Thank you, Madam Chair.
The Centre for Science in the Public Interest is a non-profit consumer health advocacy group specializing in nutrition and food safety issues, with offices in Washington, D.C., and Ottawa.
We don't accept funding from industry or government. We are fortunate to be very well funded by our 100,000 subscribers to the Canadian edition of Nutrition Action Healthletter, which does not carry advertisements. We have, on average, one subscribing household within a one-block radius of every Canadian street corner.
Every year, nutrition-related diseases cost the Canadian economy—mostly provincial treasuries—at least $5 billion, and some estimates are as high as $30 billion. Applying World Health Organization estimates, they caused 48,000 deaths in Canada due to cancers, diabetes, heart disease, and stroke related to nutrition.
Dozens of expert reports have called for regulatory changes to enhance the nutritional quality of the food supply, and thereby improve health, protect medicare, and improve economic productivity. Last September a special session of the United Nations General Assembly, which included 33 heads of state, adopted the political declaration of the high-level meeting of the General Assembly on the prevention and control of non-communicable diseases.
That commitment resulted in a unanimous agreement to—and I'm going to simplify the United Nations text a little bit—reduce the impact of tobacco use, unhealthy diet, physical inactivity, and harmful use of alcohol through the implementation of relevant international agreements and strategies, and educational, legislative, regulatory, and fiscal measures.
To support a comprehensive review and report to the General Assembly in 2014, the Secretary General of the United Nations and the Director General of the World Health Organization will develop, by December 2012, a global monitoring system for relevant, non-communicable disease indicators and time-limited targets; develop options for strengthening action through effective partnerships, which the World Health Organization has interpreted as including safeguards against commercial conflicts of interest; and finally, submit to the General Assembly, by May 2014, a report assessing national progress in implementing the global strategy and action plan.
We recommend the following specific federal government policy reforms, and I would underscore that these are the same reforms, for the most part, that we recommended when we were before the committee last February.
One, strengthen food-labelling regulations, including mandatory front-of-package nutrition labelling. In practice, nutrition facts labels on prepackaged foods are very useful to interested and educated shoppers, but might be more aptly named “back-of-pack, complicated nutrition facts”. Harried shoppers should be able to quickly scan the front of the package on a shelf to pick a nutritious choice, and repeat that process for dozens of weekly choices without stretching a simple shopping trip into a tedious, time-consuming research project.
Two, extend the Quebec ban on advertising to children—the vast majority of which promotes sedentary play and non-nutritious foods—to the other 75% of children in Canada, and help Quebec stem the flow of non-compliant advertisements leaking across the borders through the Internet, U.S. cable networks, and other media. Since 1980, the Government of Quebec has been a world leader in protecting children from the unfairness and adverse health effects of commercial marketing that targets children under the age of 13. That law was challenged in the 1980s, and in upholding the law the Supreme Court of Canada said that advertising to children is “per se manipulative. Such advertising aims to promote products by convincing those who will always believe.” Unfortunately, only token safeguards are applied to protect children outside of Quebec against advertising.
Three, shift the GST and HST from foods that promote good health—like fruits, vegetables, and whole grains—to foods that increase the risk of disease. It is indefensible to tax foods that help prevent disease, but the Excise Tax Act often does just that. Federal and provincial levels of government each collect about $3 billion from GST and provincial sales tax, or their portion of the HST, when applied to food.
To be fair, the act taxes soft drinks, candy, and snack food at the rate of about 13% in most provinces but discourages healthy eating by taxing low-fat milk, whole grains, and vegetable dishes when consumed in restaurants, as well as club soda, salads, and vegetable and fruit trays when sold in retail stores. Meanwhile, many unhealthy foods sold in retail stores are tax-free, such as sugary breakfast cereals, transfat-laden shortening, high-saturated-fat cheese, chicken wings, fatty burgers, even salty caviar. You get the idea. That makes no sense. Taxes should be focused on unhealthy foods and eliminated for healthy foods.
The average Canadian now spends about $95 per year on GST for food purchases. In 2010-11, the GST low-income credit reimbursed $631 to the average single individual earning $20,000. These rebates could easily be increased by a few dollars to offset further regressive effects, if any, of nutrition-promoting food tax reform and increased even further to help reduce poverty.
Four, the federal government should join most provincial and some municipal governments in subsidizing school meals for Canadian schoolchildren K to 12, provided those foods meet strong nutritional standards. As a major study from Harvard University and our chief public health officer acknowledged, subsidized school meals may also improve school attendance, completion, and equalize opportunities for life success among children from families with unequal financial means.
Last month the U.S. Department of Agriculture finalized binding national nutrition standards for food that are much stricter than the old ones. They are used to qualify for more than $14 billion in federal government subsidies for school food, or approximately $1.30 per student per school day. On a per-student basis that commitment is more than 30 times the four cents per student that the Canadian government spent on school meals. To my knowledge, the federal government still spends nothing or virtually nothing; it's mostly provincial governments. In Canada, only Ontario has binding school nutrition regulations.
Five, mandate the disclosure of calorie counts and notices about the amounts of sodium for menu items in outlets of large restaurant chains, where Canadians spend $60 billion annually, which is one-fifth of all food consumed. Nutrition information for restaurant menus has been exempt from the nine-year-old regulations mandating numbers for calories and 13 nutrients on packaged foods sold in grocery and convenience stores but not at restaurants, where Canadians spend so much of their food dollar.
While Health Canada continues to discuss menu labelling, governments in New York City, California, and elsewhere have required calorie labelling on menus, and soon regulations will extend that requirement nationally in the United States.
Dozens of Canadian groups and expert reports have called for mandating calories and sodium on restaurant menus. Studies indicate that fewer than 1% of consumers go out of their way to obtain onsite nutrition information prior to ordering. By contrast, one carefully conducted New York City study found that calorie labelling on menus helped reduce calorie totals by 14% per non-beverage food transaction. That's when the numbers were actually on the menu board.
So Canadians finding that a Tim Hortons sausage, egg, and cheese breakfast sandwich has nearly double the calories, 530, of the English muffin with egg and cheese, with 270 calories, or a McDonald's mighty Caesar entree salad with warm crispy chicken has nearly five times as much sodium, 1,320 milligrams, as the spicy Thai salad, 260 milligrams, might choose differently or eat elsewhere if they find that all the nutrition numbers look grim.
