What's happening to food these days? Vitamin-enhanced waters and juices, fortified cereals and even chewing gum are all on supermarket shelves - and all with Health Canada's blessing. Are these products even good for us?
Maybe some are but there are plenty of products out there that may pose a health risk and it seems like no one is paying much attention.
Years ago, you could count on Health Canada to be a watchdog for Canadians checking up on assorted issues and products. Concerned about the possible contamination of your cod liver oil with substances like PCBs? Health Canada was there to randomly inspect these products and make sure they were wholesome.
But not anymore. Now companies who sell assorted supplements such as cod liver oil are self-regulating, meaning the onus is on them to test their own products' purity and take steps if they're not up to snuff. Health Canada will only act if they receive a complaint of adverse effects - something that could take years to find out about - if at all. When is the last time you heard about a company pulling its own products off the shelf - unless they were concerned about a possible government recall?
Supplements and other so-called health products now fall within the jurisdiction of the Natural Health ProductsDirectorate (NHPD), which, though under Health Canada's auspices, is an entirely separate unit from the Food Directorate. But the division between a food and a "health product" is not so clear cut. And this gray area between the two may not bode well for consumers.
Ottawa physician, Yoni Freedhoff, M.D., points out just a couple of the many, many shortfalls of this NHPD in a recent article in the Canadian Medical Association Journal entitled Fortified food loophole or natural health product?
Freedhoff points out that under Food Directorate regulations, food companies cannot simply add what they want in the way of nutrients like vitamins and minerals to our food. If any nutrients are to be added, there has to be enough scientific evidence presented to justify the change. For example, soy beverages can now contain similar nutrients as cow's milk. Makes sense.
But the rules of the game have changed. Now, if a company tries to get the Food Directorate to approve the addition of various nutrients to a product and the Food Directorate turns the request down because there's not enough research to back it up, there's now a simple way around it. They apply to the NHPD.
"To date, 32 foods carry the Natural Health Products Directorate's explicit seal of approval and another 857 product license applications for 'health products in a food format' are awaiting evaluation," Freedhoff says. As these foods can be found alongside regular items in the supermarket, you sometimes can't tell a juiced up juice from a regular one with no added nutrients. On top of that, these foods don't have to have the regular Nutrition Facts box on the label telling you about the basic nutrients like calories or sugar content.
Supplement labeling is another area where Canadians are being left in the dark by Health Canada. Do you have any idea how much in the way of various vitamins or minerals you should be taking in on a daily basis? Likely not. When you make a food purchase, there is information on assorted nutrients, such as vitamin C or sodium, which tells you how much of each is in that food. It also tells you what those figures mean in terms of what you should consume in a day - the percentage of your Daily Value.
Try figuring that out if you are making a supplement purchase. In the U.S., supplements list both the actual amount of that nutrients and the percentage Daily Value (% DV). Not so in Canada. Why the difference? According to Stéphane Shank, a Health Canada spokesperson, in the U.S, dietary supplements are regulated as foods and therefore must bear the nutrition facts table, which includes percentages of daily value.
In Canada, surprise, surprise: Supplements are under the NHPD and not subject to the same labelling requirements. And though there's fast-accumulating evidence that getting too much of certain nutrients is linked to a higher risk of disease, Health Canada does not intend to amend its current labelling provisions.
If you're not armed with enough information, you could end up inadvertently getting too much of some of the riskier nutrients.
Don't take supplements? Even within the Food Directorate, consumers seem to be taking a back seat to the corporate world. For example, as I have previously written about, Health Canada is bringing in interim measures to allow for the addition of caffeine to non-colas soft drinks while they assess the issue. And food companies can add folic acid - also linked to a number of health issues at high doses - to products without disclosing the amount. The information can be called proprietary.
When asked about changing the regulations to allow for the disclosure of this information, Stéphane Shank, a spokesperson for Health Canada, said, "While it would provide information that some consumers would like to have, in order to make something mandatory, the evidence needs to be conclusive before such an amendment can be made."
Suddenly the evidence needs to be conclusive here. No interim measures when it might offer benefit to the health of Canadians.
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