Health committee  There is evidence to support programs such as what's called the “red light, green light diet”, where there are red light and green light labels. If you label food in relatively simple ways, where people can understand what's a healthy food that you can probably eat almost as muc

Health committee  I'm not sure the evidence supports that people are as ignorant as you're articulating. I certainly agree that public education is important, but we know the evidence tells us that public education alone is insufficient. I'll just give you one anecdote. I'm just back from the In

Health committee  Certainly there are correlations between stress and obesity, and the stress hormones contribute to the problem. I think underlying that, again, is this issue around access and exposure and advertising and things like that. We have to keep in mind that our least nutritious foods,

Health committee  When it comes to Canadians, I think the word I would use is “support” as opposed to “seed”. So when you talk about individuals, the key here is to support them in their environments to be able to make healthy choices. In some cases they don't have access, as my colleagues have t

Health committee  Leaders in this field recognize that focusing on the word and the target “obesity” is actually a problem, particularly for children. That's not what we want to do. What we want to move away from is the tremendous linkage in our population between food and fun. So what the leade

Health committee  Certainly we do need partnerships across all portfolios--across agriculture, transportation, across all sectors. That's really critical because it affects everybody. When I talk about seed money I talk about getting efforts to intervene under way, to have work happen, and then un

Health committee  We're supporting researchers to do that kind of work, although not enough.

Health committee  Can I offer a quick response on the better data question? I think that's an important one, certainly. There are two areas around data that are important. One is surveillance. We don't have very good surveillance in this country. Not only is this the first national nutrition surv

Health committee  I guess I'll give you the recommendation that I got when I asked the world's authority on pediatric and child obesity, who also works for the U.S. federal government, that exact question: what's the role of a federal government in dealing with this problem? His response was that

Health committee  What I would add to that--and I didn't come with the exact numbers about life expectancy--is that we believe the generation of children being born now and over the recent past are not expected to live as long as their parents. It's the first generation that will come to that.

Health committee  There's little doubt that there is a lower quality of life. I brought you the statistic last time that illustrated the point with studies that compared the quality of life for children who are obese with that for children who have cancer and who are undergoing chemotherapy. They

Health committee  Yes, because that's what it's linked to.

Health committee  Yes, but when you look at it from a statistical point of view it doesn't sound very frightening because the numbers are down at 1% or 2%, or something like that. I think it's about 1% across Canada in children. The problem, of course, is that is really the tip of an iceberg, and

Health committee  Absolutely, and the projections, of course, are always a bit challenging because the world changes over that time. But I think the most striking statistic I've heard is that one in three children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes in their lifetime, and that's as a conse

Health committee  Sure, I'd be happy to comment. I think your question was more directed toward how to solve the problem--did I understand correctly?--or how big the problem is.