What’s the Deal With Canada's Food Guide

Andrew Hutton

Mr. Breaton

EWC4U

March 11th, 2015

What’s the Deal With Canada's Food Guide

Creative Comp #1

Canada's Food Guide.  Now there is something that I can't bring myself to believe in.  If you ask almost anyone if they follow Canada's Food Guide to the number I bet they would say not by a long shot.  If we all followed it to the number then everyone would be overweight to some degree and spending far more money than we need to on food and on prescription drugs.  The only people that I know that have ever told me to follow Canada's Food Guide are the people who are paid to tell me to follow it.  Pediatricians , dieticians and doctors.  Now I'm not saying that every part of it is bad advice, I'm just saying that the majority of this guide is less than perfect when it comes to promoting healthy eating.  Now, I have Chrons disease which is a nice way of saying that I have internal inflammation in my small and large intestines.  Why does this matter to my point?  If not for Chrons disease then I would be like most people blindly following the guide because it's created by the government right? The government wouldn't lie to me.

When I was very sick back in elementary school, I was told to follow the Food Guide so that I could get healthy.  The dietician told me to drink more milk, eat more grains, eat vegetables and fruit and eat more red eat.  What did that do for me? It made me more sick than I already was because my body was so inflamed it could not digest any of the foods they recommended.  Following the Food Guide made me so sick that I could not eat real food at all. I had to get all of my nutrients from a liquid diet and an nasogastric tube that went from my nose to my stomach directly.  No whole food for me - just a liquid diet that cost $100 a can and $2000 a week to make me healthy.

My big issue was that I could not digest milk.  This issue started back when I was a baby and this intolerance to milk made me sick over time.  The dietician kept telling me to drink more milk and the more I drank the sicker I got.  I'm not quite sure why we as humans think that to be healthy we need to drink the milk of another pregnant animal?  There are lots of other ways to get calcium without drinking cows milk.  Did you know that we feed antibiotics to cows to keep them healthy to produce more milk for babies and children?  Do you think those antibiotics are in the milk we drink? Do you think they just disappear or do they get transferred to humans who drink the milk? Canada's Food Guide tells us to drink milk.  Today there are so many alternatives to dairy in the refrigerator of your local supermarket, like coconut, almond, soy, flax and rice milk just to name a few.  More and more people are choosing not to drink milk.

Then we have Gluten.  Canada's Food Guide recommends grains as the best source of carbohydrates and energy in our diet.  In the wild, how many animals eat wheat?  The answer is none.  If we feed wheat to animals they get sick and fat and they need antibiotics to repair all of the digestive damage that eating grains creates.  So if that is what happens to animals, why would we think that eating wheat would be good for humans?  Canada's food guide tells us to eat grains at  the majority of our meals. As we continue to eat more grains we continue to get sick.  Never in our history have we as a human race been fatter and sicker.  Eat more grain people!

The companies that manufacture the majority of our packaged food are driving the business of Canada's Food Guide.  The Dairy Board, the Meat Manufacturers and big corporations like Kellogg's are the major funding agencies behind the food choices that our government promotes. Do you know how much sugar is in breakfast cereal?  Advertising teaches parent to buy cereal for their kids for a healthy start to their day.  With that much sugar in cereal why don't we just feed kids cake and soda pop for breakfast?  We wonder why kids are so hyper in school?  It couldn't be the sugar added in their food could it?

What would happen if we all just decided to eat real food like whole fruits and vegetables, local meat and eggs, nuts and seeds?  We would be thinner, healthier and have more energy to live an exciting life.  I choose to eat healthy to be healthy and not to follow the government guide.  I think it's just big business selling us bad advice.  What do you think?  Choose your food wisely!