Dr. Trevor Hancock – Healthy people, healthy communities, a healthy planet

• Published as “Our addiction to plastics will come back to haunt us”

Plastics contain some very toxic chemicals and break down into nano-particles that end up in our bodies.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

16  April 2024

696 words

Tomorrow, April 22^nd, is Earth Day, and the theme this year is ‘Planet vs. Plastics’. This is timely, because Tuesday 23^rd April marks the start of a week-long session in Ottawa of the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee on Plastic Pollution. So this week I begin to look at the plastics industry as yet another example of an industry that harms people and planet in pursuit of profit.

Set up by the UN Environment Assembly, the Committee’s task is “to develop an international legally binding instrument on plastic pollution, including in the marine environment.” This is intended to take “a comprehensive approach that addresses the full life cycle of plastic, including its production, design, and disposal” and should be ready by the end of this year. It can’t come too soon.

According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), on its ‘Our planet is choking on plastic’ website, the world produces an estimated 400 million tonnes of plastic waste every year. This will grow to 1 billion tonnes by 2052 if we carry on as we are. Since the 1970s, adds UNEP, “plastic production has grown faster than that of any other material.” For example, an astounding one million plastic bottles are purchased every minute worldwide – yes, that is every minute! – and up to five trillion – yes, trillion, which is one thousand billion! – plastic bags are used each year, UNEP states.

Making and distributing all that plastic, takes a lot of fossil fuel – “98 percent of single-use plastic products are produced from fossil fuel”, notes the UNEP – and a lot of energy. “The level of greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production, use and disposal of conventional fossil fuel-based plastics is forecast to grow to 19 per cent of the global carbon budget by 2040”, UNEP states.

All that plastic has to go somewhere, but not much is recycled; less than 10 percent according to the UNEP. About half goes into landfills, while just under 20 percent is incinerated (which if done poorly can create some very toxic chemicals, such as dioxins and furans – potent cancer-causing and foetus-damaging chemicals).

Almost a quarter is mismanaged: ‘Mismanaged means, in practice, “materials burned in open pits, dumped into seas or open waters, or disposed of in unsanitary landfills and dumpsites”, notes Our World in Data.

As a result, a lot of it ends up in our oceans. The UNEP estimates that 75 to 199 million tons of plastic are currently in our oceans. As of 2016, we were adding about 9-14 million tonnes per year, but the UNEP estimates this could double or triple to 23-37 million tonnes per year by 2040.

The problem with plastic, the UNEP notes, is that it is very durable and resistant to degradation, which makes plastic “nearly impossible for nature to completely break down.” So it floats around, ends up on beaches or sinks to the bottom, and in all of those settings, it can be mistaken for food and eaten by marine life and birds, or in the case of large nets, can ensnare fish or drown birds, turtles and air-breathing mammals.

But all that plastic does not stay floating around in large pieces. Instead, it is broken down into tiny nano-particles, which then enter the food chain. An April 7^th article in this newspaper reported that “earlier this year, UBC and Ocean Wise scientists found that plastics can harm or even kill zooplankton, reducing a food source for many types of fish, including salmon.”

Its bad enough that plastics add considerably to global heating and are a threat to marine life. But just as with persistent chemicals, which I discussed last week, our plastics will come back to haunt us in other ways. They contain, can give rise to or absorb some very toxic chemicals and, we now know, they breakdown into nano-particles that end up in our bodies. The combination of toxic chemicals and nano-particles takes us into very uncharted waters in terms of health impacts.

Next week I will look in more depth at the health implications of plastics, at the way the industry has covered up these problems, and how governments and the international community need to respond.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• Published as “We still have no idea of the health effects of many pollutants

The chemical industry is subjecting us — and all the other species with whom we share this planet — to an uncontrolled experiment to which we never consented

Dr. Trevor Hancock

9 April 2024

698 words

Almost 45 years ago I co-led a report titled ‘Our Chemical Society’ for the City of Toronto’s Department of Public Health, for whom I then worked. It makes for instructive reading, because the industry we were focused on seems to have changed little in the intervening decades in terms of its appraoch, although it has grown even larger.

In 1981 we wrote: “The chemical industry is a large and powerful sector of our society, and is committed to expanding the use of chemicals. Indeed, many chemicals used in many varied ways have been beneficial to us all. However, the extent to which chemicals have penetrated ourselves and the environment of which we are a part is a matter for serious concern.”

At that time, it was estimated, there were 60,000 – 100,000 chemicals in commercial use, with 1,000 new chemicals introduced annually. Of these, 34,000 chemicals were on the US EPA’s 1978 Toxic Effects List and there were 1,400 pesticides used in North America.

