Thank you, Madam Chair.
As you know, Food and Consumer Products of Canada is the trade association that represents the food manufacturing industry in Canada. We welcome this opportunity to speak to the Standing Committee on Health regarding the industry's efforts to reduce trans fat in the Canadian food supply.
We're pleased with the results to date and believe that industry continues to demonstrate support and commitment to providing healthy products to Canadians.
I want to begin by reiterating that despite recent media reports to the contrary, food manufacturers in Canada have indeed made significant progress in reducing or eliminating trans fats in prepackaged products. FCPC and our members have been active participants in the reduction of trans fats for a number of years. When the multi-stakeholder trans fat task force began in 2004, FCPC was at the table to help develop recommendations and strategies to effectively eliminate or reduce processed trans fats in Canadian foods to the lowest levels possible.
The ultimate goal of the reduction strategy was to meet the World Health Organization recommendation to have no more than 1% of total energy made up of trans fats. Since those recommendations were accepted and implemented by the government in 2007, the processed food industry has successfully reduced or eliminated trans fat toward the task force's goal in approximately 80% of the prepackaged products monitored by Health Canada. This estimate, to connect to earlier remarks, is based on a review of the last set of monitoring data collected from the marketplace in 2008 and early 2009.
Industry's progress made has been publicly praised by Health Minister Aglukkaq, who said, “Our government is pleased to see that industry has reduced the level of trans fat in many prepackaged foods. This was achieved by finding healthier alternatives without increasing the levels of saturated fat”.
We continue to seek and develop healthier alternatives to trans fats for the remaining products. However, for some products, as already indicated by Mr. Hetherington, reducing trans fats will require a longer-term effort, given the challenges that are well documented in the task force report "TRANSforming the Food Supply".
Despite significant investment by industry, government, and academics, challenges still exist to find the appropriate substitute ingredients for some products and to ensure that reformulated and new products meet consumers' expectations for taste, texture, and quality.
Because of this progress, we continue to support a voluntary approach to trans fat reduction. We believe that Health Canada's trans fat audits demonstrate that food manufacturers have made significant progress since 2007 and have met the task force targets in a wide variety of product categories.
Moving forward, we propose an accurate assessment of Canadians' intake of trans fats against the World Health Organization's recommendation of less than 1% of total caloric intake. This should be done before we consider an expensive legislative process. Ultimately the 1% level is the critical success indicator for the trans fat task force.
We recommend that Health Canada utilize the Canadian Community Health Survey data for dietary patterns and access current trans fat label data from the marketplace to assess the current trans fat intake of Canadians. As I mentioned earlier, the assessments of products in the marketplace are reflective of the marketplace in 2008, and we need to update.