Thank you very much, Madam Chair and members of the committee.
I am pleased to attend this session, and I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you today about the sources of sodium in our food supply. I'm a professor at the University of Toronto and the chair of the department of nutritional sciences there. I'm also the vice-chair of the sodium working group.
In preparation for my remarks today I've provided you with two figures that I thought might be useful to help you understand where sodium is in the foods we eat. This data is from the Canadian community health survey, and it's very valuable to help us understand where the sodium is in our food supply. It's also the first national survey of nutrition that has been done in Canada in the last 30 years.
I would like to draw your attention to the first data I've presented to you on the pie chart and explain what was done here. I believe it was handed out to members. This is data from the community health survey where the food sources of sodium have been divided into the various groups. You can see that sandwiches have been split into the components of bread, meat, and cheese. All of those have been divided into the various food components.
When we do that we see that the major source of sodium in the diets of Canadians is bread products. This is followed by processed meats, vegetable juice, vegetable products, soups, and then pasta dishes. Even foods such as cheese and milk products contain significant amounts of sodium. You can see that in the bottom of the circle. This is followed by a number of meat and poultry dishes. In the case of these mixed dishes, the sodium usually comes not from the meat itself but from many of the other ingredients, such as sauces and batters, that are added to these mixed dishes.
It is also worth noting some of the other food categories on the left-hand side. Things like breakfast cereals, potatoes, fish, rice dishes, and eggs are not normally products that Canadians would consider salty, but in actual fact they provide more sodium in our diets than things like potato chips and salty snacks, which the consumer might think of as being the salty sources of foods in the food supply.
In summary, there are two important features about this data that I have presented to you. One is it reflects the total amount of sodium that people consume. Things like bread may only be moderate in their level of sodium, but Canadians consume substantial amounts. On the whole, they eat relatively large quantities of a product like bread and they consume it virtually every day. Secondly, there's no one food group or few food groups that provide most of the sodium. Reducing sodium will mean changes have to occur in virtually every food group and food product in the marketplace if we are to achieve meaningful reductions in our sodium intake.
The second figure gives you a snapshot of some of the ranges of sodium that we see in these foods that I've spoken to you about. They're not meant to single out any one particular brand because these are fairly typical of the types and levels you'd see in a food category, although, as Mr. Jeffery has pointed out, there is still tremendous variability within each of these groups.
So you can find high-sodium cereals or low-sodium ones, or vice versa, in the salty snacks. If you look at this table you can see that the breads have only about 300 milligrams of sodium, which is a moderate amount. Some of the soups, pogos, and hot dogs will have about double that amount, about 500 or 600 milligrams. That's approaching one-third to one-half of the sodium that's recommended for a whole day.
Then you can get into some of these mixed dishes. The product in the corner provides almost the total recommended amount that you would consume in a day.
A consumer might think the mixed sandwich is a healthy product because it has whole wheat and less than six grams of fat. But that product contains almost the upper level for sodium for a whole day. You might have a couple slices of bread with that or a dessert, or some other food as part of your meal.
So the take-home message here is that sodium is found throughout our food supply and consumers do not necessarily see these as salty foods.
With these remarks, I would like to thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you today about the sources of sodium in our food supply.
Thank you very much.