Health committee  I was responding to a particular example that had been raised in questioning. I don't actually have any evidence regarding whether any particular additive would cause harm or not. My general point, though, was that nutrition isn't the only thing we care about in health, and that

Health committee  I was involved in a study that tried to simulate what impact fruit and vegetable price subsidies would have in the United States. We found that you could save 10,000 lives, due to prevention of strokes and heart attacks alone, with a relatively small 1% subsidy across the board o

Health committee  A lot of things we've looked at here we did successfully with tobacco; however, tobacco is a rather cohesive product. Tobacco is tobacco, and it was relatively easy to target what you meant by tobacco products. Here we have a lot more difficulty. Certainly with taxation, educati

Health committee  To the first point about the cost of eating healthy, we did some work in Edmonton. We went around and did calorie pricing of food items. We were particularly concerned and were motivated by the question, if you really were on a very tight budget and you first had to meet your bas

Health committee  The sweetened soft drinks and, more generally, drinking diet soda instead, we do have to be careful that in our push for nutritional choices we don't inadvertently raise other health concerns. If there are other health concerns, perhaps from exposure to certain additives that mig

Health committee  My first recommendation would be to take a careful look at, and do a thorough review of, those existing programs that already affect food prices in this country, some of which have their genesis in historical concerns that go back the better part of a century and do not in any wa

Health committee  On the first question, certainly food accessibility is a huge issue. In the context of fat taxes and other food taxes, if you're going to highlight certain foods for special taxation and not provide access to the substitutes that you want to encourage, you're not going to be able

Health committee  One thing that is not utilized very much in Canada--this ties into some of what I brought up earlier, about existing programs that might support agricultural production--is the direct provision of food aid. That is not universally popular because of concerns that it might carry s

Health committee  I would like to thank the members of the committee for providing me this opportunity to address you today. I'm a health economist at the University of Alberta, and I'll be focusing my comments today on food price interventions, because that's my area of expertise, but I don't in