[benzor]

This is great. A no-nonsense, modern take on healthy nutrition. It's simple (no more food groups, portions, etc.), and actually healthy (e.g. not catering to the dairy industry with a daily glass of milk recommendation, pizza is not a vegetable, etc.).

Compare it to this: https://www.cnpp.usda.gov/sites/default/files/archived_proje...

[maxlybbert]

> Compare it to this: ...

The USDA updates the guidelines every so often. They no longer use a pyramid, and they’ve silently backed away from recommending so many carbs. Compare Canada’s guide to https://www.choosemyplate.gov/ .

[sharmi]

https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/healthy-eating-recommendatio...

It seems to stick to more traditional lines of avoid saturated fats (butter, ghee,coconut oil) and favour olive oil, canola oil etc.

And reduce fat in general

[sonnyblarney]

"This is great. A no-nonsense, modern take on healthy nutrition. "

Even though it's technically 'no nonsense' - it actually is effectively 'nonsense' from a communications perspective.

It's almost meaningless, and un-actionable, and I don't think it will have any effect, on any group. I wonder if this should simply be a single page of points urging us to 'eat healthy' and that should be it.

Consider the main takeaway points:

'Enjoy your food' 'Eat protein' 'Eat lots of vegetables' 'Chose whole grain foods'

Seriously?

This is essentially very traditional approach to food, with noticeably less focus on carbs (we don't work on farms anymore), and also the absence milk, cheese and almost absence of meat which I believe is likely a shade ideological as opposed to nutritional.

It surely is good advice, but it's not specific at all, and essentially boils down to 'eat healthy, don't each junk food'.

Seriously consider this:

https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/healthy-eating-recommendatio...

It's the page on 'how to enjoy your food'.

"tasting the flavours" "being open to trying new foods" "developing a healthy attitude about food"

Seriously - a page devoted to instructing us to 'taste the flavours' of food.

Here the section on your 'eating environment':

Influences on eating and drinking. These can include:

distractions where you eat who you eat with what you are doing while you are eating

Eating environments can affect:

what you eat and drink the amount you eat and drink ow much you enjoy eating

It's really an eerie thing to read.

I should add: the recipes look really good however.

[cknoxrun]

It’s important to note that this is taught in schools starting from as early as grade 1. I do believe that teaching children about the joys of eating food and sharing meals could have a positive impact. Consider France, arguably one of the healthiest nations when it comes to food, where this is culturally ingrained from an early age.

[decasteve]

> It’s important to note that this is taught in schools starting from as early as grade 1.

My kids come home with hungry with half-eaten lunches complaining how they didn’t have enough time to eat. They get rushed to finish within 10-15 minutes and go outside. This is a universal complaint among parents.

We’re culturally ingraining eating as something you rush through on the way to something else.

[shittyadmin]

Isn't that a good thing? Eating for the sake of enjoying eating seems more like a problem than a solution here, eating should be more something you do because you need to rather than something you do for fun.

If you want something beneficial, teach people to enjoy cooking rather than eating.

[dwaite]

Food is essential fuel for life and we have complex relationships with it. One could say that some of the recent emphasis on mindfulness around eating is that when we eat as a background task rather than giving it focus, we tend to eat junk and/or overeat.

[Aengeuad]

They have a page about taking time to eat [0] under the eating habits section. It might take a long time before any cultural or policy change happens but they at least acknowledge that being rushed or distracted isn't helpful.

[0] https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/healthy-eating-recommendatio...

[cknoxrun]

Out of curiosity where are you located? I chatted with my partner, a K-6 teacher and here they get 30 minutes to eat followed by 30 minutes to play or go to an activity (like choir). This seems reasonable to me.

[sonnyblarney]

You know what would be better is longer lunches and a little less class time anyhow.

2 hours max a day of 'guided learning' a day, the rest somewhere between 'self learning' and 'fooling around' is fine.

[sridca]

> almost absence of meat which I believe is likely a shade ideological as opposed to nutritional.

Finally someone here notice it. Have you also noticed how Canada's New Food Guide looks eerily similar to the much-criticized EAT-Lancet recommendation (reportedly fueled by Vegan propaganda): https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/diagnosis-diet/20190...

[leethargo]

I like it, too. Pretty much what I've been following for the last 1-2 years.

Would like more clarification on the saturated fats front, though (compare coconut oil, butter, palm oil, trans fats).

