Our Eating Habits are slowly Killing us.
A Food Policy that encourages the wider availability and affordability of Real Food would help reverse the trend.
You can’t see it. You can’t even feel it. But what most of us are eating is literally poisonous and is slowly killing us.
On the new Amazon series ‘Reacher’, there’s a scene where the main character uses ketchup and salt to scrub off the accumulated grit, rust and burn residue from the metal plate containing the Vehicle Identification Number on the burned out remains of a vehicle. The acetic acid in the ketchup and the coarseness of the salt works in tandem to remove most surface contaminates.
Wait a minute. Acetic acid in ketchup? But, don’t we eat that? We sure do. Canadians consume on a per capita basis more ketchup that anyone else in the world. Except people from Finland. Heinz Canada decided in 2018 that the Fins being the top consumers wasn’t right, and launched a campaign to encourage Canadians to consume more ketchup.
The Heinz product contains a lot of sugar; 4 grams of sugar per tablespoon in fact, which is a third of the amount. All from high fructose corn syrup and regular corn syrup. The recommended daily intake of added sugar is about 24 grams, or 6 teaspoons. Added sugar is not necessary for survival and its addictive to boot.
But its not just ketchup. It’s all the ultra-processed foods we eat that contain high levels of sugar, salt and other chemicals that render these ‘foods’ not only unrecognizable, but contribute to our overall decline in health.
The data is clear: Canadians are getting fatter. We’re gaining weight at an alarming rate and that is leading to the development of several chronic diseases that are making us sicker, burdening our health system and walking many of us to an early grave.
In a study commissioned by the Canadian Heart and Stroke Society of Canada, Moubarac et al noted that heart disease is the 2nd leading cause of death in Canada after Cancer. More than a quarter of all adults and 12% of all children and adolescents are considered to be obese; more than half of adults are overweight. Half of Canadians have one chronic disease or another and only one in five adults actually meets the physical activity guidelines (150 minutes of moderate or vigorous physical activity per week).
The tragedy is that most of the chronic diseases that Canadians suffer from are treatable with simple changes in diet and exercise.
In the latter half of the 20th Century until today, Canadians — and more broadly, those in the USA, Australia and the United Kingdom — have shifted what we eat away from minimally processed foods like fruits, raw vegetables, red meat, chicken and fish to ultra-processed foods that are ready-to-consume, either from frozen or through the addition of various chemicals to change their composition to allow them to be preserved at room temperature for long periods of time.
Moubarac et al noted that the energy share of ultra-processed foods that Canadians consume has increased from 24% in 1938 to over 50% in 2001. Think pre-prepared burgers, pizzas, frozen dishes, mass-produced packaged breads, breakfast cereals, and sweetened and salty snacks. Ultra-processed foods contain only half of the essential micronutrients we need (essential for overall good health and for combatting diseases), and have more fat and carbohydrates that consuming what I call Real Food (Real Food is minimally processed foods that you traditionally buy around the edge of your supermarket — fruits, raw vegetables, red meat, chicken, fish, dairy products, eggs, and so on).
In general, Moubarac et al conclude that ultra processed food are poorer in overall nutritional quality in terms of factors and nutrients critical for the prevention of chronic diseases and overweight, as well as maintenance and promotion of good health and well-being.
The purpose of Moubarac’s study in 2015 was to advocate principally for a change in the Canada Food Guide, as well as all other relevant food public policy programmes. The Canadian Food Guide was changed in January, 2019 and moved the guide away from recommended food groups and serving sizes, towards a focus on the consumption of vegetables, whole grain foods and proteins.
The other changes to public policy have yet to come. And therein lies the problem.
The key conclusion of Moubarac et al was that Canadians, in order to improve their overall health and wellbeing, needed to radically change their eating habits from the consumption of ultra processed foods to that of minimally processed foods and freshly made dishes. Their key recommendation was to encourage government to step in and created the policy levers that would effect this change, in essence, work to prevent the emergence of chronic disease before it happened which would, downstream, alleviate the fiscal and resource pressure on our health system.
This is a big ask. We would all have to spend a lot more time selecting and preparing our own meals and make room in our schedules for exercise. A lot of us don’t want to take the time to prepare meals, and given the values of our convenience society today — where one can order pretty much anything and have it delivered within the hour (instant gratification) — it’s a hard sell to move people off that and onto rustling up dinner seven days a week. It’s what meal preparation companies like CookIt and GoodFoods are counting on to drive their business model.
So far, governments have tinkered around the edges with actions that have little impact on what Canadians consume and little impact on the food produced by our processed food companies.
They’ve changed the Canadian Food Guide for the better. But what is less clear is how the Guide is intended to be used. It is a ‘guide’ only, after all. It is designed to be something that is consulted and used as a reference, not as the basis to provide incentives for individuals to change what or how they eat. The Food Guide web site contains details of the Guide, recipes that fit into the guide and other food resources to assist consumers in changing their eating habits. Is it taught in schools? Difficult to tell without doing a thorough examination of curricula in contemporary home economics classes.
Government has also worked on labelling. Knowing what you eat is pretty important at the individual level, if you have the interest and desire to know that. Most of us don’t. We buy what we buy based on gorgeous packaging, dubious claims and alluring photos of the product. Rarely do we turn the product around to see what the heck is actually in the thing. When you buy your O Henry bar at the corner store, do you care that this little package is jam-packed with palm oil, palm kernel oil, high fructose corn syrup, corn syrup and artificial flavour? Or that it contains 30 grams of sugar (almost 8 teaspoons — more than your recommended daily intake) per bar? Probably not.
