News

Canada should ban trans fat and launch a major public-awareness campaign to prevent an "obesity epidemic" from lowering the life expectancy of Canada's children, says an all-party Commons committee that has been studying the issue since last June.

The report says 26 per cent of Canadians aged 2 to 17 are overweight or obese, compared with 12 per cent in 1978. "The committee was shocked to hear how much overweight and obesity rates among children and adolescents in Canada have increased over the past three decades," it says.

"The committee shares the fears of many experts who predict that today's children will be the first generation for some time to have poorer health outcomes and a shorter life expectancy than their parents."

The committee wants the government to set hard targets to halt the rise by 2010, in time for the Vancouver Olympic Games, and to reduce obesity rates in children 2 per cent by 2020.

"We've got a serious problem," said Conservative MP Rob Merrifield, chairman of the standing committee on health.

"We've got to do a paradigm shift and it's going to take a concerted effort by every Canadian," he said, comparing the challenge with the campaign to persuade people to use seat belts.

"The public needs to know, more than anything else, they're just eating larger meals than they should eat for the amount of exercise they are expending," he said.

For children, those meals too often include fatty and processed foods and sugary drinks loaded with calories. The report says that sugary drinks may be responsible for as much as one pound a month of weight gain in adolescents.

Obesity costs Canada an estimated $1.6-billion annually in direct health care — 2.4 per cent of total health-care spending. There's another $2.7-billion in indirect costs, including lost productivity, disability insurance, reduced quality of life and mental-health problems because of stigmatization and poor self-esteem, the report says.

Responding to the concerns about childhood obesity, the committee spent nine months consulting dozens of stakeholders, including dieticians, doctors, industry associations and aboriginal health service agencies.

The report, entitled Healthy Weight for Healthy Kids, notes that 55 per cent of aboriginal children on reserve and 41 per cent off reserve are either overweight or obese.

The most concrete recommendations include a legislated limit on trans fat — the industrially produced unsaturated fat used in baked or fried foods. Trans fats have been shown both to elevate "bad" cholesterol and lower "good" cholesterol.

The report proposes regulations that by 2008 would limit trans fat to a maximum of 5 per cent of total fat content in food, allowing the small amount of natural trans fats from some animal products. Manufacturers would not be allowed to offset the reduction with an increase in saturated fat.

The federal Trans Fat Task Force, which was co-chaired by Health Canada and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada, recommended in 2006 a regulated approach to reducing the mostly industrially produced fat.

While the food industry supports the push toward reduced trans fat, it wants time to find other healthier oils, said Blake Johnston, vice-president of government affairs for Food & Consumer Products of Canada, which represents 150 Canadian companies, including Cadbury Adams, Frito-Lay, Heinz Canada and McCain Foods Ltd. The association sat on the task force and was consulted several times by the Commons committee, Mr. Johnston said.

"The concern we have as industry is that if we ban trans [fat] and we move too quickly and there's no supply of healthy alternatives, then food manufacturers will be forced to go back to saturated fat oils like palm oils," he said.

The health committee also recommends a mandatory, standardized nutrition label for the front of food packages, beginning with foods advertised primarily to children.

Companies have been required to put nutritional-content labels on the back of packaging since 2005. However, Ottawa does not control what manufacturers can say on the front.

"The proliferation of unregulated, front-of-package logos, based on different criteria and delivering different information, has led to confusion and mistrust among consumers," the report says.

Other recommendations include:

• A large-scale campaign on healthy weights for children that promotes physical activity and healthful food choices;

• Better collaboration with provincial and territorial partners, and national aboriginal organizations;

• A boost in research focused on children, weight, physical activity and healthful food choices, especially among aboriginal, Inuit and Métis children;

• The immediate identification of a federal department to co-ordinate the federal effort;

• An evaluation of the methods used to provide native communities with nutritious food and a second look at the idea of a children's fitness tax credit.

The report did not give the cost of its recommendations and the government is not obliged to act on them.

The standing committee on health studies and reports on all matters relating to the administration Health Canada, and oversees five federal agencies that report to Parliament through the Minister of Health.

The committee report stopped short of recommending an outright ban on child-targeted ads for high-calorie, low-nutrient food and drinks. Instead, it suggests a closer look at the situation in Quebec, which prohibits ads targeting children.

Geoff Ball, director of the pediatric centre for weight and health at Stollery Children's Hospital in Edmonton, and a professor of pediatrics at the University of Alberta, welcomed the report's emphasis on data collection and hard scientific numbers, and how it draws attention to the complexity of obesity.

"There's this perception that it's an easy fix, that it's just up to individuals pushing themselves away from the table or that we just need to get schools to get rid of vending machines," he said. "If the solution were that simple, we would not be in the situation we're in."

The government has 120 days to respond to the report.