[leethargo]

Basically, many of their healthy fat oils are actually highly processed (which are not recommended), while the non-processed unsaturated fats (such as olive oil) are not suitable for (high-temperature) cooking.

[lelima]

"unsaturated fats (such as olive oil) are not suitable for (high-temperature) cooking."

That's not true, another human myth.

here is the paper, TLDR: olive oil retains most of its nutritional benefits even when heated in high temperatures.

https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/jf020506w

go for healthy fat! :)

[pugio]

You're missing the point – oils are (un)suitable for cooking primarily based on the risk of oxidation via heat. That study is only about the polyphenol content of olive oil (which, according to the study, do not get degraded as much as we might have thought), but it says nothing about the oxidation of poly-unsaturated fats.

Unsaturated fats are at a much higher risk of oxidation, which is why cooking with canola oil (7.4% saturated, 28.1% polyunsaturated), for instance, is so dangerous – without the hydrogen armor around the carbon backbone, the fat is at high risk for oxidation, after which point it becomes toxic.

The study you linked to even alludes to this danger: > It is worth noting that all the heating methods assayed resulted in more severe polyphenols losses and oil degradation for Arbequina than for Picual oil, which could be related to the lower content in polyunsaturated fatty acids of the latter olive cultivar. These findings may be relevant to the choice of cooking method and olive oil cultivar to increase the intake of olive polyphenols.

Suggesting that if you want to cook at higher heats with olive oil, you should search for one with an exceptionally low polyunsat content.

[Amygaz]

Olive oil can easily sustain 160C for hour long period of time. You can use it for saute and pan frying. What you are refering too is deep frying with temperatures above 190C. That is what the consensus is, also my personal experience: it smokes really fast and tastes rancid.

[shittyadmin]

I've had some smoking and a bit of rancidity using olive oil to do roast potatoes at 450F (230C) - 400F and lower usually works no issues.

[coldtea]

>Suggesting that if you want to cook at higher heats with olive oil, you should search for one with an exceptionally low polyunsat content.

Greeks have been frying french fries in olive oil since, well, the coming of potato to Europe... No casualties yet.

[dylanm5]

Avocado oil has a very high smoke point. Its not cheap, but not too much more than legit EVOO.

[spraak]

Avoid oils in general. They're mostly devoid of nutrition (i.e. no fiber, lacking vitamins and minerals compared to the food source) and only contain fat https://youtu.be/LbtwwZP4Yfs

[Escolte]

As someone from Spain, a place that's soon gonna have the highest life expectancy in the world, yeah we're not removing olive oil from about 50% of the "core" dishes that we regularly eat.

Sources:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/16/spain-to-beat-...

https://www.oliveoilmarket.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/3.p...

[spraak]

I don't have the book at hand right now to cite exact pages, but Dr. Greger's "How Not to Die" has a much better explanation and cited sources on why one would want to avoid oils in favor of the whole plant source. Looking at longevity, it's relative and multifaceted - maybe oils aren't as damaging as not exercising, but it doesn't make them healthy.

[coldtea]

I'd trust the people consuming them (and living to 100+) over some Dr that looks way older than his 46 years...

(Yeah, it's multifaceted, but it's not true that olive oil is "devoid of nutricional value" as someone wrote above (it has antioxidants, omega-6, oleic acid, and so on).

[spraak]

You know that's fallacious logic, right? Olive oil is devoid of value in comparison to olives. It has no fiber and stripped of minerals and vitamins.

[HelenePhisher]

Funny thing is that Dr. Valter Longo suggests the exact opposite - a take-in of 80 grams of olive oil a day: https://valterlongo.com/cardiovascular-diseases/

I read both books - "How not to die" (Greger) and "the Longevity Diet" - and I thought about their opinions as well. ATM I tend to stick to good oils from plants as well as nuts. Greger is not very convincing - mostly because he suggests nuts as well, and a good produced oil (like extra virgine olive oil) does not loose much nutritional value. I don't care about reduced antioxidants in oil if I combine it with greens that have loads of them.

[spraak]

How does recommending nuts contradict his message? It doesn't.

[atomical]

If Spain has the best diet why did it take this long to rise up in the rankings?

[Escolte]

Diet is not everything in the equation and we already have the highest life expectancy in Europe, so we're already "high enough". Also things like eliminating pollution from especially cities have become hot topics recently and that's also helped and etc..

