Canada Food Guide
My six year old daughter brought home a copy of the Canada food guide from school a couple of days ago and all weekend she has been comparing our diet with the number of servings of food that the Canada Food Guide says that we should be eating. I am not impressed at the food guide itself but would like to make my own. As some Canadians would know there are always praise and criticisms every time there is a change to the Canada Food Guide and just be reading it it seems that the guidelines are created by the farmers of Canada.
What Foods are in the Canada Food Guide?
5-12 servings of Grain products
5-10 servings of Vegetables and Fruit
2-4 servings of Milk products
2-3 servings of Meat and alternatives
Let’s see where to start. The guidelines set out are very vague. What if I have 12 servings of white bread in a day and five servings of fruit? Does anyone really need 12 servings of grains a day? That would not be balanced. What about the meat? It looks like there is a very small protein component. And why is milk or cheese something that should be mandated? Isn’t the calcium in green vegetables easier for out body to metabolize?
Portion sizes in the Canada Food Guide
The other big problem is serving size. We occasionally see some kind of marketing on what a serving size is and I have dealt with that in this blog before but the fact is that no one knows what the of something is. A 50-100 gram serving of steak is about 4 onces and I have not seen a steak less than 8 onces in a restaurant before.
I definitely am not opposed to a food guide I truly believe that anyone that is trying to stay healthy must have some kind of benchmark for what kind of and how much food they should be eating and I am really glad that six year old kids are being taught the essence of healthy eating, I just wish this education would continue because we all know that teenagers basically forget this info and treat their stomach as some kind of science project.
Stay tuned to my version of the food guide later today.
Update – new Canada Food Guide Out
Well just a couple of weeks after I lay into the Canada food guide a new Canada Food Guide is released by the health minister here in Canada. The new food guide looks at serving sizes which I like and junk food which I also like but I have not had too much of a chance to look at the nuances of the food guide which I hope to do later today.
For now go look at the Canada Food Guide, there is a guided tour as well as lots of other information on the official government website.