Health committee  It would be a wonderful opportunity to talk about comprehensive health promotion--healthy public policy--which involves, very often, more than just voluntary approaches, in general, to health policy. When I say comprehensive, I'm not talking about being overriding and authorita

Health committee  Just to be sure I understand the question—

Health committee  There are a number of ways you can influence “mouth feel”, as the food scientists would term it, by adding things that enhance the flavour or increase the viscosity and the palatability of food. But overall, the significant amount of sodium found across a whole array of foodstuff

Health committee  Well, I think it is unfortunate that the repertoire of opportunity, if I can use that rather convoluted phrase, that the committee seems to be taking seems very specifically to preclude any form of regulation. I say so because frankly some forms of regulation would be very helpfu

Health committee  Well, I would put it the other way around. Frankly, the realities of 21st century life, as we've all heard, are that many of us eat food in a variety of settings and for a variety of reasons. So I think there's a fundamental public health responsibility to optimize the safety—and

Health committee  Absolutely.

Health committee  I would perhaps defer to Stephen, who may be more familiar with that. To my knowledge, there has been no further evolution of the standard that you describe at this point.

Health committee  With the chair's permission, I'll leap in. In my day job, I head the division of prevention and rehabilitation at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute. We are always talking about making the healthy choices the easy choices so that Canadians shouldn't have to think about the

Health committee  I think it's very definitely an option for Canada, and I think one of the reasons why it's an appropriate step is that there will be laggards within the food industry. I want to come back again to the question of food safety. I think it's a fundamental public health responsibilit

Health committee  I'll probably get the figures slightly awry here, but if we were to reduce the average Canadian's diet down to a sodium intake of 2,300 milligrams of sodium, it would be taking a tablespoon of salt out of their daily diet. Salt is ubiquitous. It's everywhere in food. Most Canad

Health committee  Madam Chair, I may have misspoke myself. I meant teaspoon, and I'm told I said tablespoon. Forgive me—teaspoon of salt.

Health committee  Thank you. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. I'm sorry.

Health committee  Thank you for your question. I probably would draw attention to what's taking place in the United Kingdom. Our colleagues in Australia also are grappling with this issue. I think in the questions that were raised earlier, people were talking about the report of the U.S. Institu

Health committee  Well, as you know, if we were free-grazing homo sapiens, we probably would require only between 1,200 and 1,500 milligrams of sodium a day, but the nature of the food environment as it has evolved over the last 50 years has been such that we now have very significant increases in

Health committee  I would defer to some of the expertise that's also resident at this table. The two classic examples would be what has been taking place in Finland, which I alluded to earlier, and also more recently what has taken place in the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom has adopted an a