Today, in spite of decades of scientific and public concern, the situation is, if anything, worse. The chemical industry, noted the authors of a recent study in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, “is the second largest manufacturing industry globally. Global production increased 50-fold since 1950, and is projected to triple again by 2050 compared to 2010.” There are now estimated to be “350,000 chemicals (or mixtures of chemicals) on the global market”, of which “nearly 70,000 have been registered in the past decade.”

The study assessed whether we have passed the planetary boundary for ‘novel entities’. These are “new substances, new forms of existing substances and modified life forms”, things of which nature – including we humans – has no experience and not much adaptive capacity.

Novel entities include not only chemicals but “new types of engineered materials or organisms not previously known to the Earth system” (think nano-particles of plastic and GMOs) and heavy metals that we have mined and mobilized into the environment. 

But many of these chemicals remain inadequately tested. The article on novel entities gave an example:  Of more than 12,000 chemicals registered  for review in a European Union program, only 20 percent had been assessed after 10 years of operation of the program. And that is in a rich and well-managed region; they also reported that nearly 30,000 new chemical products “have only been registered in emerging economies, where chemical production has increased rapidly, but chemicals management and disposal capacity often are limited.”

In our 1981 report we expressed concern in particular about the problem of ecotoxicity: the dispersal of harmful pollutants throughout the environment (see my December 3^rd 2023 column). Many of those are persistent organic pollutants (POPs) that accumulate and are bio-magnified up the food chain – and guess who sits at the top of these food chains: Us, orca, raptors and other predators. As a result, we and they are born with and over time further accumulate a body burden of a mixture of POPs, the health effects of which are largely unknown, especially as a mix of many different chemicals.

Because of inadequate testing and population health monitoring and research, a Commission on Pollution and Health, established by The Lancet, suggested in 2017, that there are large categories of pollutants for which we lack knowledge of their actual health impacts. As a result, “the health effects of pollution that are currently recognised and quantified could thus be the tip of a much larger iceberg.”

Unsurprisingly, then, the assessment of the planetary boundary for novel entities found “the planetary boundary . . . is exceeded since annual production and releases are increasing at a pace that outstrips the global capacity for assessment and monitoring.”

In effect, the chemical industry is subjecting us – and all the other species with whom we share this planet – to an uncontrolled experiment to which we never consented, and of which we were not adequately informed – in fact, deliberately kept in the dark by so-called ‘trade secrets’. Forty-five years later, the chemical industry continues to fight tooth and nail to protect its profits and avoid stronger regulation, regardless of the toll on people and the myriad other species with which we share the planet.

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• Published as  “Gambling industry needs stronger regulation to protect public health.”

Gambling opportunities continue to expand in spite of evidence of harms from mental-health effects to financial problems

Dr. Trevor Hancock

2 April 2024

702 words

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) in Toronto just released a report on another industry that in various ways harms health – gambling.  Not only can it be addictive and harmful to health and social wellbeing, its impact is disproportionately experienced by low-income people, which makes it unjust.

Statistics Canada reported in 2022 that in 2018 (troublingly, the last year for which there is national data, it seems), almost 70 percent of Canadian adults gambled. Half of all adults bought lottery or raffle tickets, one-third bought instant lottery tickets or online games, one in eight used video lottery terminals, while one in 12 of us bet at casino tables or on sports.  

However, the StatsCan report noted, “1.6 percent of past-year gamblers were at a moderate-to-severe risk of problems related to gambling”. This equates to more than 300,000 people, but the CAMH report notes that “for every person experiencing gambling problems, another 5 to 10 people are negatively affected, with harms to mental health and financial security especially common.” So problem gambling actually affects 1.5 to 3 million Canadians.  

Problem gambling is classed as an addictive disorder.  The risks problem gamblers face include “depression and suicide, bankruptcy, family breakup, domestic abuse, assault, fraud, theft, and even homelessness”, according to the Canadian Safety Council. The CAMH study reports that “people with gambling disorder had 15 times the suicide mortality of the general population.”

While a smaller proportion of low-income people gambled, compared to high income people, they were more than twice as likely to be at risk. And worryingly, the CAMH study reported that while 1.2 percent of adults in Ontario are experiencing or are at risk for gambling problems, the rate is almost 50 percent higher in high-school students.

