Canada’s Food Guide: An Update

In October 2016, the Minister of Health announced the revision of Canada’s Food Guide, a key element of Health Canada’s Healthy Eating Strategy which aims to curb the rising burden of obesity and chronic disease by making the healthier choice easier.

Canadians have grown up learning about healthy eating from the Food Guide, which has provided a consistent foundation for nutrition and health education policies and programs across the country. It influences the foods served and sold in Canada’s public institutions from day cares and schools, to long term care facilities, as well as the foods Canadians choose for themselves and their families. 

In an era of conflicting nutrition messages, the revision of Canada’s Food Guide will give Canadians confidence in guidance that is based on the best available evidence and consistent with other respected health authorities.

The revised Canada’s Food Guide will communicate guidance in ways that better meet the needs of the general public and health professionals.

It is recognized that individuals with specialized dietary requirements may need additional guidance from a health care professional.

Canada’s Food Guide

Input from consultations, experts, and stakeholders is being considered as guidance is being refined and finalized. This guidance will form the foundation for a Canada’s Food Guide suite of tools and resources. Key aspects of the dietary guidance are outlined below.  

Nutritious foods are the foundation for healthy eating

Canada’s Food Guide will encourage the regular intake of vegetables, fruit, whole grains, and protein foods. Among protein foods, an emphasis will be placed on plant-based sources.

While an emphasis is placed on shifting Canadian’s intakes towards more vegetables, fruit, whole grains, and plant-based sources of protein, Canada’s Food Guide will continue to include animal-based foods, such as fish, shellfish, eggs, poultry, lean red meat, wild game, lower fat milk, lower fat yogurts, lower fat kefir, and cheeses lower in fat and sodium. The recommendation for lower fat foods is not to encourage Canadians to follow a low fat diet. Rather, it is to help Canadians eat less saturated fat, while encouraging foods that contain mostly unsaturated fat.   

The health impacts of eating less saturated fat depend on what nutrients replace saturated fat in the diet (e.g. unsaturated fat from healthy oils, or refined carbohydrates and sugars).  The 2015 Health Canada Evidence Review found there is convincing evidence for replacing saturated fat with unsaturated fat to reduce LDL-cholesterol. Elevated LDL cholesterol is an established risk factor for cardiovascular disease.

Canada’s Food Guide will encourage water as the beverage of choice to support health and promote hydration without adding calories to the diet.

Processed or prepared foods and beverages high in sodium, sugars, or saturated fat undermine healthy eating

Some forms of processing, such as pasteurization, have public health benefits. Processed foods and beverages have the potential to negatively impact health when they are high in sodium, sugars, or saturated fat, and are consumed on a regular basis.

Canada’s Food Guide will recommend that processed or prepared foods and beverages high in sodium, sugars, or saturated fat not be consumed regularly. This can include foods and beverages prepared by restaurants and other similar establishments, and those prepared at home.

Canada’s Food Guide will recommend that confectionaries and sugary drinks not be served or sold in publically-funded institutions. Sugary drinks include: soft drinks, fruit-flavoured drinks, 100% fruit juice, flavoured waters with added sugars, sport and energy drinks, and other sweetened hot or cold beverages, such as iced tea, cold coffee beverages, sweetened milks, and sweetened plant-based beverages.

Beverages that contain sugars have been linked to a higher risk of dental decay in children. Consuming foods or beverages with sugars added to them has also been linked to an increased risk of obesity and type 2 diabetes.

Importance of food skills

Canada’s Food Guide will highlight food skills as a practical way to support healthy eating. Processed or prepared foods and beverages high in sodium, sugars, or saturated fat have become the easy choice where Canadians live, learn, work and play. Promoting food skills and awareness of food marketing is an important part of supporting life-long healthy eating habits. Canada’s Food Guide will promote cooking and food preparation using nutritious foods, as well as the use of food labels to help Canadians make informed food choices.

