Facilitating the use of Canada's food guide

To meet the needs of Canadians, we continue to develop new food guide tools and resources with helpful advice on adopting healthy eating practices. Canada's food guide continued to evolve with new content added throughout 2020, with advice on adjusting recipes, improving eating habits, diets and food trends, and healthy eating during pregnancy and breastfeeding. New kid friendly recipes, and recipe videos were added to the website.

Building and maintaining awareness of Canada's food guide

In collaboration with the Canadian Nutrition Society, Health Canada conducted a three-month Student Ambassador Network pilot project to encourage nutrition and dietetics students to share the food guide's healthy eating recommendations throughout their university communities. Students organized a range of activities at 13 universities, including booths, cooking classes, presentations, workshops, and social media events/posts to raise awareness of healthy eating and the new food guide. The largest event took place over social media, with more than 2,000 participants.

Reaching this demographic is important because youths and young adults represent one third of the Canadian population, and reflect Canada's diversity. Health Canada also recognizes that engaging and developing resources with and for young people can help instill long-lasting healthy eating habits. We continue to explore new, and innovative ways to involve and to reach these audiences. For example, we established two other networks of youths and post-secondary students to engage their peers about the food guide and healthy eating in 2021. These networks will also provide advice to Health Canada to inform educational activities and resources supporting use of Canada's food guide.

In addition, in order to increase awareness of healthy eating recommendations, Health Canada also collaborated with Public Health Agency of Canada to support the production of a calendar featuring recipes from the food guide. The calendar, which included recipes such as corn, bean and squash soup (Three Sisters Soup), moose stew, and pork-and-apple skillet dinner, was mailed to the communities served by the Nutrition North Canada program. In addition to recipes, the calendar highlighted the recommendations from the food guide snapshot, and featured other helpful tips.

Supporting healthy eating during the pandemic

Being asked to reduce contact with others during the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that Canadians have been cooking more at home, thinking about how to plan their meals better to avoid visiting grocery stores more than necessary, and being more aware of the ingredients they have in stock at home. At the same time, some Canadians have also been reporting that they are consuming more junk foods and sweets.

To help respond to the needs of Canadians during this challenging time, Health Canada developed webpages to support Canadians' healthy eating during the pandemic. The food guide's monthly newsletter was also adapted to provide subscribers with advice relevant to addressing the challenges many were experiencing. Newsletter topics included information on using non-perishable foods to build healthy meals, adjusting recipes when ingredients are limited, making better use of leftovers, and grocery shopping during the pandemic.

Supporting evidence-informed decision making

Assessing adherence to Canada's food guide

In collaboration with the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, Health Canada hosted a Best Brains Exchange (BBE) event in March 2020, with discussions focused on developing tools to assess how Canadians are following the recommendations outlined by the food guide. The BBE aimed to engage researchers and policy experts in an open dialogue around how the proposed tools can be improved or adapted so that they are relevant and useful to a variety of users. Health Canada is using the experiences and knowledge shared at the BBE to develop and validate these new tools in collaboration with researchers. For further information regarding the discussions, check out the event summary.

Updating the National Nutritious Food Basket

In 2020, we updated the National Nutritious Food Basket to be consistent with the 2019 food guide. The food basket includes approximately 60 nutritious foods that are commonly consumed by Canadians.

The food basket is used as a tool by provincial and territorial governments, as well as stakeholders, to monitor the cost of healthy eating within their regions. It serves as a reference to inform their health and social policies, and raises awareness about the relationship between poverty and food insecurity. Statistics Canada also uses the food basket to calculate the cost of the food included in the Market Basket Measure (MBM). The MBM of low income develops thresholds of poverty based on the cost of a basket of food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and other items for individuals and families representing a modest, basic standard of living.

Food insecurity

Our leadership in nutrition policy includes the facilitation of data collection and knowledge development on factors that promote, or are barriers to, healthy eating. There is a strong correlation between household food insecurity and negative nutritional and health outcomes, including higher rates of chronic conditions and premature deaths. To understand the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Canadians at risk of food insecurity, we worked with a leading Canadian food security expert and Statistics Canada to include questions on household food insecurity as part of the Canadian Perspective Survey Series. Conducted in May 2020, the survey found that almost one in seven Canadians (14.6%) reported living in a household with food insecurity in the previous 30 days. These results were more than a third higher than pre-pandemic estimates. These data help governments and other organizations across the country understand the state and nature of food insecurity, to help develop well-informed interventions, both in and outside the health sector, to support the conditions for healthy eating.

Monitoring food and beverage advertising to children

In 2020, we began implementing an evidence-based strategy to monitor food and beverage advertising across a range of media and settings. New methods and protocols were developed, where needed, to do this monitoring. This foundational work has enabled the monitoring activities currently underway, which provide Health Canada with key insights into the current state of food and beverage advertising to children.

We know that children are particularly vulnerable to advertising that influences their food preferences and choices, which can shape their eating habits for the rest of their lives. Many Canadian children are exposed to such advertising regularly via digital platforms. At the same time, the reach of online advertising can be difficult to monitor and measure due to its complex nature. To gain a better understanding of how advertising is affecting children in the digital age and support countries in policy decision making, the World Health Organization (WHO) Europe developed the CLICK Monitoring Framework (a tool to assess the extent of children's exposure to advertising). Health Canada is now collaborating with WHO Europe to test the framework's methods and tools, and will be launching a pilot project in 2021 to assess the digital marketing of foods to children in Canada.

In addition, Health Canada is monitoring the exposure of Canadian adolescents to food and beverage advertising on social media websites. The findings will generate new information regarding the levels of exposure to advertising, and insights into how adolescents engage with the food and beverage brands they see on social media.

In addition, we continue to support the child-focused component of the International Food Policy Study (IFPS), which evaluates the impact of national-level food policies by conducting surveys across Canada, the U.S., Australia, Chile, the U.K., and Mexico. This ground-breaking study will support our efforts to monitor food and beverage advertising. It will also serve to inform our other healthy eating policies, while providing evidence of the impact of healthy eating policies at the international level.

The IFPS conducts annual surveys to gather information on food and eating behaviours, including food sources and purchasing, food preparation and skills, food security, dietary patterns, and weight loss efforts. The initiative also collects data regarding the impact of dietary guidance (such as Canada's food guide), food advertising, and taxes on sugary drinks on consumption habits.

While the first two cycles of IFPS collected data from adults only, Health Canada supported the expansion of the IFPS to include children and youth between the ages of 10 and 17 years. The IFPS's inclusion of this younger age group provides Health Canada with another valuable resource to inform policy. Having data on this age group also helps us assess how factors such as food advertising, the food guide, nutrition labelling, food security, sugary drink consumption, restaurant dining, nutrition information sources, and the nutrition environment at schools are influencing the eating habits of Canadian children and youths. Data collection and analysis on the child survey took place in 2019 and 2020, and a report will be released in 2021.

Nutrition Science Advisory Committee

Health Canada's newly established, Nutrition Science Advisory Committee (NSAC) held its first meeting on November 18, 2020. This group of external expert advisors was formed to provide us with scientific and technical advice on nutrition, in a timely and independent manner. The committee will provide advice in several key areas, such as emerging scientific trends that impact the nutritional health of Canadians, and the best practices for assessing and evaluating scientific evidence to inform public health nutrition policy. NSAC's advice will support Health Canada's efforts to use the best available evidence in fulfilling its mandate to support the nutritional health of Canadians.