But gambling is also immensely profitable, both to the gambling industry and to governments that both operate and tax gambling. So it is not surprising that “gambling opportunities have been increasing globally” and that is true in Canada too; sports gambling was legalised in 2021 and in addition the provinces have expanded legal online gambling. This expansion is occurring, notes the CAMH report, in spite of evidence that “In general as gambling opportunities increase, gambling-related harms tend to increase.”

However, as a source of government revenue, gambling is unjust: First, only two-thirds of us play and pay, and second, it is a regressive form of taxation. Low-income people who gamble spend proportionately more of their annual income on gambling than do higher-income people. As the CAMH report notes, “to the extent that gambling policy fails to prevent (or even facilitates) harm, gambling policy can exacerbate health inequity.”

The CAMH report comes at the same time as a growing concern with sports gambling, especially among young people, and with the amount of advertising for gambling. The CAMH report is clear on the role of advertising: “The purpose of advertising is to drive consumption, and gambling is no exception”, their report states, adding that “there is a causal relationship between exposure to gambling advertising and . . . actual gambling activity.”

Moreover, CAMH notes, “Children and youth, as well as those already experiencing gambling problems, are especially susceptible to these effects.” Unfortunately, CAMH adds, “There do not appear to be rules or guidelines in Canada governing the volume of gambling ads”.

Bruce Kidd, a former Olympian and a professor emeritus of sports policy at the University of Toronto, is chair of a Campaign to Ban Ads for Gambling. Interviewed on CBC Radio’s ‘On the Coast’ on March 27^th, he stated: “Since the legalisation of sports betting in Canada there has been a tsunami of ads and it’s clear they have encouraged more and more children and youth and other vulnerable people to bet, and to bet well beyond their means, and to create very difficult situations.”

The campaign’s ‘White Paper’ (available at BanAdsForGambling.ca)is clear; it “calls for the prohibition of ads for gambling in the same way that ads for tobacco and cannabis have been restricted.” This should be part of a broader approach recommended by the CAMH report, to take a public health approach to gambling by focusing on stronger regulation of the industry, rather than just encouraging gamblers to be responsible.  

© Trevor Hancock, 2023

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Getting people to want and purchase more has adverse effects on both people and the planet

Dr. Trevor Hancock

26 March 2024

701 words

Last week I looked at one of the underpinnings of our economic system, the financial sector. This week I turn to another key sector that is often overlooked – the advertising industry. It is a huge industry. Forbes magazine recently reported that Magna, a major media and communications company, expects the global ad spend in 2024 “to increase by 7.2 percent, totalling $914 billion”, with over two-thirds of that being spent on digital media.  

Almost all of that nearly $1 trillion expenditure – equal to about 40 percent of the entire global auto manufacturing industry – is focused on encouraging and celebrating consumption, and getting people to want and purchase more. But this has adverse effects on both people and the planet.

Clearly people are harmed directly when advertising encourages the consumption  – or over-consumption – of health damaging products such as tobacco, unhealthy foods, alcohol, breast milk substitutes, gambling or a host of other products. But what I think we need to focus on is the harmful effects of advertising in general, regardless of the product being marketed.

Almost 2,500 years ago the Greek philosopher Epicurus wrote: “Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not”, a sentiment echoed by the 19^th century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “Happiness is continuing to desire what you already possess.” Or as Amercian singer and actor RuPaul put it, very simply, “happiness is wanting what you already have.”

But commercial advertising, of course, is about the very opposite of this. It is about persuading you that happiness is about possessing what you don’t have, to want more of something you already have, or to envy the experiences that others are having. It fosters not just envy and greed, but anxiety about lacking what you don’t have; ask the parents of any child who feels left out and looked down upon if they don’t have the latest gadget or sneakers or whatever.

In a pamphlet on the impacts of advertising on mental health, Adfree Cities – a UK-based campaign to end all corporate outdoor advertising – notes: “Advertising often presents us with an unrealistic picture of happiness, often tied to notions of glamour, money, power and possessions. As we struggle to live up to this we can feel that we’ve failed no matter how much we spend.” In the end, then, advertising creates unhappiness.

A 2020 article in the Harvard Business Review highlighted the work of a European research team that looked at the relationship between advertising and the happiness of nations. The researchers looked at roughly I million people surveyed over 30 years across 27 European nations. They found “that increases in national advertising expenditure are followed by significant declines in levels of life satisfaction.”

One of the team, Andrew Oswald, Professor of Economics and Behavioural Science at the University of Warwick, noted: “if you doubled advertising spending, it would result in a 3 percent drop in life satisfaction.” That may not seem very much, but it is “about half the drop in life satisfaction you’d see in a person who had gotten divorced or about one-third the drop you’d see in someone who’d become unemployed”, meaning “advertising has sizable consequences.”

