.?
As many of these questions as we get through, we get through.
4:35 p.m.
Director General, Health Products and Food Branch, Food Directorate, Department of Health
Maybe I'll start on the question around nutrition labelling—what impact it is having, whether people have the ability to understand the label. It's a fairly new regulation, and when we developed it we did a significant amount of focus testing with real Canadians to develop a label that was as easy to read and understand as it could be.
Based on our analysis to date, we know that 60% to 80% of Canadians are reading the nutrition facts panel. That's fairly significant this early in the process of having the new regulation. But as time goes on, we certainly will want to go back to Canadians to learn more about the impact these labels are having. Are they reading them? Are they helpful? Do they understand what they mean? Are some of the educational toolkits we're putting into place reaching Canadians? We have an educator's toolkit, but Mary's team has also developed an interactive website to help Canadians learn how to read a label. These are all activities we can do as time unfolds.