There's a lot of evidence to demonstrate that poor dietary practices that start in childhood persist into adulthood. One of the things we've noticed in recent years is early-onset diabetes. It used to be called adult-onset diabetes, but it happens so early now that they had to rename it. We've heard reports of physicians detecting plaque build-up in children's arteries even at a young age. This committee has reported before on the problems with childhood obesity, and of course that's a prelude to problems with adult obesity. It's not an isolated problem any more. Almost two-thirds of Canadians are overweight or obese, and 90% of Canadians will at some point in their life have high blood pressure. Fruit and vegetable intake is very low. These are problems that are affecting everybody. It's not just a kind of isolated community that we can provide special programs to. We have to think of broad measures to make our society healthier and to compress the period of illness at the end of life. This could be very expensive for medicare.
On February 2nd, 2012. See this statement in context.