In addition to effects on our personal wellbeing, advertising also impacts planetary health by encouraging more and more consumption of just about everything. Consumption is at the root of our global ecological crisis; more ‘stuff’ extracted for a growing population with growing demands from an increasingly damaged and over-exploited environment spells trouble. So urging people to want more stuff – super-sized meals, more energy, larger cars, more trinkets, more everything – is going to increase the harm we do to the Earth and thus to ourselves.

‘Badvertising’ is a campaign  in the UK committed to stopping adverts and sponsorships fuelling the climate emergency. They point out: “We ended tobacco advertising when we understood the harm done by smoking. Now we know the damage done by fossil fuel products and activities, it’s time to stop promoting them.”

I agree. But I would suggest we expand this idea even further, to target all advertising that encourages activities that harm the Earth and damage our health. The last thing we need is encouragement to lead more unhappy, unhealthy and planet-damaging lives.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

The issue comes under the broad heading of ethical investment, in which environmental, social and governance concerns are a factor in making investment decisions.

Dr. Trevor Hancock

18 March 2024

701 words

So far, in examining what the World Health Organization calls the commercial determinants of health, I have been looking at private sector firms that produce products that harm health, such as tobacco, fossil fuels or unhealthy foods. But the private sector does not just produce goods, it also provides financial services – such as banking and pensions – that support various industries by investing in them or providing loans.

Where these services are provided to companies that are producing products that are good for our health, such as healthy food or healthy housing, they contribute to health. But when they provide financial support to industries that produce harmful products they are harming health.

This issue comes under the broad heading of ethical investment, in which environmental, social and governance (ESG) concerns are a factor in making investment decisions. Ethical investors, for example, may choose not to invest in tobacco, fossil fuels or armaments for moral reasons.

In a recent article in Forbes Advisor, finance advisor Kat Tretina comments: “Investing solely to benefit from the highest possible returns is becoming somewhat passé.” She cites a 2022 Stanford University report that found “Older investors are overwhelmingly opposed to the idea of forfeiting investment return to advance ESG objectives.”

On the other hand, the study found “most young investors claim to be willing to give up moderate (between 5 and 15 percent) or large amounts (over 15 percent) to bring about environmental, social, and governance changes.”

But while ethical investment can be a personal decision about where to invest, most of us have large parts of our investments through our pensions (the CPP and various other pension funds) over which we have little or no direct control. So it is important that banks and pension funds invest ethically on our behalf, and that we urge them to do so.

In the case of tobacco, as a result of persistent advocacy by anti-smoking groups around the world, a number of major pension funds have divested from tobacco. A 2020 report from Physicians for a Smoke-Free Canada noted several public pension funds have divested from tobacco, including California in 2000, Aotearoa New Zealand (2007) and Norway (2010).

But the report also notes: “Within Canada, with the notable exception of Alberta, governments have not consistently accepted responsibility for ensuring that the money under their stewardship is not invested in tobacco.” Indeed, in responding to one of my columns, Pender Island resident Paul Hutcheson noted in a January 22^nd comment in this newspaper that the British Columbia Investment Management Corporation (BCI), which is an arm of the BC government, “has $124.25 million invested in the tobacco industry.”

When it comes to fossil fuels, the Canadian banking and pension sectors have been the focus of recent critical reports. A March 24 report from FinanceMap, part of a global non-profit think tank called Influence Map, found that the ‘Big Five’ Canadian banks (Royal Bank of Canada, Toronto-Dominion Bank, Scotiabank, Bank of Montreal, and Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce) “are undermining their own net zero commitments through their financing activities, lack of robust sector financing policies, and inconsistent policy engagement.”

Specifically, the report found, “the Big Five steadily increased their fossil fuel financing exposure from an average of 15.5 percent in 2020 to 18.4 percent in 2022” compared to “6.1 percent for leading US banks and 8.7 percent for European banks.”

Moreover, none “have committed to a phase-out of financing thermal coal” or “publicly advocated for ambitious climate-related policy in Canada.” This in spite of the fact that they are all signatories to the Net Zero Banking Alliance.

The pension funds don’t fare any better. The 2023 Canadian Pension Climate Report Card from Shift Action for Pension Wealth and Planet Health noted that not a single pension fund had acknowledged “the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels”. Indeed, “Canada’s largest pension funds continue to invest their own members’ retirement savings in companies that are accelerating the climate crisis, while delaying efforts to confront this unprecedented threat.”

