Evidence of meeting #27 for Health in the 39th Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was infrastructure.
A recording is available from Parliament.
Regional Manager, Northern Health
Ah, Canada's food guide. I was a registered dietician-nutritionist for a long time, and I'm still an RD. I call myself a radical dietician, though.
There is a lot of literature about the relationship between dieticians and the food industry. It's not just dieticians, though. We're all bought and sold by the food industry. The food guide has been developed with a lot of lobbying and pressure from the food industry. You can look and see that in fact a lot of those recommendations are questionable if you look at the longer, larger body of research on the different areas. Dairy in particular is one around which there's a lot of controversy.
So, yes, we've developed a new tool and we're telling Canadians to be using this tool in order to make healthy food choices. I guess we need to start somewhere: here are the different food groups that you can be choosing from.
In B.C., we actually have B.C.'s food guide. The B.C. food guide will tell you which foods grow in your area, which foods you should select in season, where you can get foods that are less processed and packaged. We've taken Canada's food guide as a beginning and we've developed our own that fits with what we're wanting for our food system.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rob Merrifield
Thank you very much.
I want to thank the witnesses for coming forward. All of your presentations were very interesting, and the questions equally so.
I want to draw this part of the meeting to a conclusion. Thank you again on behalf of the committee. We look forward to some of the presentations that you've committed to give to the committee as we get into our final draft.
With that, I want to make just a couple of remarks to the committee with regard to the subcommittee's agenda. We presented it at the last meeting. I would like to do that at the next meeting, when we have a little more time and all of our normal committee members are here instead of the substitutes.
Conservative
The Chair Conservative Rob Merrifield
Is not normal? Yes, I know. I've called her worse than that before. It's all right.
The other thing is that we have a summary document and draft instructions that we have passed out for the drafting of the report. I would like to remind the committee members that this will be confidential information. Please read it and we will discuss it at the next meeting and give some direction with regard to the drafting of the report on obesity.
With that, I want to thank everybody. Have a great week off, and don't work too hard. Have a great Remembrance Day. We'll see you next time.
The meeting is adjourned.
