Health Committee on May 28th, 2018

[Dr. Melanie Henderson]

Thank you for the question.

It is a difficult issue, because sometimes a glass of orange juice is the only portion of fruit or vegetables that a child consumes in a day. People are always a bit reluctant to cut out that portion.

Personally, I consider that the problem with juice is its high sugar content. I think we would do better to encourage young people to eat an orange and drink a glass of water rather than hydrating with juice. In addition, according to my own personal clinical experience, my patients who drink juice can drink a litre a day.

In 2004, in Quebec, we assessed the quantity of soft drinks, which are also sweet drinks, consumed by children. We calculated that 9% of children of 4 years of age or less drank soft drinks at least three times a day. That is why we certainly have some awareness-raising work to do with young mothers and fathers to prevent the consumption of soft drinks as well as juice.

[Ramez Ayoub, Liberal, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

I have a full seven minutes. I thought I had only four minutes.

We were talking earlier about the cost of fruit in northern Canada. We would like to replace juice with fruit. What would be the solution, in your opinion, to allow access to better quality food? Should there be a government subsidy? How do you see that?

Transportation is important, as you mentioned earlier. Fresh foodstuffs, fruit and vegetables sent North cost much more than in other parts of the country. What is the solution? How will we finally manage to provide better choices to the population that lives in northern Canada?

[Roslynn Baird]

I think part of the solution is connecting young people with their elders and the teachings of how to harvest and eat from your geography, and eat food from nature. We've come very far from that. I think a lot of young people have lost the taste for wild game, fish, and traditional foods. Getting back to some of those traditional teachings would definitely be a very good place to start, like connecting youth with elders; doing those land-based teachings and programs that were mentioned previously; and learning rites of passage as to what are young people's responsibilities in the community to bring harvested food to elders and to provide healthy food for each other. A lot of those traditional teachings have been lost.

Some other solutions can be to have programming available around gardening, gathering of foods, and greenhouses. There are other ideas around that as well.

[Ramez Ayoub, Liberal, Thérèse-De Blainville, QC]

I appreciate your suggestion, but I think it is only in the medium or even the long term that we will be able to change all of these lifestyle habits.

In the short term, what can we do to change the content of young people's plates? Children are our first concern, but we are also concerned about adults, obviously. In the short term, how can we establish an action plan that will change things?

I suppose that becoming a farmer or changing the way production is done and providing vegetables and fresh fruit themselves would be quite a challenge in that part of the country.

[Dr. Agnes Coutinho]

One of the key things to address this will be to reach out to various communities. There is no one answer to your question, unfortunately. I think communities tend to know exactly what they need, and I bet if we were to connect with a community right now they would give us five points of what would make their lives easier to enable them to feed themselves, their families, and the youth in the right way. Sometimes access to resources is the biggest issue, but the type of research that's lacking varies from one community to another. Whether this is more of something for a provincial government to look into, or whether it's a national issue to address, it is something that will require a very specific look into what the communities need.

[The Vice-Chair, Conservative, Marilyn Gladu]

Thank you so much. We're at the end of our time. I want to thank our witnesses for your input on our study today.

We're going to suspend now and go into committee business. I would ask for everyone's co-operation. We have to clear the room of everyone who is not part of the committee, in order to do that. So let's go ahead and do that now.

[Proceedings continue in camera]