The answer to the first question is yes, I actually did meet with Health Canada on two occasions. The first occasion was informal at a think tank on obesity in Toronto, and my views were dismissed completely out of hand.
The only other time I was given the opportunity to speak directly with Health Canada was after my views were published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, at which time the meeting was conducted. It also became fairly apparent that while my views were being heard, there was a bit of reluctance to accept another person's views on the calories and the models.
In terms of food guides, a very well-researched food guide was created by Walter Willett, chair of the department of nutrition at the Harvard School of Public Health. Walt Willett produced something called the healthy eating pyramid. He did it the right way; he used evidence-based medicine. He took 40 years of dietary research and summarized it into a pyramid form that is very easy to understand, with non-ambiguous messages.
Then he went further and proved in a study he published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that people following his food guide were more likely to be free of chronic disease than people following the American food pyramid, which for all intents and purposes is comparable enough to Canada's Food Guide that we can talk about it. His food pyramid used the Physicians' Health Study and the Nurses' Health Study—very robust data sets and unequivocal results.
Indeed, the American Heart Association released new dietary guidelines this year as a healthy eating pyramid. The guidelines explicitly talk about calories and provide resources on their websites, including charts to help people determine how many calories their age, sex, etc., would require for daily weight maintenance.