Isn’t it time the financial sector stopped investing in products that harm our health – and remember, there are many other industries out there that harm our health – and instead invested in our health and wellbeing?

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

The shift towards a healthy food system: Too little, too late

·      Published as “Voluntary agreements with food industry not good enough”

The challenges we face are now so massive and occurring so rapidly that such leisurely approaches will be too little, too late

Dr. Trevor Hancock

12 March 2024

700 words

My recent columns have looked at the many ways in which our food system harms both our health and the health of the planet. So worrying is the extent of that harm that in September 2021 the UN held a Food Systems Summit to discuss the transformations in food systems that are needed.

At the Summit, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres said the focus had to be on “feeding growing populations in ways that contribute to people’s nutrition, health and well-being, restore and protect nature, are climate neutral, adapted to local circumstances, and provide decent jobs and inclusive economies.” The Summit called for every country to appoint a national food systems convenor to establish a pathway to a transformed food system.

Then in 2023 the World Health Organization (WHO) convened a meeting to discuss food systems for people’s nutrition and health. The resulting dialogue “emphasized the importance of aligning food systems with nutrition and health goals” and using a systems approach to “integrate nutritious food systems actions throughout government policies while protecting the environment.”

Here in Canada, the federal government launched its Food Policy for Canada in 2019, with the goal of creating a healthier and more sustainable food system in which “all people in Canada are able to access a sufficient amount of safe, nutritious, and culturally diverse food.”

Canada also created the position of a national food systems convenor, who is a senior official in Agriculture and Agri-food Canada. Then in 2021 ‘Canada’s National Pathways’ report was published. The report looked at how to get to a healthier and more sustainable food system in the context of evidence that “one in 10 Canadian households experience moderate or severe food insecurity due to economic constraints; almost two in three Canadian adults are overweight or obese; and, over a third of Canada’s food supply is never eaten.”

Seven priority areas were identified in the document: Eliminating hunger and reducing food insecurity; reducing food loss and waste; strengthening Indigenous food systems; advancing environmentally sustainable production; supporting local food economies and a strong workforce; improving human and animal health, and working towards a National School Food Policy and Nutritious Meal Program.

But the Pathways report is quite weak on the health side. Glaringly, there is no reference anywhere to diet-related diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and some forms of cancer. The section on human and animal health focuses first on animal health, and the part on human health refers only to reducing sodium, fat and sugar through Canada’s 2016 ‘Healthy Eating Strategy’ and the Canada Food Guide, both of which are voluntary and intended “to make it easier for Canadians to make the healthier choice.”

But what is missing, it seems to me, is a sense of urgency. Governments and industry are still employing 20^th century approaches – risk management, tweaks here and there, voluntary agreements with the food industry – to 21^st century problems. Voluntary agreements to reduce sodium, for example, have clearly failed, while commitments to merely “monitor the extent and nature of advertising to children”, for example, are grossly inadequate. The government’s failure to pass legislation to control this illustrates both the government’s pusillanimity and the industry’s power, as well as its disregard for the wellbeing of children.

But the challenges we face are now so massive and occurring so rapidly that such leisurely approaches will be too little, too late. Nowhere in the Pathways report, for example, is there any suggestion of the need to move to a low-meat diet, other than a passing reference to “changes in consumer demand”. But a shift to a low-meat diet needs to be a central component of Canada’s  health food and healthy eating strategies if we are to get the very large health and environmental benfits of such a shift.

Admittedly, that shift is embedded in the new Canada Food Guide, but that is just a guide. Why not make it an urgent government priority to shift Canada’s agri-food industry towards producing a diet that is consistent with Canada food guide, and to make the unhealthy choice the difficult choice by, for example, banning or restricting advertising of unhealthy foods, raising taxes on such foods, and/or reducing taxes on health foods?

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

(Published as “Corporate lobbying needs to be kept out of the food system”)

The process of revising the Canada Food Guide shows that prohibiting or severely restricting private-sector lobbying has benefits for the health of people and the planet

Dr. Trevor Hancock

5 March 2024

700 words

In my last three columns I looked at the health and economic burden of unhealthy diets, the role of large parts of the food industry in producing and marketing an unhealthy diet, and the ways in which our current food system harms the planet. Clearly this has to stop, and you would think that governments would take a much stronger line than they do in requiring the food industry to put people and planet first.

However, governments seem reluctant to act. In part that is because the food industry is at best a challenging ‘partner’, often actively opposed to changes that would make our food system healthier for people and the planet. Moreover, the industry spends a lot of money lobbying governments to protect itself and promote its own interests.

