Thank you, Madam Chair.
I am pleased to be here today with my colleagues. Both the Food Directorate and the Office of Nutrition Policy and Promotion are situated within the Health Products and Food Branch of Health Canada, and we work closely to support and promote the nutritional health and well-being of Canadians.
The office of nutrition policy and promotion is the focal point and the authoritative source for nutrition and healthy eating policy and promotion in Canada. We support the nutritional health and well-being of Canadians by collectively defining, promoting, and implementing evidence-based nutrition policies.
We know that healthy eating is a crucial contributor to overall health at every stage of development, and is equally important in reducing the risk of many chronic diseases. Food choices are complex decisions, influenced by the relation between individual and collective factors, including social and physical environments.
A population health approach, which we use as the base of everything we do, uses evidence to assess health, identify priorities, and develop strategies to improve health. For example, Canada's Food Guide was developed using the best evidence to translate the science of nutrition and health into a healthy eating pattern for Canadians. Health Canada currently distributes approximately 3.5 million printed food guides in both English and French each year. I think more than 20 million in total have been distributed since we released it in 2007.
In 2010, the food guide home page was the second-most-viewed page on the Health Canada website. It's the most popular document downloaded from the website. I think it's second only to the tax forms, I guess, in terms of what gets downloaded by Canadians. So I guess you could say we're probably the most popular, if you think of it that way.