Corey Pierce
Canada’s Food Guide — hazardous to your health?
Happy birthday Canada’s Food Guide ( CFG ). The second most requested government form after tax forms the new (and supposedly improved) guide was released about a year ago after three years of revisions on the 1992 version. Schools base their nutrition curriculums on it doctors hand it out to patients Canadians attempting to adopt a healthier lifestyle rely on it and it is taught as gospel to dieticians across the country who then use it to advise their clients developing programs for hospitals daycares nursing homes and other institutions.
Since its release I have read plenty of back-patting articles congratulating the CFG for its mention of ethnic foods and its ease and accessibility but no mention of its shortcomings. First and foremost according to the CFG every person differentiated only by sex between the ages of 19 and 50 has the exact same nutritional recommendations regardless of their height weight and activity level. It’s ridiculous to suggest that a six-foot-tall 21-year-old woman needs exactly the same number of calories and specific nutrients as a five-foot-tall 50-year-old woman.
Many of the kudos I’ve read are in reference to the new online version dubbed My Food Guide . “By entering personal information such as age and sex selecting various items from the four food groups and choosing different types of physical activities you can create a tool that is customized just for you.”
You go to the website and type in your age and sex and then click on your choices of foods from each group. It doesn’t allow you to input more than one serving of a specific food — even though the CFG recommends two servings of milk per day you can only input one. Of course it also lumps chocolate milk in with white milk not mentioning the fact that chocolate milk contains the same amount of sugar as pop and 80 per cent more calories. When you’re done it prints out a fancy list of the stuff you just typed in. No it doesn’t analyze nutrients and calories or sum up your choices and make suggestions for areas where you may be nutritionally deficient. It encourages you to try again inputting new foods but what’s the point?
There is no mention of calories in the CFG which seems odd in a document meant to be a complete guide to healthy eating especially considering the fact that overeating is our biggest nutritional concern in Canada. I calculated an average day’s worth of food for an adult male based on suggested servings from the CFG and it came out to over 3200 calories. That of course doesn’t factor in the inevitable little treats we’re supposed to limit and condiments which aren’t addressed at all despite Statistics Canada’s belief that Canadians get almost 25 per cent of their total daily calorie intake from these sources foods that in the old guide were classified as “other."
But wait: if you really dig around online you do come to a Health Canada resource meant to help you calculate your daily energy needs. Here’s a morsel of what you’ll find there:
Adults 19 years and older
Estimated energy requirement (kcal/day) = total energy expenditure
Men (EER = 662 – (9.53 x age [y]) + PA x { (15.91 x weight [kg]) + (539.6 x height [m]) }]
Women [EER = 354 – (6.91 x age [y]) + PA x { (9.36 x weight [kg]) + (726 x height [m]) }]
Phew that clears things up.
It also seems Health Canada still has the same fat phobia that ran rampant in the ’80s when the message was that all fats were bad and should be avoided. Presumably Health Canada is aware that healthy mono and polyunsaturated fats and omega-3 fatty acids are fats we want to encourage the consumption of yet it suggests using a very limited amount of vegetable oils. Similarly the CFG instructs us to limit foods and beverages high in calories fat sugar or salt in general — a blanket statement that appears to be good advice but again does not differentiate between good fats and bad. Nuts and avocadoes for example are high in fat and thus calories but loaded with the healthy kind that we want to include in our diets. The same goes for canola olive and flax oils.
Trans-fats on the other hand are barely mentioned and when they are it is suggested we limit them not eliminate or avoid them altogether despite the fact that Health Canada’s own trans-fat task force calls for the elimination of trans-fat from our food supply. Health Canada has at the same time declared heart disease the Number 1 killer in Canada —— one in two Canadians die due to heart disease. It’s also the most costly putting the greatest burden on our national health care system. Since Denmark banned trans fats entirely from its food supply in 2003 it has marked a 20 per cent decrease in deaths from heart disease. If we could prevent 10 per cent of all deaths in Canada shouldn’t we do so?
There is some good advice in the new CFG : eat at least one dark green and one orange vegetable each day. Eat breakfast. Make at least half your grains whole. (This of course suggests that the other half should be refined when white bread pasta and other refined grains should be avoided. Better nutrition advice would have been to make as many grains whole as possible but this is not as catchy a phrase.) Choose at least two guide servings of fish each week. (Again this could have been far better addressed by not labelling a food group “meat and alternatives” suggesting that healthier protein choices like beans fish nuts and seeds are simply an alternative to meat. Health Canada has increased the recommended number of servings of meat to all men over the age of 14.)
Rather than reflect the research that has evolved over the past decade or so regarding diet weight and disease prevention it’s disappointing to see that the one document that should encompass all of this knowledge seems to disregard so much of it. Perhaps this is partly due to the fact that 25 per cent of the members of the Food Guide Advisory Committee one of the top tiers of the revision process come directly from the food industry.
The best advice: educate yourself. Dr. Walter Willett world-renowned Harvard-based researcher and chairman of the Harvard School of Public Health’s department of nutrition has been working since the ’70s on the optimum diet and has come up with a more evidence-based food pyramid. Google it.