The Federal Government is also tackling food waste. Canada wastes about one-third of the food we produce and finding ways to ensure there is less loss of food, either at the farm, through transport and logistics issues, at the store and in consumer’s homes, would go a long way in making our supply chain more resilient, and provide more affordable food for low-income consumers. While the Government spins in place with the development of technological solutions that take time to implement, the private sector has moved into the space, with entrepreneurs developing digital matching services where stores who have food that is about to expire are matched with buyers who want the food. Think Flashfood, OLIO, Food Rescue Hero, NoWaste.
Tackling food waste, labelling, and the Food Guide are all important in reforming the overall food system in Canada. But they skirt the central issue on how to encourage consumers to eat more real food. And they leave the food processing industry in Canada — a $118 billion dollar a year mammoth — completely to themselves and taking no responsibility for the health effects of what they produce. In the meantime, smaller producers and farmers trying to provide real food to consumers struggle with multiple barriers, including retail distribution, land costs, certification costs and a price point that puts most of what they sell out of reach of ordinary consumers.
In the United Kingdom, the National Food Strategy (NFS) identified the difficulty of convincing people to switch to real food as the Junk Food Cycle. Studies have shown that most of us already know what a healthy diet looks like. The problem is not one of information, but implementation. And we have our own bodies to thank for that.
Our appetites naturally like calorie-dense foods because these foods are rare in nature. So, we seek them out. And once we find them, we over-consume them. Such ultra-processed foods — rich in calories — tend to be low in water and insoluble fibre, which interferes with our feedback mechanisms of our appetite. Our own hormones take longer to signal satiety signals (the feeling of being full) and so, we eat more, and as a result, over-consume on calories which sends us down the road to being overweight, or obese, depending on our body types. As the NFS stated: ‘We have a predilection for calorie dense foods, which means food companies invest more time and money creating these foods, which makes us eat more of them and expands the market, which leads to more investment, which makes us eat more’. Ergo, the Junk Food Cycle.
So, how to break us out of it? What policy leavers can we use to get us out of this destructive cycle?
What the government has done so far is to try to put better tools and information into the hands of consumers so that, through sheer willpower alone, we’ll all magically make a transition to eating better food.
The data noted above show that this isn’t happening. And we have to remember — the eating habits we have today were formed over a 70-year period. We’ll need similarly long-term political commitments and policies to gradually steer the Titanic of junk food in the direction of Real Food.
So, the UK is proposing some radical solutions to help do just that:
- A tax on sugar and salt used in processed foods. A generally applicable tax that applies to all processed food producers will make their input costs higher. This will start food processors down the road of producing food that has less of each input in them, thereby making healthier options available.
- Detailed reporting to Government by food processors above a certain size on what they sell, and what they waste. The reports themselves would contain information related to sales of food that is high in sugar and salt, sales of protein by type, sales of fruits, vegetables, major nutrients, and what food they waste.
- Education. As I’ve written before, educating our kids on the differences between ultra-processed foods and real food, and the health consequences of a diet of ultra-processed foods, would help immensely in shifting habits away from food that harms us to food that helps us. As demand increases, production increases, and prices will begin to fall, leading to more affordable alternatives.
- Put real food in the hands of lower income consumers. There are a variety of schemes that could be leveraged to do this: school lunch programmes that are linked to certain minimum levels of real food consumption; vouchers for lower income consumers to subsidize their purchase of specific real food items; dietary education directed specifically at lower income consumers that helps them understand the health benefits of real food, and then helping them acquire that real food.
There are signs that thinkers in Canada are moving in this direction.
The University of Alberta’s Centre for Public Health published a paper that demonstrated the total costs to Canada’s healthcare system — between $2.5 billion and $5 billion — of 16 preventable chronic diseases, and recommended a series of measures to combat such diseases at their source, such as higher taxes on all sugar-added products, and to put those tax revenues towards subsidies for healthful foods, education programs, limits on advertising to children, and better product labelling.
In addition, a coalition of health advocacy groups in Quebec published an opinion piece in Le Devoir, whereby, in the context of measures soon to be taken to reform the provincial healthcare system as a result of the pandemic, they advocated for the government to focus more on prevention and promotion of good health, rather than on the current hospital-centric model for delivering care. They point out that, since 2016, such a policy has already been elaborated and defined (consisting of housing, food, lifestyle habits and mental health) but the government has only diverted a measly $20 million, a literal drop in the bucket of the annual $68 billion the province spends on healthcare.
These are all long-term solutions that will take more than one political cycle to implement. But, they are fair in the sense that, it doesn’t leave the processed food industry off the hook, but rather, implements measures that apply to them all (to ensure that no one is left competitively disadvantaged) to make changes in the production of healthier food products. It’s either that, or we go down the road of declaring ultra-processed food equivalent to tobacco and start the process where large food processors pay large settlements with Government to help defray the costs to the health care system caused by their current product line.
Canada needs to be bold. Each province is asking the Federal Government for more health care dollars. I understand their demands, but this is a recipe for disaster as it simply continues to use current assumptions about the current health care requirements of the population without making any attempt whatsoever at addressing the upstream causes of illnesses. We can’t continue to spend our way out of our chronic healthcare crisis. We need to address illnesses at the source.
And since many chronic illnesses can be treated through dietary change and exercise, both the Federal and Provincial governments need to work in tandem put in place policies that reduce illness over time. And that means a Food Policy that has our health as its core value.
