Health Canada released their second annual Food and Nutrition Highlights Report July 15th, through Health Canada’s website. The 2020 report is part of their commitment to make more information available to the public, partners, and stakeholders.
This second edition gives an overview of the work undertaken in 2020 to support healthy eating, food safety and innovation, as well as how they contributed to the Government of Canada’s comprehensive response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“While the pandemic has challenged all of us, we continued to work to promote and implement evidence-based nutrition policies and standards, and advance initiatives under the Healthy Eating Strategy. We also forged ahead to modernize our regulations to address the issues, irritants, and bottlenecks that affect innovation and growth in the agri-food sector.” – Pierre Sabourin, Assistant Deputy Minister and Manon Bombardier, Associate Assistant Deputy Minister
The report covers Health Canada’s key accomplishments in:
- Promoting healthy eating
- Supporting evidence-informed decision making
- Monitoring the food environment
- Ensuring the safety of Canada’s food supply
- COVID-19 and food safety
- Setting safety standards
- Pre-market oversight
- International collaboration
It also includes some key metrics from the new Canada Food Guide:
- Food guide snapshots accessed*: 695,310
- Translated snapshots accessed*: 57,364
- e-newsletter subscribers: 52,300
- Website visits: 2,945,000
- Times content featured on social media: 1 million
- Food guide recipes accessed*: 800,000
* accessed = ordered + downloaded + viewed
Of note, there was a section on nutritional quality (excerpt below is from the section of the report that starts on page 15 of the PDF available though the page link at the top of this article or directly here https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/hc-sc/documents/services/publications/food-nutrition/highlights-faits-saillants-2020/highlights-2020.pdf):
Canada’s food supply is extensive and dynamic, with close to 25,000 new products introduced over the past five years. The Healthy Eating Strategy takes a comprehensive approach toward improving the food environment, with initiatives aimed at improving the quality of the food supply. To monitor and assess the impact of the Healthy Eating Strategy on nutritional quality of the Canadian food supply, we are tracking the availability of foods high in nutrients of public health concern (saturated fat, sugars and sodium) on the Canadian market. Foods containing 15% or more of the daily value of these nutrients are considered “high in” these nutrients.
Using 2017 nutrition data that University of Toronto researchers collected about prepackaged foods, we established a baseline for the nutritional quality of the Canadian food supply. The baseline shows that about half the prepackaged foods sampled (just over 17,600) on Canadian store shelves in 2017 were high in at least one of the three nutrients of concern. Health Canada found that the following select food categories had a tendency to be high in nutrients of concern: bakery products, beverages, cheese, condiments and sauces, chips and snacks, frozen entrees and sides, candies, cookies, soups, deli meats, dried fruit, and plant-based meat alternatives.
Using more recent market research data, Health Canada also looked at how the food supply changed after the launch of the revised food guide, specifically regarding plant-based foods. Canada’s food guide recommends regular intake of vegetables, fruit, whole grains, and protein foods, and among protein foods, to consume plant-based more often.
Between the launch of the new food guide in January 2019, and December 2020, 120 plant-based products entered the Canadian market. Of these new products, many are dairy alternatives (30%), snack foods (26%), processed meat, fish, or egg alternatives (15%), and desserts (11%). Although plant-based, many of these products are not in line with Canada’s food guide recommendations. More than half of the new plant-based, processed alternatives to meat, fish or eggs were high in sodium. In addition, the majority of the plant-based desserts were high in sugars and saturated fat (e.g., containing 15% or more of the daily value for these nutrients of concern). Moreover, more than one third of dairy alternatives, snacks, and processed meat, fish, or egg alternatives were high in saturated fat.
