Comment by benzor
7 years ago
This is great. A no-nonsense, modern take on healthy nutrition. It's simple (no more food groups, portions, etc.), and actually healthy (e.g. not catering to the dairy industry with a daily glass of milk recommendation, pizza is not a vegetable, etc.).
Compare it to this: https://www.cnpp.usda.gov/sites/default/files/archived_proje...
> Compare it to this: ...
The USDA updates the guidelines every so often. They no longer use a pyramid, and they’ve silently backed away from recommending so many carbs. Compare Canada’s guide to https://www.choosemyplate.gov/ .
https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/healthy-eating-recommendatio...
It seems to stick to more traditional lines of avoid saturated fats (butter, ghee,coconut oil) and favour olive oil, canola oil etc.
And reduce fat in general
"This is great. A no-nonsense, modern take on healthy nutrition. "
Even though it's technically 'no nonsense' - it actually is effectively 'nonsense' from a communications perspective.
It's almost meaningless, and un-actionable, and I don't think it will have any effect, on any group. I wonder if this should simply be a single page of points urging us to 'eat healthy' and that should be it.
Consider the main takeaway points:
'Enjoy your food' 'Eat protein' 'Eat lots of vegetables' 'Chose whole grain foods'
Seriously?
This is essentially very traditional approach to food, with noticeably less focus on carbs (we don't work on farms anymore), and also the absence milk, cheese and almost absence of meat which I believe is likely a shade ideological as opposed to nutritional.
It surely is good advice, but it's not specific at all, and essentially boils down to 'eat healthy, don't each junk food'.
Seriously consider this:
https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/healthy-eating-recommendatio...
It's the page on 'how to enjoy your food'.
"tasting the flavours" "being open to trying new foods" "developing a healthy attitude about food"
Seriously - a page devoted to instructing us to 'taste the flavours' of food.
Here the section on your 'eating environment':
Influences on eating and drinking. These can include:
distractions where you eat who you eat with what you are doing while you are eating
Eating environments can affect:
what you eat and drink the amount you eat and drink ow much you enjoy eating
It's really an eerie thing to read.
I should add: the recipes look really good however.
It’s important to note that this is taught in schools starting from as early as grade 1. I do believe that teaching children about the joys of eating food and sharing meals could have a positive impact. Consider France, arguably one of the healthiest nations when it comes to food, where this is culturally ingrained from an early age.
> It’s important to note that this is taught in schools starting from as early as grade 1.
My kids come home with hungry with half-eaten lunches complaining how they didn’t have enough time to eat. They get rushed to finish within 10-15 minutes and go outside. This is a universal complaint among parents.
We’re culturally ingraining eating as something you rush through on the way to something else.
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> almost absence of meat which I believe is likely a shade ideological as opposed to nutritional.
Finally someone here notice it. Have you also noticed how Canada's New Food Guide looks eerily similar to the much-criticized EAT-Lancet recommendation (reportedly fueled by Vegan propaganda): https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/diagnosis-diet/20190...
I like it, too. Pretty much what I've been following for the last 1-2 years.
Would like more clarification on the saturated fats front, though (compare coconut oil, butter, palm oil, trans fats).
Basically, many of their healthy fat oils are actually highly processed (which are not recommended), while the non-processed unsaturated fats (such as olive oil) are not suitable for (high-temperature) cooking.
"unsaturated fats (such as olive oil) are not suitable for (high-temperature) cooking."
That's not true, another human myth.
here is the paper, TLDR: olive oil retains most of its nutritional benefits even when heated in high temperatures.
https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf020506w
go for healthy fat! :)
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Avoid oils in general. They're mostly devoid of nutrition (i.e. no fiber, lacking vitamins and minerals compared to the food source) and only contain fat https://youtu.be/LbtwwZP4Yfs
As someone from Spain, a place that's soon gonna have the highest life expectancy in the world, yeah we're not removing olive oil from about 50% of the "core" dishes that we regularly eat.
Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/16/spain-to-beat-...
https://www.oliveoilmarket.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/3.p...
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It doesn't make a blind bit of difference. As long as you're a) not obese, b) not eating too much sugar and b) eating reasonable quantities of vegetables, everything else is a rounding error. Read just about any study on nutrition and you'll see negligible effect sizes at the very cusp of statistical significance.
All of the confusion about what we're supposed to eat derives from this simple fact. We've got all sorts of data suggesting that this diet or this food might be good for you, but the effect sizes are too small to care about.
If you obsessively tweak your diet based on every little scrap of data, you might possibly earn yourself three or four months of healthy life expectancy compared to a diet that your great-grandmother would recognise as being sensible. It's just not worth the effort.
