Canada Food Guide
In the past I’ve often made fun of the Canada Food Guide because it was so unclear to me. I wasn’t able to understand what and how much I should be eating. It didn’t seem to account for your size and some of the suggestions didn’t seem right. 12 servings of bread? That’s like 2000 calories. In the range of 6 - 12 servings. Which is the right choice? I had mentioned this to some of my friends. One common response was that it’s just common sense. If it was common sense we wouldn’t need a food guide or be one of the heaviest nations in the world.
In the past I had become overweight and I had turned to the Health Canada Web site to find out what to do. All I found was the food guide that had lots of nice pictures. Cool stuff like a pound of butter. Have you had your pound of butter today?
In the end, I researched non-government information and guides from other governments. I was able to loose 65lbs by changing my diet. I actually learned new diet habits that conflicted with the food guide. The diet that I wound up with didn’t seem to agree with the guide and I went to a registered dietitian to validate my diet. I believe that the information that the dietitian wasn’t very useful as it was a reiteration of some food guide principals. Also, I don’t think there was any proper sense of how much protein I needed.
The other day I took a look at it again. I must say, it too me quite a while to figure out what to click on to see the guide. The put it in PDF format. The PDF crashed my computer a couple of times (or perhaps it’s just large and it took a while to load). In any case, I wound up rebooting.
I was just in the site a few seconds ago and I can’t seem to remember where I clicked to see the guide.
http://www.hc-sc.gc.ca/fn-an/food-guide-aliment/index_e.html
The other day when I did get in, I was surprised to see that it was improved. I still found things about it that were amusing such as the entire jar of peanut butter. 
Processed vegetables and fruit (canned vegetables and orange juice). Also I noticed quinoa. What on earth is that? Some sort of fermented milk appears in the Dairy row as well. (Can’t remember the name because I can’t get back in). I can understand that different areas of the world need slightly different guides. We don’t eat ants around here for example I’m glad it isn’t there. But I was quite surprised to find things that I wasn’t familiar with at all.
I researched quinoa and it sounded pretty interesting. I found it in a store and I love it. So that was a worth while endevour. If it wasn’t for discovering quinoa (and spending a couple of days running around asking my friends if they’ve had their quinoa today), I’d say it wasn’t all that exciting to go to the food guide site.
Another thing worth mentioning is that it was hard to figure out what to click on to see the guide. Does anybody else agree or am I just too impatient? I wonder if there’s a way of measuring how accessible the food guide is.