Thank you very much. I'm very pleased to be here and to be able to present to you some of the work we have done at our centre over the years.
The first point I want to call to your attention is something that I tell my students every year in a nutrition and society course. We are really very successful in the human race. All of us have the taste receptors, the chemical receptors, that drive us for sugar, salt, and fat, and we get too much of it. We have to figure out how to adapt and manage our environment to keep ourselves healthy.
The second point is that food security and the human right to adequate food are now part of our international definitions through the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, and the Human Rights Commission. We recognize that food for everyone needs to be available, acceptable, and accessible, as well as sustainable.
Indigenous peoples have probably a disproportionate amount of ill health related to obesity and especially to diabetes. My specialty is looking at traditional food systems of indigenous peoples and trying to understand the evolution of food systems from some hunting and gathering traditions and other food system traditions in the world.
Our indigenous peoples in Canada consume a wide variety of market foods, as well as traditional foods from their culture. The market foods, of course, they buy from the store. Each of the cultures that we have in Canada has a wide spectrum of species of traditional food. There are up to 200 different species that they know about: highly nutritious meats, fish, and wild plants. Within the plants, we mean especially berries. The major grains are wild rice and maize. We have the research to show that children are eating less of this high-quality traditional food than their parents do. Our research at the centre has actually been primarily with adults. The maximum daily average of energy consumption from traditional foods by community children is somewhere around 10%. So only about 10% of their calorie budget is coming from their traditional food. In contrast to this, 40% of their calorie budget is coming from sugar and fat and highly refined grains, what everyone refers to as junk food.
The factors that influence how indigenous peoples purchase their food and make decisions about what to feed their families are just like those for everyone else. They think about cost, and they think about how healthy things are, how much traditional food they have available, what market food is there, their children's preferences, and so forth. There is also some concern about contaminants in indigenous people's food systems at this point in time, but it's a minor issue for people who depend on land-based food systems for their traditional food.
So the patterns of daily energy intake vary. There are rural-to-urban differences. For example, there is less junk food being consumed in urban diets of indigenous peoples. This seems counter-intuitive, given that only a maximum of 10% of their food energy is coming from traditional food. They can have more traditional food in rural areas, but the junk food is less pressing in the urban diets because in the rural areas, especially in the remote communities, the amount and extent of poor-quality food is just overwhelming. There are also the north-south differences, with more people in the south using less and less of their traditional food. The most traditional food we have consumed is in the Arctic.
We have the research to show that there is better daily dietary nutrient adequacy when at least one daily serving of traditional food is contained in the diet. When people consume that, they are consuming less sucrose and fat. This is from a Journal of Nutrition paper that's been highly quoted.
We also know that more education and income result in better diets; and also, more breastfeeding and less junk food result in less childhood obesity.
So by way of solutions, we need to have more understanding of food patterns of indigenous peoples and how to improve them in our communities throughout the country. And this takes some intervention research and dissemination of findings. The research capacity of the CIHR can look into this. But we know that food security is important to indigenous peoples to prevent obesity as well as diabetes. So the general feeling of the researchers in this field is that people should be consuming more of their traditional food. It's the best food they have at this time. We should ensure breastfeeding, and improve the quality of market food that is available, accessible, and acceptable in communities. And this may take education on how to prepare some of these foods. It's quite an issue there.
It's important to reduce sugars and replace refined white carbohydrate with whole grains, reduce fats and trans fats--we've made some real advances there--and increase the omega fats that are found in fish as well as oils, and have more fruits and vegetables. It's an important point that when indigenous peoples were consuming all of the animal--all of the organs, and the brains, and the eyes, and all of those things that they have of the animal--they had all of the nutrients that we now are consuming from fruits and vegetables. And now since they're getting away from that, we have to encourage them to eat fruits and vegetables with which they are not totally familiar.
So community education is the way to go, from pregnancy through early childhood to schools and parents. We can use traditional food knowledge as a platform upon which to build education on contemporary food. And I think it's important to reduce the marketing strategies and access to junk food and beverages for children in these communities. Shelf exposure, TV commercials, and availability of junk foods in schools and public places all play a role. We know that there are--it's published now--20,000 to 40,000 TV commercials for food available to children in our Canadian environment.
Thank you.