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Eating disorder?
Canada’s Food Guide is changing. Yep, you read that correctly. That poster of a gauge, the triangular pyramidy thing, the multi-coloured roadway of deliciousness that we’ve been following to justify our consumption of seven to ten pieces of bread a day, far too much fruit or juice, an abundance of protein and enough dairy to bind you up for weeks is being revised. Many of us reference the Food Guide as the gospel for nutritious eating, secretly thinking we can blame the Guide for our weight problems.
Last updated in 2007, the Guide explained how we should mete out our excessive caloric intake. The actual CFG barely put any emphasis on actual lifestyles or real science. Now, raise your hand if any of you actually know what’s on the current Food Guide. Anyone?
Nobody takes the Guide to the grocery store. If you’ve got a copy at home, it’s probably taped to the inside of your cupboard door and you haven’t looked at it since you picked it up at a display at a local home show or the day your kid brought it home from school.
Now, do you know who does have the CFG well and truly memorized and is putting it to profitable use? Yep, the good folks who put Froot Loops, KD, Eggo waffles, V8 Fusion, VitaminWater and the like on our grocery shelves. They’re part of a nutritious breakfast, lunch or dinner, don’t cha know. We shop with a vague inkling of what’s on the CFG and are lured into buying products that promise us they’re “an excellent source of” and you get to fill in the blanks.
We aren’t stupid, but we are busy—and if a product offers a quick and easy way to get vitamins, fibre, protein or good carbohydrates, well we’re all over that box, bottle or can of goodness.
There probably isn’t a parent who really wants to put garbage into their kid’s breakfast, lunch or dinner. But there we are, offering them juices with a promise of several servings of vegetables without the taste of broccoli or carrots or beets, or breakfast cookies and bars. How many parents actually buy those “lunch-like” containers of crackers, cheese circles and a piddly bunch of some kind of sausage? Easy to do. There isn’t any thought process necessary—and if you toss an apple into the mix, who’s to say you didn’t try to make lunchtime nourishing? Heck, it’s got to be better than peanutlike butter and jam on Wonder Bread that’s really whole(ish) grain but bleached to fool the kidlets into thinking it’s the doughy stuff lunch dreams are made of.
When the current Canada Food Guide was written, close to 25 per cent of the people on the committee were employed by food-like producing corporations whose real interests would be directly impacted by the CFG’s recommendations and outcomes. Those people represented a dairy foundation, a vegetable oil industry and an organization that represented the interests of PepsiCo, Frito-Lay and Coca-Cola. Yup, of the 12 people on that committee, three of them represented the folks who bring you deep-fried, salty snacks and sugary, chemical- laden beverages to wash the whole pile of guck down. Makes me proud to have a Food Guide taped to the kitchen cupboard door.
The truth is, there isn’t a big picture in the current food guide and there never was. If we need to have a food guide, it has to focus on our health rather than “nutrients,” the food-like producing industry and agricultural interests. The new guide needs to focus on whole foods. The new guide needs to respond to the health concerns that poor diets create. The guide should separate fruits from vegetables because, given the choice, most folks would take a cup of grapes over a cup of kale. There has to be a section that addresses the good fats every person needs to consume.
The new guide should encourage consumers to shop for food—not products. And whether or not a new food guide actually happens, consumers need to smarten up and stop being delusional about what we’re noshing on. Do we really think a low-fat sausage on a white/whole-grain bun with a bottle of vegetable/ fruit juice is a balanced meal? Do we really think a heat-sealed bag of cinnamon “oatmeal” with almond squeezings is a great way to start the day? Let’s take the grocery bag off our heads and do the right thing. Real food isn’t a processed food-like product and doesn’t have a shiny television commercial—or so I’ve heard.
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