Thank you, Madam Chair.
The Centre for Science in the Public Interest is a non-profit consumer health advocacy organization specializing in nutrition issues, with offices in Ottawa and Washington, D.C. We don’t accept funding from government or industry. The 100,000 Canadian subscribers to our advertisement-free Nutrition Action Healthletter, which you have all received, funds our health policy reform advocacy. On average, we have one subscribing household within a one-block radius of every Canadian street corner, and that's rural and urban.
The World Health Organization estimates that nutrition-related disease and, to a much lesser extent, physical inactivity in countries like Canada are responsible for one-quarter of all premature deaths, or approximately 57,000 deaths annually in Canada.
Provincial governments pay the lion’s share of health costs for nutrition-related illness. For example, by 2030, health care costs alone are projected to rise from 46% to 80% of the entire Ontario government budget, if policy changes are not implemented.
The national and international character of the food supply, Health Canada’s nutrition science expertise, and the federal government’s constitutional authority make it better situated to use its regulatory and spending levers to help curb nutrition-related diseases. However, the federal government still postpones nutrition-improving regulations as if Canada has tens of thousands of lives to spare every year and as if governments preside over full treasuries and double-digit economic growth.
Recently, the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon invited Prime Minister Harper, President Barack Obama, and other world leaders to a high-level summit on the prevention and control of non-communicable chronic diseases on September 19 to 20, 2011, in New York City to draft a global approach to curbing NCDs that may include policy commitments, disease reduction targets, and accountability reporting mechanisms.
We recommend the following specific federal government policy reforms.
One, commit to fully implement Canada’s strategy for sodium reduction, which is now six months old, to ensure that salt is used judiciously by manufacturers, not gratuitously, and, at an absolute minimum, that consumers get better objective information to facilitate healthy choices.
Two, promulgate regulations restricting the use of trans-fat-laden partially hydrogenated oils to permanently prevent at least 1,800 heart attack deaths annually in Canada. Provincial regulations were promulgated to rid such oils from Ontario’s and Manitoba’s school food services in 2008 and British Columbia's restaurants in 2009.
In 2009, federal government scientists also concluded that trans fatty acid levels in Canadian foods are nowhere near as low as those of foods sold in Denmark, where a regulatory ban is in place. A scientific update commissioned by the World Health Organization and published in 2009 concluded that:
The evidence on the effects of TFA and disease outcomes strongly supports the need to remove PHVO from the human food supply.
Three, mandate disclosure of calorie counts and notices about the amounts of sodium for menu items at outlets of large chain restaurants to close a nutrition labelling exemption affecting $60 billion worth of food annually in Canada, which is one-fifth of all food consumed.
While Health Canada continues to discuss menu labelling, as you heard two days ago, governments in New York City, California, and elsewhere have required calorie labelling on menus, at least, and soon regulations made possible by the Obama health care bill will require menu labelling in chain restaurants throughout the U.S.
Fourth, strengthen food labelling regulations, including mandatory front-of-pack nutrition labelling. In practice, nutrition facts tables are very useful to interested and educated shoppers, but might be more aptly named “back of pack complicated nutrition facts”. A grocery shopper trying to home in on the lowest-sodium soups or lowest-sugar breakfast cereals from any source would have to physically pick up, turn around, and keep tabs on dozens of packages for each product being considered for purchase. Likewise, finding the pasta with the most tomatoes or berry juice with the most berries remains a guessing game, no matter where one looks on the labels.