My claim specifically, was that I find it rather surprising that olive oil is unhealthy, when the soon to be country with the highest life expectancy in the world, consumes per person 10 kg of it every year.

[atomical]

I think everyone wants to live the longest possible and not long enough as considered by someone else. Maybe people in Spain would live even longer without olive oil?

Also, consider that over 50% of the adult population in Spain is overweight. Maybe less oil would improve issues that come from being overweight and obese.

Plus, leading cause of death in Spain is heart disease.

[jdietrich]

It doesn't make a blind bit of difference. As long as you're a) not obese, b) not eating too much sugar and b) eating reasonable quantities of vegetables, everything else is a rounding error. Read just about any study on nutrition and you'll see negligible effect sizes at the very cusp of statistical significance.

All of the confusion about what we're supposed to eat derives from this simple fact. We've got all sorts of data suggesting that this diet or this food might be good for you, but the effect sizes are too small to care about.

If you obsessively tweak your diet based on every little scrap of data, you might possibly earn yourself three or four months of healthy life expectancy compared to a diet that your great-grandmother would recognise as being sensible. It's just not worth the effort.

[AnthonBerg]

There is no reason to avoid fat.

Here is one instance of an easily accessible peer-reviewed-science-based list of the current knowledge on dietary fat: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/news/t/fat

It does not show that oils or fat are something to blanket avoid.

[spraak]

I didn't say to avoid fat, I said to avoid extracted fats (oils). Whole food fats e.g. the olive instead of olive oil is fine

[maxlybbert]

About a year ago, I started looking into current nutritional advice. One thing that stood out was that the average American used to get 40% of their calories from fat and 1/6 of Americans were obese. The government recommended reducing fat to less than 30% of overall calories, and, amazingly, Americans actually followed the recommendation. We now get about 30% of our calories from fat, and 1/3 of us are obese.

That doesn’t say much about what kind of fat we’re eating (e.g., if it’s oil), but the advice to reduce calories from fat was based on them being empty calories. It appears that they also help people feel full longer.

Personally, when I eat a salad for lunch, it doesn’t bother me that literally 85% of the calories come from fat (15 calories for the lettuce, 90 calories for the salad dressing). Even if I have low-fat salad dressing (30 calories), I’m getting 66% of my calories from fat.

Then again , maybe I’m reading the data wrong: it’s possible to reduce the percentage of calories coming from fat by eating the same amount of fat, and more food overall. Maybe Americans just did that.

[tom_mellior]

Olives make a good snack, olive oil doesn't. Olive oil is great for frying things in, whole (or even sliced) olives aren't.

It's silly to pretend that you can pick one and live your life without the other. Or that there is never a need for some sort of cooking fat.

[spraak]

Because you're assuming maintaining the same eating habits. I have literally consumed no overt oils for a year now, have had no need for a cooking fat, and have had no lack in creative dishes. I eat flavorful curries, soups, etc. If I want something similar to sauted, I can use water or broth. If I want something crispy, I can bake. You just lack creative imagination to see that it's possible.

[AnthonBerg]

As dietary advice is being presented here as explicit statements (incidentally without evidence) I want to make this claim: The advice to avoid extracted fats (oils) is not sound.

As categories, oils and fat are fine. They both contain elements which are good for health. There are subcategories which seem to be bad for health (e.g. trans fats, and oils with those in, or rancid oil).

[spraak]

There's no physiological need for oil. Fat, yes. Oil is purely culinary.

[ensiferum]

Wrong. Quality fats are not only essential but also good for you for example: olive oils, Avocado oils.

Avoid (cheap) vegetable oils such as sunflower and rapeseed oils and the derived products with hydrogenated oils, such as margarines.

[latch]

He's saying to prefer the whole food (the "source") over the raw oil. Doesn't seem that wrong.

Also, this health guide lists sunflower and "cheap" canola as examples of good unsaturated fats.

[_up]

I wonder now if this Guide is also sponsored by the Agriculture and Health Industry. Processed food and sugar are the real things people should avoid.

[maxlybbert]

It sounds like Canada’s guide followed the same path that the US’s did: the original USDA food pyramid was influenced by lobbying and recommended lots of carbohydrates and milk. It also suffered from the fact that there was no attempt to have people follow the diet to see its effects before the USDA recommended it to the whole country. Over the past twenty years, the USDA has quietly been revising the recommendations (they make a big deal when they issue new recommendations and websites to distribute them, but they don’t say much about what actually changed each time).

