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Monique Keiran: Four food groups or four lobby groups?

It has been 14 years since the last update to the Canada Food Guide, and Health Canada is examining its healthy-eating recommendations to Canadians. This allows us to explore how political our food is.

It has been 14 years since the last update to the Canada Food Guide, and Health Canada is examining its healthy-eating recommendations to Canadians. This allows us to explore how political our food is.

We have personal, cultural and social relationships with food that make what we eat deeply personal. We also have political and ideological relationships with food that draw many lines around it.

Who grows our food and how, how and how much it is processed, what resources we consume to grow it, move it, eat it, where and from whom we buy it, how we prepare it, how much of it we consume, and who tries to tell us anything about it can trigger reactions.

This is particularly true here in Granola Land, where almost everybody sports an idiosyncratic food ideology and everyone has an opinion.

Found posted on walls in most hospitals, clinics and schools, the Canada Food Guide is promoted as being a model for balanced, nutritional eating. However, the one-size-fits-all food guide makes opinions rear up.

“It promotes overeating,” some say. “It recommends too much meat/grains/wheat/fat/processed food,” others scoff. “It serves industry, not public health,” others say.

The food guide’s 75-year history is largely shaped by politics.

According to food historian Ian Mosby, Canada’s first food guide, called Canada’s Official Food Rules, was designed to further “particular political and professional interests by defining healthy eating in a way that prioritized a certain vision of the wartime labour, military and agricultural needs of the nation.”

The year was 1942. War raged on three continents, and Canada needed strong, strapping young men to fight overseas. But after the nearly decade-long Depression with its nutritionally inadequate relief rations, much of Canada’s population was malnourished. Studies showed fewer than 40 per cent of Canadians enjoyed adequate daily nutrition, and almost half of the first 50,000 Canadian military recruits had been rejected as medically unfit.

The new food rules were meant to help produce men able to march for days on end with more than 35 kilograms of rifle, ammunition and kit on their backs, then spring into battle. The rules were also intended to steer Canadians who stayed at home (in the kitchen) away from foods needed overseas to feed the troops.

Industrial interests took even stronger hold in the 1944 edition, which dropped “Official” from the title and overtly promoted the interests of Canada’s biggest domestic agricultural producers.

Other than the 1961 introduction of the title Canada’s Food Guide, few real substantive changes occurred in the next four editions.

However, controversy snagged the 1992 version. Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating included a new rainbow display of the four food groups and touted a “total diet approach” — but food-industry groups strongly protested the draft version.

When the final version was released, recommended servings for products including meat, dairy and high-fat foods were increased, and the not-recommended “extras” food group was renamed “Other Foods” to be eaten in moderation.

The optics were bad. One popular television journalist quipped that the four food groups should be renamed “the four lobby groups.”

The table was set for more controversy. When the next revision began in 2003, four of 12 members on the Food Guide Advisory Committee represented the food industry. Critics objected — nutrition guides, they said, should be based on science and medicine, not business interests.

Nutritional science has advanced further since then. Multiple studies demonstrate that eating processed foods and corn-derived sugars — those “extras” or “other foods” — can mess up the body’s metabolism, compounding the current epidemics of obesity, Type 2 diabetes, heart disease and other illnesses.

After extensive consultation with public-health agencies, the Standing Senate Committee on Social Affairs, Science and Technology’s 2016 report on obesity in Canada recommends a major, evidence-based overhaul of the food guide.

It remains to be seen what role politics will play this time around.

keiran_monique@rocketmail.com