Indeed, a study by researchers at the Université de Montréal and published in December 2023 in the Public Health Agency of Canada’s own journal noted extensive evidence that “the bio-food industry interferes with the development of public food policies worldwide through corporate political activity.”  Such activity “is defined as the attempts by corporate actors to shape public policy in ways that would protect or expand their markets or favour their industry’s interests.”

Note that this is the industry’s interests, which should not be confused with the public interest. Indeed, they add, the World Health Organization has expressed concern that such activity “may limit governments’ abilities to develop and maintain effective public health policies.”

For example, a 2022 article in the journal Globalization and Health looked at lobbying in relation to Health Canada’s Healthy Eating Strategy, from September 2016 to January 2021. At the time, Health Canada was proposing “revisions to Canada’s Food Guide, changes to the nutritional quality of the food supply, front-of-pack nutrition labelling and restrictions on food marketing to children.”

Using data from Canada’s Registry of Lobbyists, the researchers found the vast majority – around 90 percent – of registered lobbyyists and the corporations and organizations they represented had ties to industry, meaning the public interest barely got a word in edgeways, suggesting “a strategic advantage of industry stakeholders in influencing Canadian policymakers.”

The good news is that, just for once, and unusually, the Minister put in place restrictions on lobbying “during the revision of the Food Guide to minimize potential conflict of interest.” As a result,  staff at the Office of Nutrition Policy and Promotion “did not interact with stakeholders from the food and beverage industry during the development process.” So effective was this, in fact, that the Globe and Mail reported in 2017 that the industry tried an end run by asking Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada to lobby Health Canada for them.

Indeed, the Université de Montréal study noted, the Dairy Farmers of Canada even went so far as to ask the Prime Minister to “direct the Minister of Health to do her homework” when their industry-funded research findings were contradicted by independent research, while the Turkey Farmers of Canada wanted environmental impacts of food removed from consideration.  

The good news is that in the case of the revisions to Canada’s Food Guide, which was “the only initiative with extensive safeguards during the policy development process”, there were “significant changes and successful implementation.” The bad news is that “the policy which received the greatest amount of attention from industry (i.e., marketing to children) resulted in failed policy implementation”; it died in the Senate in 2019.

The lesson we should learn: Prohibit or severely restrict private sector lobbying – which, let’s face it, is just a form of buying influence. Doubtless we will heal squeals from the corporate world that their rights are being infringed, and they will invoke the wholly ridiculous notion – although apparently embedded in Canadian law, according to Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada – that the corporation “has the same rights and obligations as a natural person under Canadian law.”

But what these and other studies make clear is that it is the rights of Canadians to health and a healthy environment that are being trampled upon by many parts of the corporate and commercial world. It is way past time government stopped protecting corporations and stood up for the health of people and the planet.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

• (Published as  “When it comes to food, what’s good for us is also good for the planet”)

A healthy diet can massively reduce our environmental impact — agriculture is responsible for 80 per cent of global deforestation and 70 per cent of freshwater use

Dr. Trevor Hancock

27 February 2024

699 words

What some call the agri-food sector – primary agriculture, food and beverage processors, food retailers and wholesalers, and foodservice providers – has a problem. We need to feed 8 billion people. But if the whole world ate the way we do, not only would their health be harmed and the toll of 11 million premature deaths would grow enormously, but the damage to the Earth’s natural systems would also grow enormously.

A 2022 UN report on global land use noted: “Modern agriculture has altered the face of the planet more than any other human activity”. The report found that “agriculture now occupies approximately 40 percent of the global land area”, and that 52 percent of that land is degraded. Moreover, agriculture is responsible for 80 percent of global deforestation and 70 percent of freshwater use, while drivers linked to food production cause 70 percent of land-based biodiversity loss and 50 percent of freshwater biodiversity loss.

Food production also accounts for about one quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions, much of it methane from cows and other ruminant livestock and nitrous oxides from fertilizer use, the report notes. In addition, “deforestation and the draining and burning of peatlands for food and commodity production generate the bulk of carbon emissions”, while  centuries of ploughing and soil erosion have added large quantities of CO₂ to the atmosphere.

On top of that should be added the impact of food fisheries on the oceans and marine biodiversity. The World Wildlife Fund, citing the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, notes “the number of overfished stocks globally has tripled in half a century and today fully one-third of the world’s assessed fisheries are currently pushed beyond their biological limits.” In addition, there is substantial harm done to unwanted species – known as bycatch – as well as turtles, dolphins  and whales.