My favorite example is that a doctor once recommended that I follow the DASH diet to lower my blood pressure. The DASH diet was a modified version of the 1990s food pyramid. A relatively recent study compared it with diets that get fewer calories from carbohydrates, and while all the diets they tried did lower blood pressure, the original DASH diet was the worst of the bunch ( https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3236092/ ).

[leethargo]

Thanks for the link.

This seems mostly in line with what I read in "The Mostly Plant Diet" [1]:

> Fats: Especially avoid trans fats and vegetable (seed) oils, but also other cooking oils, even olive oil, coconut oil, avocado oil, walnut oil, sesame oil, etc. Enjoy whole olives, whole coconut, whole avocados, whole walnuts, and whole sesame seeds instead. They are naturally packaged with many nutrients and fiber, which is stripped out when processed to make oil.

[1] http://www.humansarenotbroken.com/mostly-plant-diet/

[spraak]

Replying to my own comment since it's too late to edit:

I don't mean avoid fats, I mean avoid extracted fats. Oils lack fiber and much of the nutrition that the whole food has. I.e. eat olives over olive oil, avocados over avocado oil, etc. I understand it sounds crazy, and yes it's not easy, but for my family's health it's been worth it. We've all found great benefit in different ways.

Also Dr Greger's "How Not to Die" book is a better source than the YouTube video I linked.

[neuroma]

spraak's point on preferring whole source foods seems sound.

Having watched this video though, it presents a fringe view on dietary lipids, and is full of dubious logic. The presenter gains academic credos by flashing up various small studies very briefly, but never examines their interpretability, nor considers the counterpoint.

Perhaps there is a larger issues here of vegans over-eating poor quality lipids, which he is trying to address.

[spraak]

I don't have the book at hand right now to cite exact pages, but Dr. Greger's "How Not to Die" has a much better explanation and cited sources

[abainbridge]

There's some evidence that olive oil is directly good for the heart: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/101/1/44/4564320

[spraak]

That study compares different olive oils, not olive oil vs e.g. whole olives. Dr Greger's "How Not to Die" book explains how oils like olive oil are in general not good for the arteries.

[abainbridge]

Dr Greger's claims seem to contradict the bulk of academic opinion. Maybe he's right, but when I search, I tend to find things like these:

"Olive oil is well known for its cardioprotective properties" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23006416

"In conclusion, the aggregated evidence supports the assertion that olive oil consumption is beneficial for human health" - https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037851221...

"In conclusion, olive oil consumption was related to a reduced risk of incident CHD events." - https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-n...

"Higher baseline total olive oil consumption was associated with 48% (HR: 0.52; 95% CI: 0.29 to 0.93) reduced risk of cardiovascular mortality" - https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4030221/

"In this experiment, it seems that taking 20ml of raw olive oil – either extra virgin or ‘normal’ – can have a positive effect on our hearts." - https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/articles/tWtLcz30LZm3YTk5Vf...

[sridca]

They both look the same (except for use of pyramid vs circle). What exactly are the major differences as you see?

[folkrav]

The new Food Guide doesn't really discriminate by food groups apart from "eat fruits and veggies" and does away with daily portions per food type. What are the similarities you see?

[131012]

Even if I agree with the guide, one has to remember it is election year in Canada, and Canada is one of the largest grower of pulses and legumes. Nothing is devoid of political ramifications.

[igrekel]

While it is not completely impossible, if political ramifications were the prime drivers, meat, dairy and grain would have a lot more space and would have suffered when comparing to previous version of the guide.

The guide as likely little effect outside the country, its effect is more on small institutional kitchens (daycares, schools, clinics etc.), its content is unlikely to affect international sales. Its political effect is more likely to be felt internally, through perception of people in the affected industries rather than the effect the guide may have on their sales.

Some of the not so favoured are powerful industries what occupy a lot of land across several provinces (wheat), have suffered recently and are getting more politically active (dairy) or are in areas where the party currently in power needs to keep its support for the next election (meat).

[dwild]

https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/healthy-eating-...

https://www.choosemyplate.gov/

Both use a pretty similar graphic and both dedicate 50% of the plate for fruit and vegetable.

I'm Canadian and the milk industry seems like a much bigger political issues (and it was already one after the USMCA).

