A Health Canada proposal to create a healthy food label that focuses on nutrients and calories could discriminate against healthful dairy products, says a dairy nutritionist.
Nathalie Savoie, who works for Dairy Farmers of Canada, warned members of the House of Commons health committee that Canada should not go down the path of the United Kingdom, where food is graded solely on the basis of ingredients such as fat, sugar and salt.
It is a “traffic light” system, in which food deemed healthy gets a green sticker, less healthy food receives a yellow sticker and unhealthy food a red sticker.
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“Foods get a green, yellow or red light for fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt without any consideration of the beneficial nutrients,” she told MPs, who are conducting a healthy living study.
“Therefore, diet soft drinks and unsweetened Jell-O each get four green lights while nutritious foods such as two percent milk, salmon, almonds and olive oil could get red or yellow lights for fat, saturated fat or sugar.”
Savoie said the problem with trying to create simple labels that consumers can understand is that many healthy aspects of some food will get lost in the translation.
She said putting too much emphasis on calories in a food product without looking at other beneficial ingredients is an example of the problem.
“If we consider only the calories, a serving of milk would show more calories than the same serving of soft drink and a small serving of almonds, more than three Oreo cookies,” she said.
She used her time in front of the health committee to promote the health benefits of dairy products, such as bone growth, combating Type 2 diabetes and reducing the chance of colon cancer and cardiovascular disease.
She said milk products contain 16 ingredients essential to human health.
“Studies show that when the intake of milk products is not adequate, people’s diet usually falls short of several of these key ingredients. Unfortunately, most Canadians are not meeting their minimum recommended intake.”
She urged MPs to recommend to Health Canada that the proposed new healthy foods chart not be made so simple as to be misleading.
A nutrition fat table already exists, she said.
“I think it can be improved, but at least it doesn’t risk telling people that diet soft drinks are healthy and milk is not.”
