North Americans’ lifestyle is a party now, pay later deal.
Bad diet, little exercise and aging demographics are creating an overweight, disease-prone population.
Couple that with increasing application of ever more expensive high tech medicine and you have the prospect of crippling health care costs.
Indeed, the Conference Board of Canada says public health care spending as a percent of provincial and territorial government revenue is expected to climb to 42 percent by 2020, up from 31 percent in 2000.
In the United States, total health care spending now represents 16 percent of the gross domestic product and is expected to rise to 20 percent by 2015.
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That is worrisome, but while we’d like to be like that healthy 60-year old Swede on his cross-country skis, first we have to finish watching Canadian Idol and hey, could you hand me another doughnut?
Canadians should be encouraged to improve activity and diet, but the sad fact is that we seem set in our ways.
So if people won’t change, how about changing food?
That question is being asked at the Richardson Centre for Functional Foods and Nutraceuticals in Winnipeg.
Just a few months old, the $30 million facility is set to be a proving ground for the idea that components with specific healthful properties can be extracted from whole foods, put into other foods and eaten to address identified health problems.
We’ve all heard about certain foods’ ability to boost the immune system or lower cholesterol, but until now, many of these claims were based on anecdotal information.
In today’s regulated food system, such claims can be printed on labels and advertised only if proven by scientific study.
That is where the Richardson Centre comes in. Not only does it have the equipment and know-how to determine what components to extract and how to do it, it can perform animal and human feeding trials and has the sophisticated medical monitoring equipment to confirm the impact on the body.
Curtis Remple, research development
manager at the Richardson Centre, says the result will be to redefine food as the first line of health.
Of course, it already is, but eating healthy isn’t easy. Look at food guide recommendations like eating five to 12 servings of grain products a day.
Few weight-watching, sedentary office workers will eat that much bread and cereal.
But if you offered the best, most nutritious parts of cereals in one fortified serving that met their daily need without overloading their calorie intake, they’d go for it.
Remple thinks there are opportunities for farmers in all this.
For example, American dietary guidelines recommend eating three cups of pulses per week for their health-giving fibre and low-fat nutrition, but most people would be hard pressed to think of pulse-based dishes to meet that target. The result is dismal domestic pulse consumption.
But if pulses were processed into flour that could be used to fortify bread, bagels and even doughnuts, the domestic market for pulses would expand, benefiting farmers.
Repeat this across a range of foods and soon the billions of dollars earmarked for pills and treatments and hospital stays could be saved, replaced by a new concept of eating for health that, best of all, still allows us to snack on a fortified, but delicious, doughnut.