And added to all that is the pollution arising from the use of pesticides and fertilizers, animal manure and other causes, which result both in toxic impacts on humans and wildlife (pesticides cause harm to to the nervous sytem and reproduction in many species), while runoff “degrades water and soil quality, and causes eutrophication” – ‘dead zones’ in the oceans and algal blooms in lakes.

Clearly this state of affairs is unsustainable, especially when we consider that “nearly 80% of total agricultural land is dedicated to feed and livestock production while providing less than 20% of the world’s food calories”, according to the 2022 UN report. But meat consumption has been trending upwards, globally, for decades, suggesting that even more land will be needed, and it will need to be farmed more intensively.

The good news is that, as is usually the case, what is good for the planet is also good for us. It turns out that a more healthy diet is a more sustainable diet, as was described in a 2019 report from a Commission established by The Lancet – one of the world’s leading medical journals – and EAT – a global, non-profit foundation established to catalyze
a food system transformation.

The report – “Our Food in the Anthropocene” – explored how we would get healthy diets from sustainable food systems, noting that “without action . . . today’s children will inherit a planet that has been severely degraded and where much of the population will increasingly suffer from malnutrition and preventable disease.”

They called for “a radical transformation of the global food system”, proposing “a more than doubling in the consumption of healthy foods such as fruits, vegetables, legumes and nuts, and a greater than 50% reduction in global consumption of less healthy foods such as added sugars and red meat”, much like the new Canada Food Guide.

The report’s authors lay out a plan for such a transformation, adding: “Food is the single strongest lever
to optimize human health and environmental sustainability on Earth.” So a healthy diet can massively reduce our environmental impact. We urgently need the agri-food industry to be 100 percent behind this shift, for the sake of people and the planet. But their track record is not good and clearly the industry cannot be trusted to change quickly enough on its own, so this will require government action, as I discuss next week.

 © Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

Dr. Trevor Hancock

20 February 2024

700 words

Last week I noted the private sector is the key player in the provision of a healthy diet. But the food industry also makes a great deal of money from the production and marketing of unhealthy food. It is estimated that globally, unhealthy diets account for about 11 million premature deaths annually.  

The toll in Canada is also large: A recent Canadian study noted the dominant Canadian dietary pattern is “high in fast foods, carbonated drinks, refined grains, solid fat, and processed meat” and found that “poor dietary pattern is the leading risk factor for loss of life years at the national level”, ahead of smoking, physical inactivity, and alcohol consumption.

The study looked at the effect of five different healthy diet patterns (e.g. the Mediterranean diet) compared to eating the usual Canadian diet. Depending on which healthy diet pattern was being examined, between a quarter and nearly 40 percent of all deaths among Canadian men and between 9 and 23 percent of deaths among women “were attributable to poor dietary patterns.”

The economic costs are also very large. A 2018 study looked at the costs of unhealthy eating in Canada; our collective failure to meet recommendations for five protective foods (vegetables, fruit,  whole grains, milk, and nuts and seeds) and three harmful foods (processed meat,  red meat and sugar-sweetened beverages).

The authors found this resulted in direct health care costs of $5.1 billion and indirect costs (due to early death or disability) of $8.7 billion. But that is an under-estimate because the costs of some chronic disease were not included, nor, importantly, did they include the costs associated with salt, fibre or fat.

It’s not as if we don’t know what makes for a healthy diet. The revised Canada Food Guide, issued in 2019, focused on a more plant-based diet, more whole grains, replacing meats, poultry and dairy products that are high in saturated fat, free sugars or sodium with healthier, less salty, sweet or fatty products, including plant-based protein foods, and reducing our intake of highly processed products and sugary drinks.

And yet large parts of the food industry are dedicated to producing and selling precisely the unhealthy diet – high in fast foods, carbonated drinks, refined grains, solid fat, and processed meat – that we know is causing all these deaths, illnesses and costs. In fact, they spend a huge amount of money on marketing these products, and as I will discuss next week, lobby energetically to prevent changes that would be good for health but perhaps bad for their bottom line.

A 2022 study of food and beverage advertising in Canada noted such marketing “has been identified as a powerful determinant of dietary intake and weight.” The researchers found that in 2019 “an estimated $628.6 million was spent on . . . food and beverage advertising in Canada”, two thirds of which was on television. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that 87 percent of that advertising was for “products and brands classified as ‘unhealthy’”, while only 2.1 percent was spent on marketing fruit and vegetables and less than 1 percent on water.

Also unsurprisingly, a 2019 study of trends in fast-food offerings in the United States from 1986 to 2016 found “broadly detrimental changes in fast-food restaurant offerings over a 30-year span including increasing . . . portion size, energy, and sodium content” – it is not likely to be very different here in Canada.

