Canada launched a new and improved edition of its food guide yesterday, our neighbor to the north’s version of the U.S. “food pyramid.” Theirs looks a bit less influenced by the meat and dairy associations than ours does. As reported in the National Post, Canadians should:
• Eat at least one dark green and one orange vegetable every day
• Have vegetables and fruit more often than juice
• Make at least half of your grain products whole grain each day
• Drink fortified soy beverages if you do not drink milk
• Eat beans, lentils and tofu often
• Eat at least two food guide servings of fish every week
• Satisfy your thirst with water
• Adults should get 30 to 60 minutes of moderate physical activity every day and children 90 minutes
Can you imagine the USDA telling Americans to eat tofu? The shit-caked boots of the beef lobby would be firmly holding their necks to the ground within minutes of their typing the words. Just ask Oprah.
The Canadian guidelines also offer a customizable component, where online visitors can enter their gender, height, and weight and … well, that’s all … and get “personalized” nutrition information. Canadian physician-turned-blogger Yoni Freedman is infuriated by the uselessness of the My Food Guide component, and has a rant about it as well as the food guide over at Weighty Matters.
(Thanks, O indefatigable Jack)
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February 6th, 2007 at 2:33 pm
It’s true, the My Food Guide component is quite useless. However, they now have a link up to something called EATracker, which lets you track your day’s food and activity choices and compare them with the new Health Canada guidelines. It looks promising (I’ve only just signed up so haven’t given it a test run), although Mac users beware: it doesn’t work in Safari.
February 6th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
I object to “Satisfy your thirst with water” when wine is the choice of mine. (hiccup)
February 7th, 2007 at 7:23 am
this is impressive, though i keep hearing that too much soy is bad for you and that we should try to minimize soy intake. between the soy milk and the frequent tofu servings the guide recommends, would it kill me, or is someone paying u.s. researchers to come up with this stuff in order to put the kabosh on increased tales of soy? inquiring minds want to know.
February 7th, 2007 at 8:10 am
I think the Canadian recommendations are a bit out of context: really what they mean is “eat beans, lentils and tofu often in place of meat.” Tofu is high in fat but the fat’s less harmful than what you get in most meat; I don’t think soy in and of itself is the issue but rather the fat content of tofu. They don’t recommend more than 3 or so servings of meat and alternatives (including tofu) per day.
February 7th, 2007 at 11:46 am
The concern with Tofu is that it seems an “OD” of Tofu / Soy increases Estrogene production in the body and obviously (especially for guys) that is “not a good thing”.
True or false? You decide. I really couldn’t tell you.
February 7th, 2007 at 1:14 pm
There’s still a lot of influence by the meat and dairy industries. And the wheat board.
The customizable component actually only allows gender and age. The lack of options to include height, weight or physical activity levels are part of what makes the online interface so useless.
As for the inclusion of soy - that’s been in previous versions. The kicker is that the new guide doesn’t recognize anything other than tofu or soy milk (no almond or rice milk as a replacement for dairy, for instance), and the multi-cultural aspects that we were all expecting are pretty sad indeed.