Sure.
Certainly, when the Office of Nutrition Policy and Promotion—and this actually predates me—was reviewing the old food guide, the 1992 food guide, they really looked at the scientific basis of that and compared it with the new dietary reference intakes that were referred to earlier. This is the work that we do in partnership with the U.S. government through the Institute of Medicine, where we get the requirements for a wide range of different nutrients.
We looked at the best science available there. There had been 14 years of concerted effort by both of our countries to bring those up to date, so we had those, which were new. We looked at the latest evidence that connects the food supply with different chronic diseases and the effects on your health in general. Using that information, there was a very extensive modelling process, where for every age-sex category that's in the food guide, they would produce 500 different model diets, and then look at the distribution of nutrients in there. So it was an iterative process until you really got the best type of pattern of eating, where you ensured that you had the right amount of nutrients, but not too many nutrients as well. So you're really controlling there for things like sodium as well.
That was the process that was entered into, and then it went out for consultation. It went across Canada. I think there were 7,000 people who provided input to that. We had a lot of academics. I was at CIHR at the time and we had quite a lot of input from CIHR, with a lot of different academics at CIHR looking at what had been put forward, and assessing the science behind it. NGOs were assessing it, and the provinces and the territories. So it was really open to very wide consultation, which was incorporated; and in the end, we got the pattern that we recognize now as the Canadian food guide.