Nutrition Month is a time for us all to reflect on our eating habits and the Government of Canada is committed to helping all Canadians make healthier food choices.
Canada’s food guide is one part of a comprehensive approach to supporting healthy eating on a variety of budgets. Health Canada considers many factors, such as the cost and availability of foods, when developing food guide resources.
The Food guide kitchen helps show how to apply Canada’s food guide in every day life, and includes recipes, articles, photographs and how-to videos to help Canadians gain skills and explore their kitchens with confidence. Searches can be filtered by meal type, required cooking appliances, recipe collections (e.g., 30 minutes or less), and ingredients. With these features, the tool can help Canadians with meal planning, budgeting, and reducing food waste.
To support healthy eating for all Canadians, Health Canada works with other departments who monitor food insecurity, the cost of food and poverty in Canada. For example, Health Canada developed the National nutritious food basket, a tool used by various levels of government and stakeholders to monitor the cost and affordability of healthy eating across the country. It is also used to calculate the cost of the food component of the Market Basket Measure, which is used by Statistics Canada to measure Canada’s Official Poverty Line. This information helps us make evidence-based decisions and informs the development of public health nutrition policies that support Canadians.
The Public Health Agency of Canada is also supporting community-based initiatives to improve health-related behaviours and to address health inequities among priority populations at greater risk of developing chronic disease. In particular, the Healthy Canadians and Communities Fund invests approximately $20 million annually and leverages additional funding from partners to support projects that focus on common behavioural risk factors, including physical inactivity, unhealthy eating and tobacco use, associated with diabetes, cardiovascular disease and cancer.
This Nutrition Month and beyond, we should all try to be more mindful of our eating habits and make healthy eating a source of joy in our life!
Happy Nutrition Month,
The Honourable Jean-Yves Duclos, P.C., M.P.
Minister of Health
