The Public Health Agency of Canada and the Foodbook study

On this page

• Foodbook background
• Importance of Foodbook
• Completing the survey
• Privacy and confidentiality
• More information

Foodbook background

The Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) has launched a research study called Foodbook 2.0. PHAC has invited approximately 20,000 people across all provinces and territories to participate in this study and complete a survey. The survey asks about the foods they eat, and the activities they do that may affect their health.

Households are randomly selected to take part in the study. Participants are asked about:

• foods they have eaten in the past week
• sources of drinking water and other water exposures
• animals they may have had contact with, including pets and their foods, and farm animals
• food safety knowledge and practices in the home
• recent vomiting or diarrhea

Participants are also asked about their age and gender. This helps PHAC better understand and describe the characteristics of the individuals participating in the study.

PHAC completed the first version of this study in 2014-2015. You can find out more about the first study, and view the data and key findings from this study by accessing the Foodbook Report.

Importance of Foodbook

We use the information from the Foodbook study to help with foodborne illness outbreak investigations and response in Canada. This can reduce the number of foodborne illnesses that occur each year. When a foodborne illness outbreak occurs, we can compare Foodbook data to outbreak cases to help identify the source of an illness. This information can help us prevent more people in Canada from getting sick. We can also use Foodbook information:

• to guide policy decisions
• for other public health studies
• to look at trends in food consumption in Canada

We will summarize and publish the data from Foodbook 2.0 in an online report when the study is complete.

Completing the survey

PHAC has hired a survey company to administer the study. It is contacting the selected households on our behalf. Households are randomly selected to take part in the study, and an individual within each household is randomly selected to complete the survey.

If you have been contacted via mail or by phone to take part in the Foodbook Study and would like to participate, you may access the survey here and enter your survey code to complete the questionnaire. Your survey code can be found on the invitation to participate you received in the mail. You may also complete the survey over the phone, by calling (tollfree): 1-888-313-8927 Monday to Friday between 9 am and 9 pm, or Saturday to Sunday 10 am to 6:30 pm local time.

Privacy and confidentiality

Participation in the Foodbook study is voluntary, and all answers received from study participants are confidential and stored in a secure manner. Information that could potentially identify survey respondents (for example, name, telephone number, address) will not be stored with survey responses.

More information

If you have questions or want to know more about the Foodbook study, please contact: Foodbook.Atlasalimentaire@phac-aspc.gc.ca