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Blinded food guides leading the blind

We can do better than the Canada Food Guide
food_glenda1

Ever since they taught it to us in Grade 5, I've never been able to reckon with Canada's Food Guide. Whenever I look at it — even back then when we had to draw little bottles of milk and clusters of grapes to replicate the guide in our notebooks — I feel like I'd turn into an elephant if I ate everything recommended.

For a woman my age — that's over 51 — the current food guide says every day I should eat seven servings of vegetables and fruits, which could include half a cup of pure fruit juice; six servings of grain products; three of milk; and two of meat or some protein alternative. Good God! I'd weigh the equivalent of 10 elephants if I ate all that.

I know, I know. Even though the experts try to tell us a serving is the size of a deck of cards or a baseball, we usually overdo it in that department. But then look at the serving examples the food guide provides. One serving of grain could be a single slice of bread. But it could also be three-quarters of a cup of porridge. Have you ever tried to eat that much porridge at once? It's ridiculous, unless you're a lumberjack.

And what happens if you're some kind of porridge freak and consider each of the six grain servings to be just that? Three quarters cup of porridge times six equals four and a half cups of cooked oatmeal, or whatever, a day. That would be in addition to everything else, including all the protein, one serving of which is two, not one, but two eggs, which alone seems to open the door to over-eating; or half a cup of meat; or three quarters cup of tofu, or cooked beans and the like.

If you're a guy aged 19 to 50, you're supposed to be downing even more. Eight to 10 servings of vegetables and fruits each day. Eight servings of grain products and three servings of meat or some other protein. And two servings of dairy.

Now, after these many years of feeling out in the food guide cold, I've been vindicated!

Dr. Yoni Freedhoff was in Vancouver recently to take part in a conference on obesity. Assistant professor of family medicine at the University of Ottawa and founder of Ottawa's Bariatric Medical Institute — a multi-disciplinary, evidence-based nutrition and weight management centre — he's known variously as a nutritional watchdog, an obesity expert and a diet guru. Either way, he definitely had my ear when he was on CBC Radio's B.C. Almanac.

"It's a very strange world we live in," he said, describing everything from school cafeterias serving food we tell kids isn't good for them, to representatives from Coca-Cola spewing BS, as he put it, like sugary drinks like Coke don't add to obesity.

"We have normal appetites in an abnormal world."

That's a world where one-third of the Canadian population is overweight and one in seven is obese, and where we keep insisting that exercising is key to maintaining a healthy weight when that's only 20 per cent of the equation. Diet is 80 per cent.

Given we don't have to do much to feed ourselves these days other than chewing and swallowing, you'd think the least we can do is pay a bit more attention to what we put in our mouths, and to the food guide our federal government puts before us to help us do it right.

"While the Food Guide may not be taped on every fridge it's still hugely important," Dr. Freedhoff writes on his excellent blog, Weighty Matters.

"It helps to shape national nutrition policies and industry programs, and serves as the backdrop against which every food related news story is published. It is what's taught to our children in schools, it dictates what's served to patients in nursing homes and hospitals, it becomes the basis for industry based food health claims and front-of-package labels. In short it becomes Canada's nutritional consciousness and given how infrequently it's revised (15 years this past time around), if it's wrong it'll misinform and undermine good nutrition in Canada for a decade or more."

So why, he wonders, doesn't Canada have an evidence-based food guide instead of one that is politically and corporately driven?

To whit, at the 2006 launch of the revision to the latest food guide (the current one I'm holding right now), one third of the attendees were representatives from "Big Food Canada". These included Brewers of Canada, The Canadian Meat Council, The Canadian Sugar Institute, The Canola Council of Canada, The Confectionery Manufacturers Association of Canada and Dairy Farmers of Canada. And, according to Dr. Freedhoff, 25 per cent of the members of the Food Advisory Committee, which is one of the top tiers of the food guide revision process, serve what he calls "Big Food."

That's just the beginning of the story. (You can read about all the flaws in the food guide and its revision process www.weightymatters.ca). But it gives me comfort to realize I haven't been wrong since the fifth grade.

Dr. Freedhoff blasts Canada's Food Guide for contributing to our weighty problems. His cheeky "Eating Not-So-Well with The Industry's Food Guide" points out that we now have a food guide that promotes obesity and bad eating habits by suggesting things like pudding, chocolate milk and muffins as healthy choices. As for that half cup of 100 per cent juice, half a cup of grape juice, for instance, is equivalent to drinking an eighth of a cup of maple syrup. Ugh.

So what do we do?

Turn to the Harvard School of Public Health's Healthy Eating Plate. It's the best, he says. It's also simple and easy to follow. The shorthand version is this: Fill half your plate with vegetables and fruits. (Potatoes and French fries don't count because they're high in fast-digested carbohydrates). Save a quarter of your plate for whole grains. Put a healthy source of protein on one quarter of your plate. Use healthy plant oils. Drink water, coffee or tea. Stay active.

You don't have to ban treats — food as pleasure and as celebration have been part of being human for thousands of years.

But we do have to educate ourselves about genuinely healthy eating habits in our abnormal world.

Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning journalist who's going to try the Healthy Eating Plate.