moved that Bill C-398, an act to amend the Food and Drugs Act (food labelling), be read the second time and referred to a committee.
Madam Speaker, more than ever Canadians are interested in protecting their health by improving their diet. The Government of Canada has begun and should continue to encourage their efforts to do so.
Indeed, earlier this year the Minister of Health took a big step in this direction by ensuring that manufacturers provide full nutrition information on most foods sold in retail stores. In doing so, Canada joined the United States, Australia, Brazil, New Zealand and more recently a half dozen other developed and developing countries in obliging manufacturers to disclose the amounts of key nutrients on labels of prepackaged foods.
These regulations, which came into force in January of this year, were announced in the fall of 2000. I have been working on nutritional labelling since 1989 and I was pleased that the proposed regulations closely mirrored the bill I then had before the House. That bill had the broad support of Canadians as well as parliamentarians of all parties.
Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada economists estimate that the health benefits in terms of health care cost savings and productivity gains resulting from the dietary changes triggered by mandatory nutrition labelling will be 20 times the costs of modifying food labels.
It is indeed a rare occasion when we as MPs are called upon to support policies that promise that impressive amount of economic payoff. My bill simply extends the principle of mandatory nutrition labelling to more types of food so as to capture more of those economic and health benefits.
A lot of Canadians are following this debate. Support for the measures proposed in Bill C-398 extend beyond the reaches of the parliamentary precinct.
Despite the short notice for this debate, I have been receiving a steady stream of letters of support from health and citizens groups since last Friday. The list is long. I will name a few to give the House a sense of the breadth of community support. The list includes the National Pensioners' and Senior Citizens' Federation; the Community Nutritionists Council of British Columbia; the Ontario Society of Nutrition Professionals in Public Health; the Canadian Women's Health Network; Vive, l'Union des consommateurs; the Toronto Food Policy Council; the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology; the HEAL Network of Northern British Columbia; the National Eating Disorder Information Centre; the National Retired Workers' Advisory Council; and the Centre for Science in the Public Interest, which is a non-partisan consumer health organization financially supported by over 100,000 subscribers to its Nutrition Action Healthletter.
Ensuring that consumers have ready access to useful information about the nutritional composition of food is critical to help reduce the human and economic toll of diet related disease estimated to cost $6.3 billion in health care spending and lost productivity and cause as many as 25,000 deaths annually in Canada due to cardiovascular disease, cancer and diabetes. If unchecked, these costs will likely increase substantially in the coming years as a result of rising pharmaceutical drug costs, the aging baby boom population and rising rates of obesity.
The World Health Organization has also recognized that diet plays a key role in disease prevention. In its October 2002 World Health Report , the WHO estimated that healthy life expectancy can be increased by as much as 6.5 years in countries like Canada by avoiding the top 25 preventable health risks. However, the report found that in countries like Canada, virtually all preventable deaths examined are attributable to four diet related factors: blood cholesterol, blood pressure, being overweight and low fruit and vegetable intake, as well as physical inactivity and smoking.
A growing body of evidence indicates that health promotion efforts can reduce medical costs and productivity losses, with studies demonstrating as much as $4 to $5 in savings for every $1 invested in health promotion. A recent report of the Auditor General noted, “Preventive health activities are estimated to be 6 to 45 times more effective than dealing with health problems after the fact”.
As I said, the federal government announced these very good mandatory nutrition labelling rules on January 1, 2003. The new nutrition labelling rules are predicted to lower the direct and indirect economic losses due to diet related disease by at least $5 billion over the next two decades by reducing premature deaths and disabilities due to coronary heart disease, stroke, cancer and diabetes.
This represents an estimated twentyfold return to the economy as a whole compared to the private sector expenditures incurred to modify food labels. These predicted cost savings, although an impressive first start, constitute only 4% to 7% of the total costs of diet related disease. My bill is an effort to capture more of those economic and health benefits.
For instance, the new regulations exempted fresh meat, poultry and seafood, except ground meat, and all foods sold in restaurants. Bill C-398 is in part an attempt to close these two important loopholes.
Nutrition information is particularly important as a decision making tool for selecting meat, poultry and seafood because of variation in the nutritional composition of these types of foods, which cannot be accurately estimated by consumers using visual inspection.
For instance, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a three ounce serving of trimmed, broiled top round beefsteak has only one gram of saturated fat, while a three ounce serving of trimmed, broiled shoulder blade pork steak has four grams of saturated fat. That is a fourfold difference in saturated fat content between two cuts of meat that are the same size. It is very unlikely that consumers looking at the two would know that one has four times as much saturated fat.
Some meat industry lobbyists successfully urged the government to exempt fresh meat from nutrition labelling because, they said, they did not have reliable, representative nutrition profiles of the numerous cuts of meat. However, one organization, the Beef Information Centre, which is a division of the Canadian Cattlemen's Association, supplies detailed nutrition composition information for 106 cuts of beef on its website. Others provide similar information, which appears to refute the information-poor claims of the industry.