[village-idiot]

Oh, it’s still catering to some industries, they’re just far less blatant about it than in America.

[ramy_d]

Do you have anything to back that statement up?

https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canada-food-...

[village-idiot]

Food science in general is as corrupt as it gets, with the vast majority of research funded by and favorable to agriculture businesses. Even stuff that we take for granted as healthy, such as fruit and vegetables, often have their benefits massively overstated by the companies that stand to benefit by such proclamations of health.

The area has been an absolute miserable failure in its obstensible goals, making us healthy. The western world has been pretty diligent about following the recommendations of the food scientists, especially around eliminating saturated fat, and the results have been a complete and utter disaster. Yet we continue to listen to the exact same people hashing the exact same advice as the population continues to get fatter, sicker, and die sooner.

[ramy_d]

I don't understand. You're saying a diet based around fruits and vegetables is unhealthy and favourable to the agriculture business but saturated fats are ok?

What a tail spin.

[village-idiot]

I'm not saying that fruits and vegetables are unhealthy per se, but that their benefits have been vastly overstated, especially for fruits. Triply so for juice, which is basically the same as soda.

Saturated fat is good for you, the pop science you've been fed about saturated fat is complete garbage. Sure, saturated fat increases "bad" cholesterol, LDL. Unfortunately it turns out there are two types of LDL, only one of which is actually correlated with heart attacks. Turns out cutting out saturated fat from your diet might drop your LDL, but it also reduces expected lifespan. Oops! You could also take Statins for those "dangerous" levels of LDL, but it turns out they do nothing to improve your all-cause mortality stats unless if you fall within a narrow portion of the population.

It's only a tailspin because you've been fed garbage information about food your whole life. But given the absolute catastrophic state of public health within the United States, I'm genuinely surprised that anyone listens to the official health guides at all.

[ramy_d]

> Triply so for juice, which is basically the same as soda. https://food-guide.canada.ca/en/healthy-eating-recommendatio...

did you even read the guideline?

[bb101]

In the Pork and apple skillet dinner[1], they recommend using canola oil, a recommendation one doesn't see all that often. With canola oil having been engineered in Canada, is it an oil of choice for Canadians?

[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/health-canada/services/canada-food-...

[igrekel]

I'd say canola is the default oil if you need fat that has little to no flavour itself in a recipe.

[lhopki01]

All the vegetable oil I buy here in the UK is actually 100% canola oil. You have to look at the ingredients list to realise it since it's just labeled as vegetable oil.

[freeone3000]

I'm surprised you don't see that recommendation often. It's a very cheap, versatile cooking oil. I wouldn't say it's anyone's favourite, but it's effectively the default?

[RugnirViking]

No? At least where I'm from, the default is sunflower oil and if you want to upgrade its olive oil. I've never heard of canola oil

[tom_mellior]

FWIW, you may know it as rapeseed oil. "Canola was originally a trademark name of the Rapeseed Association of Canada, and the name was a condensation of "Can" from Canada and "ola" from other vegetable oils like Mazola,[6][7] but is now a generic term for edible varieties of rapeseed oil in North America and Australia. The change in name serves to distinguish it from natural rapeseed oil, which has much higher erucic acid content." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canola_oil

[village-idiot]

Because it’s awful for your health?

[benj111]

Such as?

[zxcvbn4038]

Milk is a huge deal in the US, the dairy farmers association has it engrained in every American that they need milk and only milk for calcium - never mind broccoli, almonds, figs, sardines, etc., in fact they go through great pains to not mention alternate sources of calcium. It only works because so much of the US population is lactose tolerant.

[kcmastrpc]

One might argue we are lactose tolerant because of the ridiculous amount of lobbying they did in the 50s and 60s.

[village-idiot]

Calcium in milk is also not bio-available once it’s been homogenized, because it’s stripped out of its protective fat layer and expose to lactose which binds to it in a way that humans can’t undo on our own.

Milk is a fantastic source of calcium, when you don’t mess with it too much. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s evolved specifically to grow mammals up to full size as quickly as possible, which includes growing a lot of bone. The issue is that we’ve monkeyed with it in a way that’s convenient for producers, but bad for consumers.

[benj111]

Do you have any links?

It's not a claim I've ever heard before.

[village-idiot]

Not a link, but a book. Deep Nutrition, by Catherine Shanahan.

She cites a couple hundred studies in the book, worth a read if you’re into this stuff.