Canada’s current food environment makes eating healthy a challenge. When delicious and appealing but unhealthy foods are promoted, priced, and placed for easy access and consumption, they contribute to the suboptimal diets of most Canadian adults and children.
The food industry is part of the World Health Organization’s global action plan to combat chronic disease by creating healthier food environments, including by reducing the amount of salt, saturated fat and sugar in food. playing a role. After all, food companies manufacture, distribute, and sell most of the food we consume.
It is no secret that corporations and their shareholders have legally mandated profit-driven interests, but those interests may not align with Canadians’ desire to support public health and healthy eating habits. There is a gender.
To better understand the food industry’s efforts, we examined the nutrition policies and commitments of Canada’s largest food and beverage companies, including Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Danone. We understand the work companies are doing to create a healthier food environment in Canada and see how things have improved since 2018, when a team of nutrition and public health researchers first carried out this work. I wanted to see if that’s the case.
We used standardized methodologies used in other countries to evaluate Canada’s top 22 food and beverage manufacturers and their efforts in six key areas of corporate policy and nutrition.
- corporate strategy,
- Food (re)formulation,
- nutritional information and labeling;
- marketing and promotion,
- accessibility and availability, and
- Transparency in relationships.
The scores in each of these six areas were summed to generate an overall score out of 100 for each company. To ensure that the evaluation was appropriate, we adopted a methodology that took into account current Canadian policy. The newly released report, which follows a similar report published by our team in 2019, reveals some surprising findings.
amazing discovery
Our research shows that some companies are doing more than others. Scores across companies varied, with the highest score being a total of 75 points out of 100 and the lowest being 18 points.
The best-performing company, Unilever, has a clear strategy to support healthier diets, a public target and reporting requirements for the proportion of sales from healthier products, and marketing 16 They had a policy restricting children up to age. These positive examples show that it is reasonable to expect companies to commit to public health and report on their progress toward achieving those goals.
The results show that many food and beverage companies are not doing enough to positively shape Canadian eating habits. The median score received was 49/100, a slight improvement from the previous report.
When we looked at each of the six key areas, we found little effort to make healthier food more accessible. Most efforts focused on what companies said they were doing to improve the nutritional quality of food. We also found several key areas where none of the 22 companies had commitments. For example, not a single company pledged to reduce spending on marketing unhealthy foods.
A company’s commitment to nutrition is important. They can be used to guide a company’s current and future actions, to inform shareholders and governments about a company’s intentions, and, perhaps most importantly, to hold companies accountable for actually fulfilling their stated promises.
Recommendations for a healthier food environment
For food manufacturers to play a meaningful role in improving the food environment, their initiatives and goals need to be specific, comprehensive, and clearly and transparently shared with Canadians. Companies also need to track and report on their progress toward meeting goals. We see some promising practices emerging internationally. for example,
Grupo Bimbo, an international food manufacturer based in Mexico, publicly reports on the healthiness of the products it sells and what percentage of its sales come from healthier foods.
Based on our analysis, we have developed a set of recommendations for food manufacturers. For example, we recommend:
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Food manufacturers are required to set and publish targets for the proportion of health foods in their sales.
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All food manufacturers must meet and report progress towards specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound (SMART) targets for the amount of sodium, sugar and saturated fat in their products. is needed.
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Companies must commit to making healthier food the same or lower in price than less healthy food.
We also encourage businesses to pledge not to promote unhealthy products or brands on product packaging, in environments where children under 18 may come into contact with them, or in the media, in line with recent World Health Organization recommendations. Recommended.
If companies truly want to support healthier eating habits for Canadian adults and children, they can do more. While some companies may be moving in the right direction, others appear to need further incentives to act, and overall progress remains slow.
This study highlights the importance of implementing government policies that require businesses to make positive changes and create a healthier food environment in Canada. Given that diet-related illnesses cost Canada billions of dollars in health care costs each year, it may be a worthwhile investment.
Lana Vanderlee, Canada Health Food Policy Research Chair, Assistant Professor of Nutrition; Laval University; Alexa Gaucher-Holm, Master of Science student in the Department of Nutrition; Laval University; Dana Olstad, Associate Professor, Department of Community Health Sciences University of CalgaryMonique Potvin Professor, Kent School of Epidemiology and Public Health; University of Ottawa/University of Ottawa
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