Indeed, a recent study found that while sodium (salt) intake in Canada is down from 2004 it is still well above the level needed for good health. Moreover, the voluntary sodium reduction strategy adopted by Health Canada in 2012 was ineffective, with only 13 of 94 food categories meeting the 2016 sodium reduction targets.

Also unsurprisingly, a 2015 review by the respected Cochrane Collaborative found  “people consistently consume more food and drink when offered larger‐sized portions, packages or tableware than when offered smaller‐sized versions.”

In short, a large part of the food industry is producing and marketing an unhealthy diet, at great cost to the health of Canadians. Moreover, as I will discuss next week, the way our food is grown is also often harmful to both the planet and to people.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy

The food industry – good for health, or bad for health?

• Published as “Reaching goal of Zero Hunger includes improving affordability of healthy food”

Besides ending hunger, Zero Hunger includes improving nutrition and promoting sustainable agriculture

Dr. Trevor Hancock

13 February 2024

698 words

The tobacco industry sells a product that when used exactly as intended prematurely kills half its users – 7 million people every year – as well as indirectly killing a further 1.3 million non-smokers, making it the worst mass killer in human history. Air pollution from fossil fuel combustion is estimated to kill 8 million people annually, but threatens far greater damage as a result of climate change.

So what are we to think about the food industry, when unhealthy diets result in an estimated 11 million deaths annually? This is according to a comprehensive study published in The Lancet in 2019. The authors found “the leading dietary risk factors for mortality are diets high in sodium [salt], low in whole grains, low in fruit, low in nuts and seeds, low in vegetables, and low in omega-3 fatty acids”, and extolled the virtues of “shifting diet from unhealthy animal-based foods (eg, red meat and processed meat) to healthy plant-based foods.”

Now there is no question that the food industry, which is largely in the private sector, is a major contributor to health across the world by keeping most of us fed, and mostly fairly well fed. But there are major problems with our food system, both globally and here in Canada, that need to be addressed.  At a 2023 UN Food Systems Summit, the World Health Organization (WHO) stated: “Although global food production of calories has kept pace with population growth, the common prioritization of quantity and profitability over nutritional value has meant healthy diets remain unaffordable for over 40 percent of the world’s population.”

Goal 2 of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, agreed to by Canada and all the world’s nations in 2015, is Zero Hunger by 2030. But we are a long way  from achieving that goal, and headed in the wrong direction. Addressing the UN Food Systems Summit, UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres noted “the number of people facing hunger and food insecurity has risen since 2015, exacerbated by the pandemic, conflict, climate change and growing inequalities.”

He reported that “258 million people in 58 countries faced acute food insecurity in 2022, an increase of 34 percent compared to 2021”, adding that “45 million children suffered from wasting.” Moreover, projections show that by 2030 600 million people – 7% of the world’s population – will be hungry, he added.

But the Zero Hunger goal is not just about hunger; it is, fully stated, to end hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture. The second target under this Goal is to end all forms of malnutrition. Now malnutrition takes two main forms that co-exist globally: Under-nutrition, when people can’t access or afford adequate food, and over-nutrition, when their food supply is excessive and unhealthy.

The WHO reported at the Summit that “2.4 billion people suffer from food insecurity, while 670 million adults live with overweight or obesity” and that “478 million children aged under 5 [are] impacted by stunting, while 145 million 5-9 year olds live with overweight/obesity.”

Moreover, the production of food is often done in ways that harm the environment. Hence target 4 of the Zero Hunger goal is concerned with creating ecologically sustainable food production systems. But here too, we have a long way to go. In his remarks at the Summit, Guterres noted: “current food systems continue to generate pollution and degrade soil, water and air, contribute to 28 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, are responsible for as much as 80 percent of biodiversity loss and account for up to 70 percent of freshwater use.”

The WHO’s Director of Nutrition and Food Safety, Dr Francesco Branca, proposed a three-point agenda for food systems transformation: lower the cost of nutritious foods for consumers, increase the availability and affordability of healthy diets, and ensure a fair price for the producer, while reflecting the true costs on environment, health and livelihoods.

While this requires that governments take action on these important steps, it is particularly the responsibility of the food industry to stop producing and selling the unhealthy foods that lie behind those 11 million deaths a year, and stop producing food in environmentally harmful ways. That will be my focus next week.

© Trevor Hancock, 2024

thancock@uvic.ca

Dr. Trevor Hancock is a retired professor and senior scholar at the

University of Victoria’s School of Public Health and Social Policy