Obesity tied to food security
By gail johnson
Publish Date: 5-Oct-2006
The New York City department of health is one step closer to prohibiting the city’s 20,000 restaurants from serving food loaded with trans fats. Its proposal comes on the heels of Canada’s federal NDP’s September 21 call for the Stephen Harper government to ban the same artery-clogging substances. Those are exactly the kinds of measures that the project coordinator of the Toronto Food Policy Council wants to see more of. Wayne Roberts says that the connection between food and health is undeniable. He’s hoping to raise awareness of that link at an upcoming food- security conference in Vancouver.
“Everyone thinks that food is connected to health,” Roberts says on the phone from his office. The problem, however, is that when it comes to public policy, the two are treated as “segregated worlds”. For proof, he says, look no further than our own distinct departments, Health Canada and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada. The role of groups like his and the Vancouver Food Policy Council, he notes, is to “bridge borders”.
Given such bureaucratic gaps, the move by New York’s department of health is a bold one. (The second phase of the project is to require certain restaurants to provide calorie counts for their dishes.) It will vote in December on a ban on restaurant food containing more than trace amounts of artificial trans fats. (Vancouver’s chief medical health officer, Dr. John Blatherwick, told the Straight that he’s not planning a similar move in Vancouver any time soon. “I’m aware of it, but it’s probably not on the radar for the next year,” he said by phone.)
Some trans fats occur naturally in animal-based foods, but they’re also artificially created through hydrogenation, a chemical process that turns liquid oil into a semisolid form. Products with trans fats have a longer shelf life than those without. Besides store-bought cakes and doughnuts, trans fats are found in fast-food items like French fries, certain snack foods such as crackers, and some salad dressings. Associated with heart disease, they’re considered the most harmful type of fat to human health.
In Roberts’s view, obesity is North America’s next big health crisis. According to Obesity Canada, 10 to 25 percent of all teens and 20 to 50 percent of adults have a weight problem.
“Neither the American nor the Canadian health-care systems are sustainable under the threat of obesity, which is a guaranteed route to diabetes, heart disease, and some kinds of cancer,” he says. “Obesity is an urgent public-policy issue that’s everyone’s business.…Our conference is going to be a call to arms.”
Chew on this
So why do we need to look at food security? Plenty of reasons, according to a paper by the Community Nutritionists Council of B.C. called “Making the Connection: Food Security and Public Health”. Highly processed foods are aggressively marketed to kids, who get one-third of their daily energy requirements from such products, the council claims. Childhood obesity rates have doubled over the past 15 years. Furthermore, one in six British Columbian children lives in poverty. Poor nutrition in childhood can negatively affect intellectual and physical development. And Health Canada estimates that the country has 2.2 million cases of food-borne illness every year.
Food Secure Canada is holding its fourth annual assembly Saturday to Wednesday (October 7 to 11) at the Sheraton Wall Centre as part of the Building Bridges Towards Food Security conference. The organization’s goals include achieving zero hunger, a sustainable food system, and universal access to healthy, nourishing foods that aren’t contaminated with pathogens or industrial chemicals.
The term food security itself is somewhat vague but in fact encompasses a breadth of issues. Roberts says the phrase came out of the Second World War, along with social security and job security. Put simply, it refers to everyone’s right to safe, nutritious, and affordable food.
The conference, held in conjunction with the Community Food Security Coalition, will address a vast range of topics, including the protection of agricultural land from urban sprawl, salmon-habitat restoration, junk-food marketing to kids, school gardens, food as medicine, and the expansion of dietary guidelines to include social, environmental, and ethical factors.
Roberts will moderate a roundtable discussion on Wednesday (October 11) entitled New Directions for Connecting Food and Health. B.C. provincial health officer Perry Kendall, who will be among the speakers, points to the recent recall of bagged spinach that was tainted with E. coli 0157:H7 as a prime example of the importance of the food-security movement.
“Food is vulnerable to spoilage and contamination, and it’s not only meat and chicken we have to worry about, or cross-contamination and salmonella,” he tells the Georgia Straight in a phone interview. “Green, leafy vegetables can be a concern as well, depending on hygienic circumstances of how the food was grown, stored, and packaged.”
Kendall’s annual report, which this year focuses on food, health, and wellness, came out on October 4. He said that chronic disease accounts for nearly 80 percent of all costs in the health-care system and that illnesses like heart disease and diabetes can be linked to diet. (The Public Health Association of British Columbia is another organization that’s working to increase awareness about food security throughout the province.)
Roberts says there is good news: people don’t have to wait for the government to act. They can start making positive changes in their own lives.
“What the individual can do is very obvious and heartening,” Roberts says. “When you start eating right, it starts having an impact pretty quickly….You start to feel better right away. So on an individual level, the prognosis is good. The problem is on the policy issue.…Obesity is not a front-burner issue in Ottawa.”
Other subjects of importance to food-security organizations are environmental toxins and sustainability.
“What kind of residues are on that food after it’s been on the road for six days? Organic only gets rid of the stuff we put on it. It doesn’t protect us from what’s there in the environment, what’s in the rain,” Roberts explains.
“Sustainability really is harmony between social [factors] and the economy and the environment and health,” he says, adding that buying local is an act that food-security groups encourage; the less distance food has to travel, the less environmental harm is done.
Then there is food supply. If there were a disaster—say, an avian-flu pandemic—that shut down trucking and transportation systems, cities like Vancouver would only have one to three days’ worth of food on hand.
Roberts would like to see all educational, community, and recreation centres have food programs as part of their mandate.
The conference will address all of these issues and more, giving people plenty of food for thought.
Obesity Tied to Food Security