Some of these groups are apparently working with federal government officials to calculate these figures. The bill gives those technical discussions a focus. Bill C-398 would ensure that manufacturers will have to share that information with consumers so they can in turn use it to select types of meat with amounts of saturated fat, vitamins and minerals that are acceptable to them.
Bill C-398 offers a workable adaptation of the nutrition labelling rules to be applied to chain restaurants. In the bill, restaurants with more than $10 million in annual sales, and for all intents and purposes that means chain restaurants, would be obliged to report the amount of calories on menu boards. Restaurants with table service would be obliged to report the amounts of calories, sodium, and saturated plus trans fats on menus, where there is more space.
We are no strangers to the havoc that restaurant and fast food meals can have on our health. Our hectic schedules are more like our constituents' lives, especially those with young children, than we know. Sadly, heart disease has cut short or slowed down the work of a number of our colleagues in the House. Likewise, poor diet prematurely kills thousands of Canadians every year as a result of diet related cancer, cardiovascular disease and diabetes.
Canadians spend 30% of their food budgets on restaurant and cafeteria meals, yet it is virtually impossible to find nutrition information at restaurants. To make healthful food choices, Canadians ought to be able to see relevant health information about menu options at the point of sale. Caloric content, for instance, is at least as important as price in making product choices and it is at least as difficult as price to estimate, yet only price is displayed on menu boards.
We certainly would not expect consumers to check the company websites to find the price of foods, or to ask a waiter to recite the sodium and saturated fat content of all the menu choices until we found one that met our nutrition objectives. This minimum amount of information could very easily and for very little expense be provided on menus or menu boards for the standardized menu choices we see at chain restaurants. If this type of information were available, I am confident our diets would change for the better as a result.
Bill C-398 also requires packaged foods to disclose the percentage by weight of key ingredients, especially fruits, vegetables, added sugars and whole grains. This will help prevent misleading ingredient claims like we often see on products called “fruit” cocktail that are really mostly sugar and water or on products “made with whole grains” that use mostly refined flour. However, it will also help consumers choose products that have higher amounts of healthful ingredients or lower amounts of unhealthful ingredients.
There is widespread scientific agreement about the health benefits of consuming adequate amounts of fruits, vegetables, legumes and whole grains and about the adverse health effects of consuming foods high in added sugars. For instance, scientists agree that a diet rich in fruits and vegetables is associated with a lower risk of several cancers, lower rates of stroke and lower blood pressure, but about two-thirds of Canadians do not consume the recommended five to ten servings of fruits and vegetables per day. Many processed foods purporting to contain fruits and vegetables as ingredients contain only trace amounts of them without disclosing that fact on the label.
The World Health Organization issued a report in March 2003 called “Diet, Nutrition, and the Prevention of Chronic Disease”, noting that many foods contribute protective or causative effects on chronic disease risk that cannot yet be reduced to the metabolic effects of particular nutrients.
The WHO report identified 14 classes of foods that are often used as ingredients in processed foods and play very important roles, protective or causative, in the causation of non-communicable chronic diseases.
In addition to adequate breastfeeding and consumption of appropriate amounts of certain nutrients, the WHO report determined that there is convincing or probable evidence establishing links between cardiovascular disease, cancer, or type II diabetes and the following foods and ingredients: the protective foods, such as fruits; vegetables, excluding tubers; whole grain cereals; legumes; fish and fish oils; and unsalted nuts, provided that the caloric intake is not exceeded; and the causative foods, such as foods and drinks rich in added or free sugars; unfiltered boiled coffee; some forms of salted or fermented fish; high temperature foods; preserved meats such as sausage, salami, bacon and ham; and salted meats, pickles and other foods.
The five classes of ingredients identified in Bill C-398, namely fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, and added sugars, constitute a practical subset of the 14 classes of ingredients the WHO expert report determined to be related to the risk for chronic diseases.
In closing, disease prevention is the most direct way of alleviating financial pressure on the health care system because it involves both decreasing the need for health care services by Canadians and, at the same time, increasing the ability of Canadians to help finance health care through increased labour productivity by contributing to the other side of the health care ledger.
Meaningful information can help consumers to make decisions that promote disease prevention. An informed consumer is an educated consumer. An educated consumer is a healthful consumer, one who will contribute to minimizing the increasing health care budget by preventing disease with educated consumption. This fact is what lead to mandatory nutritional labelling, which came into force on January 1, 2003. My bill closes a few loopholes left by omissions in the regulations. Its passage will benefit all of us directly in contributing to more beneficial dietary habits, and as a country, by helping prevent rather than treat numerous diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, cancer and diabetes. I ask all colleagues to support the bill.