Implementation of dietary guidelines

Canada’s Food Guide is one part of a comprehensive approach to support healthy eating.  Creating supportive environments by addressing the broader determinants of health, and reducing health inequalities, is required to help Canadians make healthy food choices that are aligned with Canada’s Food Guide.

Canada’s Food Guide Tools, Resources and Timelines

Health Canada is developing a new suite of tools and resources to make the Food Guide easier to understand and apply for the general public and health professionals.

In late fall 2018, Health Canada plans to launch a new mobile-responsive web-based platform. It will house:

• Canada’s Dietary Guidelines for Health Professionals and Policy Makers: a report outlining Health Canada’s policy on healthy eating.
• Healthy Eating Principles for Canadians: communicating Canada’s Dietary Guidelines in plain language.
• Canada’s Food Guide Graphic: expressing the Healthy Eating Principles through visuals and words.
• Canada’s Food Guide Interactive tool: providing custom information for different life stages, including teens, adults and parents, in different settings including at home, at work, at school, on the go, grocery shopping, and eating out.
• Canada’s Food Guide Web resources: including factsheets, videos, and recipes to help Canadians apply Canada’s Dietary Guidelines.

In 2019, Health Canada will release:

• Canada’s Healthy Eating Pattern for Health Professionals and Policy Makers: a report providing guidance on amounts and types of foods as well as guidance for younger children, pregnancy and older adults.
• Enhancements and additional content to Canada’s web application on an ongoing basis.  

The Evidence Base for Canada’s Dietary Guidance

To ensure that the Healthy Eating Strategy, including Canada’s Food Guide, is built on a solid foundation of evidence, Health Canada developed a systematic approach to gathering, assessing, and analyzing the science, referred to as the Evidence Review Cycle for Dietary Guidance, which was published in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.

The 2015 Evidence Review for Dietary Guidance was published in October 2016. Health Canada considers the strongest convincing evidence in the revision of Canada’s Food Guide, where there is a well-established evidence base to support a public health need, and where the evidence is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. Health Canada continues to monitor the evidence. An updated evidence review on food, nutrients and health will be published in fall 2018.

Health Canada’s evidence review includes high-quality peer reviewed, systematic reviews and reports from leading scientific organizations, such as the World Health Organization and the World Cancer Research Fund International, as well as reports commissioned by governmental agencies such as the United States Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee. Health Canada considers strict inclusion and exclusion criteria.  Reports from organizations with an economic interest are excluded from Health Canada’s evidence review to reduce the risk of, or perception of, bias in Health Canada’s dietary guidance.

In addition to the evidence on relationships between food, nutrients and health, the Evidence Review Cycle for Dietary Guidance also considers factors unique to Canada such as the food supply, the foods commonly consumed by Canadians from a range of cultures, and how Canada’s dietary guidance is used. This helps to ensure the guidance is relevant and useful to Canadians.

Openness and Transparency

Health Canada is committed to an open and transparent process in the development of Canada’s Food Guide to ensure that the dietary guidance is based on the best available health evidence.

A full list of meetings and correspondence with stakeholders on the subject of healthy eating, including the revision of Canada’s Food Guide, is available online.

Consultations with Canadians

Health Canada held two online public consultations on Canada’s Food Guide.  The consultations were open to all interested Canadians, including health professionals, educators, health organizations, and industry. Input from the consultations help ensure Health Canada’s recommendations are clear, relevant and useful to Canadians.

During the first consultation, almost 20,000 submissions were received providing input on the needs and expectations for a revised Canada’s Food Guide. The results were summarized in a What We Heard report in June 2017.

During the second consultation, over 6,700 contributors provided input on draft healthy eating recommendations.  The results of this consultation were also summarized in a What We Heard report in March 2018.

Health Canada is continuing to engage Canadians by conducting public opinion research to ensure that new dietary guidance resources are useful, well understood and easy to apply.