There is no reason to avoid fat.
Here is one instance of an easily accessible peer-reviewed-science-based list of the current knowledge on dietary fat: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/news/t/fat
It does not show that oils or fat are something to blanket avoid.
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Wrong. Quality fats are not only essential but also good for you for example: olive oils, Avocado oils.
Avoid (cheap) vegetable oils such as sunflower and rapeseed oils and the derived products with hydrogenated oils, such as margarines.
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Thanks for the link.
This seems mostly in line with what I read in "The Mostly Plant Diet" [1]:
> Fats: Especially avoid trans fats and vegetable (seed) oils, but also other cooking oils, even olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, walnut oil, sesame oil, etc. Enjoy whole olives, whole coconut, whole avocados, whole walnuts, and whole sesame seeds instead. They are naturally packaged with many nutrients and fiber, which is stripped out when processed to make oil.
[1] http://www.humansarenotbroken.com/mostly-plant-diet/
Replying to my own comment since it's too late to edit:
I don't mean avoid fats, I mean avoid extracted fats. Oils lack fiber and much of the nutrition that the whole food has. I.e. eat olives over olive oil, avocados over avocado oil, etc. I understand it sounds crazy, and yes it's not easy, but for my family's health it's been worth it. We've all found great benefit in different ways.
Also Dr Greger's "How Not to Die" book is a better source than the YouTube video I linked.
spraak's point on preferring whole source foods seems sound.
Having watched this video though, it presents a fringe view on dietary lipids, and is full of dubious logic. The presenter gains academic credos by flashing up various small studies very briefly, but never examines their interpretability, nor considers the counterpoint.
Perhaps there is a larger issues here of vegans over-eating poor quality lipids, which he is trying to address.
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There's some evidence that olive oil is directly good for the heart: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/101/1/44/4564320
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They both look the same (except for use of pyramid vs circle). What exactly are the major differences as you see?
The new Food Guide doesn't really discriminate by food groups apart from "eat fruits and veggies" and does away with daily portions per food type. What are the similarities you see?
Even if I agree with the guide, one has to remember it is election year in Canada, and Canada is one of the largest grower of pulses and legumes. Nothing is devoid of political ramifications.
While it is not completely impossible, if political ramifications were the prime drivers, meat, dairy and grain would have a lot more space and would have suffered when comparing to previous version of the guide.
The guide as likely little effect outside the country, its effect is more on small institutional kitchens (daycares, schools, clinics etc.), its content is unlikely to affect international sales. Its political effect is more likely to be felt internally, through perception of people in the affected industries rather than the effect the guide may have on their sales.
Some of the not so favoured are powerful industries what occupy a lot of land across several provinces (wheat), have suffered recently and are getting more politically active (dairy) or are in areas where the party currently in power needs to keep its support for the next election (meat).
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-...
https://www.choosemyplate.gov/
Both use a pretty similar graphic and both dedicate 50% of the plate for fruit and vegetable.
I'm Canadian and the milk industry seems like a much bigger political issues (and it was already one after the USMCA).
Oh, it’s still catering to some industries, they’re just far less blatant about it than in America.
Do you have anything to back that statement up?
https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canada-food-...
Food science in general is as corrupt as it gets, with the vast majority of research funded by and favorable to agriculture businesses. Even stuff that we take for granted as healthy, such as fruit and vegetables, often have their benefits massively overstated by the companies that stand to benefit by such proclamations of health.
The area has been an absolute miserable failure in its obstensible goals, making us healthy. The western world has been pretty diligent about following the recommendations of the food scientists, especially around eliminating saturated fat, and the results have been a complete and utter disaster. Yet we continue to listen to the exact same people hashing the exact same advice as the population continues to get fatter, sicker, and die sooner.
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In the Pork and apple skillet dinner[1], they recommend using canola oil, a recommendation one doesn't see all that often. With canola oil having been engineered in Canada, is it an oil of choice for Canadians?
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canada-food-...
I'd say canola is the default oil if you need fat that has little to no flavour itself in a recipe.
All the vegetable oil I buy here in the UK is actually 100% canola oil. You have to look at the ingredients list to realise it since it's just labeled as vegetable oil.
I'm surprised you don't see that recommendation often. It's a very cheap, versatile cooking oil. I wouldn't say it's anyone's favourite, but it's effectively the default?
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Such as?
Milk is a huge deal in the US, the dairy farmers association has it engrained in every American that they need milk and only milk for calcium - never mind broccoli, almonds, figs, sardines, etc., in fact they go through great pains to not mention alternate sources of calcium. It only works because so much of the US population is lactose tolerant.
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