By Courtney Howard and Ian Culbert,
EvidenceNetwork.ca
What is a healthy diet?
New Year’s diet conversations still abound around water coolers Canada-wide as people debate the merits and shortcomings of sugar, gluten, meat, dairy, tofu and other edibles. Scientific articles, shiny celebrities and representatives of various groups who produce, transform and sell food all compete for our attention as we try to figure out what to eat.
How is anyone supposed to know who to listen to?
Canadians’ traditional solution to this conundrum has been to turn to Canada’s Food Guide – that familiar rainbow of foods that many of us learned about in elementary school.
The last version of the guide was published in 2007, so it’s time for a revamp to reflect new information. Health Canada has been looking at the most recent research and consulting with various stakeholders.
So who should Health Canada listen to in its efforts to come up with the best diet recommendations for Canadians?
They’ve taken a prudent stance: feeling that industry’s participation in past food guide development undermined the public’s confidence in the guide, this time Health Canada has prioritized information from sources that don’t stand to profit from the outcome. In opting not to meet one-on-one with industry groups, Health Canada has given itself the best chance of producing a guide that puts the health of Canadians first and that will be, and be seen to be, a trusted source of information.
As trust in conventional information sources wanes, it’s an approach that Health Canada would do well to consider expanding ministry-wide.
The guiding principles of the draft food guide were released in 2017 and include recommendations to reduce our intake of processed foods; share meals with family and friends; and shift our diets towards “a high proportion of plant-based foods without necessarily excluding animal foods altogether.”
This is all sound and evidence-based advice. However, there are now reports that the meat and dairy industries in Canada are expressing concerns that they weren’t adequately consulted by Health Canada. They have turned to Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada and Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada officials to register their complaints.
As representatives of organizations dedicated to human health, we believe that Health Canada’s recommendation that we eat more plants and less meat positions Canada as a leader in both the health of people and of the planet. Strong support for these principles was one of the main recommendations of the jointly-produced Lancet Countdown-Canadian Public Health Association policy brief.
Plant-rich, low-meat diets have been shown to have modest benefits in terms of all-cause mortality, to decrease our risk of colorectal cancer, and cardiovascular disease and to improve glycemic control in people with diabetes. Low-meat diets also reduce greenhouse gases, and land use and water consumption by a median of 20 to 30 per cent across studies, which is critical to maintaining planetary health and sustaining our ability to feed ourselves as we move through the 21st century.
