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Provinces' School Nutrition Policies Are 'Disappointing,' Says Health Watchdog

Posted on: Wednesday, 3 October 2007, 21:00 CDT

By Anne-Marie Tobin, THE CANADIAN PRESS

TORONTO - Not a single province scored an A on a school nutrition policy report card released Wednesday by a health advocacy group, and three provinces - Prince Edward Island, Ontario and Saskatchewan - received a failing grade.

"It's quite a disappointing effort on the part of provinces," Bill Jeffery, national co-ordinator for the Centre for Science in the Public Interest, said from Ottawa.

"Provincial governments and parents and physicians and other health-care providers have been wringing their hands a lot over the past several years about rising rates of obesity, diet-related disease that's related to excessive sodium intake, too much saturated fat and too many calories.

"And it may well be that provincial governments are contributing to all of these problems by not setting strict enough standards about what can be served in schools."

Alberta received a conditional B on the scorecard, based on its draft guidelines for new standards, while a C was awarded to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland and Labrador.

The other provinces - British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec and New Brunswick - scored a D.

The three territories do not have standards, the centre's report noted.

The provincial standards were measured against science-based recommendations for set standards released by the U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM) in April of this year.

In the case of Alberta, Jeffery noted that the province scored well perhaps because it had the benefit of seeing the IOM report in April.

The IOM proposed standards take into account calories, saturated fat and sodium levels of foods. For instance, they say that there should be no more than 200 milligrams of sodium in most foods, and no more than 400 milligrams of sodium in a main entree, said Jeffery.

The objective of the centre's report Wednesday was to assess the extent to which provincial school nutrition standards actually set out expectations for school foods.

In Ontario, Jeffery said that the nutrition guidelines are limited in scope.

"They only apply to vending machines and foods that are actually served to children by community groups, like the Breakfast for Learning programs," he said.

"And so in a kind of odd way they subject these two categories of foods to much stricter standards than foods that are sold in tuck shops and fundraising activities, and most importantly, cafeterias."

On Wednesday, a campaigning Premier Dalton McGuinty said he would make Ontario schools healthier if re-elected by banning trans fats and ensuring all school menus conform to Canada's Food Guide to Healthy Living.

In the case of Prince Edward Island, Jeffery said the standards specified a list of foods that shouldn't be served at all, or that should be served only rarely.

"But often the way they characterized that was such that those could actually be served fairly often," he said.

"If you say you can't serve onion rings more than twice a month, and you can't serve cheeseburgers more than twice a month, and you go down the list of dozens or hundreds of foods, then there's a whole bunch of junk food that you can't sell more than twice a month, but you end up possibly with a lot of choices of them every day."

Jeffery called on provinces to subsidize healthy foods so they will be more appealing to students from a cost perspective.

"There is an opportunity there for exposing them to truly nutritious foods, fruits and vegetables, sometimes that are hard to pack in a brown-bag lunch, that they have to be kept refrigerated."

He also suggested there is a role for the federal government to play because it has a stake in ensuring a healthy population.

Janice Macdonald, regional executive director in British Columbia for Dietitians of Canada, lauded the report for attracting attention to the issue.

"It would be our hope that provinces would work together and come up with some consistent standards that could be applied across the country, and leadership federally would really help that move forward," she said.

She noted that guidelines have to be realistic and schools need support to implement them.

"We suggest that there be a phased-in approach," she said.

"It's new to schools in many cases. Some of them have limited access to healthy food choices to serve in their schools, and we believe that schools need to work together - that is administrators, teachers, parents, students - working together with supports in their communities like dietitians to implement guidelines."

She also noted that new guidelines in British Columbia released last month are stricter than previous 2005 guidelines, "and in some cases the report is referring to the 2005 guidelines."

"The other positive thing about the British Columbia guidelines is these are mandatory, they have to be implemented by schools and deadlines have been set."

Source: Canadian Press

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