What Canada's Food Guide should have taught you, but I will instead, in a ranting fashion

Forget the Four Food Groups and learn about Nutrition instead.

Anyone worth their weight in salt can tell you why the Four Food Groups is a stupid system. Let’s start with the obvious - there aren’t four food groups. Where do grains begin and vegetables end - and what is a coffee bean, for that matter? Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable (actually, it’s both*!), is soy a meat alternative, or a dairy alternative, or a…grain? It grows in fields, right? And why do we devote a whole category to milk and it’s alternatives when 75% of the world’s adult population is lactose intolerant? It’s true…also true, the cucumber is a berry. And the strawberry isn’t. I just blew your mind, didn’t I? Let’s start over.

Back in my third grade classroom, I learned the four food groups. And then I learned about ‘others,’ or ‘bad food choices’ like soda pop and chocolate bars, which were the essence of evil. This was during the last days of the Food Pyramid era, and a few years later, the Food Rainbow was introduced. The concepts are essentially the same, no matter what shape you put them in - we’re all supposed to eat milk (1. Milk products), potatoes (2. Grain Products), meat (3. Meat and Alternatives), and veggies (4. Vegetables and fruits). A number was assigned to each group, and you were supposed to eat a certain portion of each of those foods according to that number, which went up and down according to your age and size and sex and whether or not your were pregnant or breastfeeding. The portion sizes were different for each food group, though, and differed among foods within that group, and a single meal probably had about three and a half servings of something or other, but never mind that. Milk is good. Fruit and veggies are good. Bread and potatoes, good. Meat, good. No vegetarians. No vegans. No raw food enthusiasts, no culturally restrictive diets, no kosher, no lent, no not eating until the sun goes down because you’re practicing Ramadan. You just eat a servings of 125mL of vegetables, or 250mL of raw, leafy vegetables, or any fruit of any size, apparently, and you do it between four and ten times depending on your age and activity level, and you make sure something is orange and something is dark green, and then you’re done. For your fruit and vegetable group, for that day. Is that SO difficult?

Well, yes, apparently, it is. Never mind that the system doesn’t make sense, and isn’t culturally inclusive, and doesn’t account for economic factors or taste preferences, and ignores fun things like the fact that corn today is exponentially sweeter than it was even a decade ago, and that the size of the average apple has doubled due to genetic selection and modification - never mind all that. The real reason we should change the system is this: It doesn’t work.

It just doesn’t work. We were all taught the food groups in school, and we can all get Canada’s food guide for free from the government, or on their website, and it’s all very colourful, but…we’re still obese and overweight (or underweight...you know who you are, Me). We still don’t get enough fibre. We still eat too much salt. Our cholesterol - sorry, our BAD cholesterol - is through the roof. Huh?

And worse still: we don’t know. We don’t know how many calories the average person is supposed to be consuming, or how much we ourselves are supposed to be consuming…because we don’t know what a calorie is. We’re prey to trends and fad diets and scared of carbs because the government spent billions of dollars on an education program that didn’t teach us what a carb is. (Is fibre a carb? Is fructose a carb? Is starch a carb? Or just bagels and…car exhaust?)

You didn’t teach us what food is made of, because that seemed too complicated. Instead you just gave us a menu. But the menu is still complicated, and oversimplified, and nonsensical, and when it doesn’t work, you just further complicate it instead of scrapping the non-functioning dunce of a system that never should have happened to begin with. Stop. Just, stop. The shape doesn’t matter. The groups don’t matter. The nutritional content is the only thing that matters, and you didn’t teach us that. You mandated labels but you didn’t bother to teach us how to read those labels, because ‘meat and alternative serving’ doesn’t appear on any label anywhere because it‘s just an arbitrarily made up thing that only you understand that has nothing to do with nutritional content…gah. You suck. You need to stop. You’ve failed.


I’m taking over now.

So, let’s return, once again, to the third grade. Your teacher is bitchy, your classmates are annoying, and you have no control over your day-to-day eating habits anyways. But today you are learning about Food & Nutrition, at it’s all brightly coloured on shiny, government produced posters.

So…what do you learn?

1. You learn about the foundation of it all: calories. Calories are the energy inside of food, which becomes energy inside of our body. Calories are like gas in a car - it’s our fuel system, and we need calories to live, and play, and think, and breath. Every day, every thing that we do burns calories. We need food to replace those calories - if we don’t get it, we’ll lose weight or get sick. All food has calories, but some have more than others. If we eat more calories than we burn off, our body stores the extra energy for later - as fat. So, fat inside of our body is just extra, stored calories. It’s good to be balanced - eat as much food as your body needs, and not less or more. The healthiest people usually eat a lot of calories - but they burn these calories off because they live active lifestyles - doing sports, exercise, and complex mathematical problems.

2. You learn about the three components of food. THREE. Three, three, three. You learn their names, you learn the basics about them, and in later years you can add to this knowledge at any point, because this is actually the science of what food is made of, instead of an arbitrary classification system. Crazy, I know. So…Carbohydrates. Protein. Fats. They make up all food…good food, junk food, processed food, ethnic food. They all give us calories. Learn with me now…

i) Carbohydrates are all based on glucose (plants get it from the sun!), and depending on how you shape and combine the glucose together, you get different types of sugars: simple sugars, like sucrose and fructose (which usually taste sweet) to complex sugars or polysaccharides, sometimes called starches (which make up foods like rice, and bread, and potatoes - they don‘t usually taste very sweet). Sometimes glucose is combined in a way that is so complicated that our body can’t break it down for fuel - this is called cellulose, or fibre. Most people don’t eat enough fibre, but they should - even though it doesn’t give us calories (fuel), is scrapes through our intestinal tracts and keeps us from getting colon cancer. Fun!

ii) Protein is made up of amino acids. When we eat protein, our body makes a choice - we can use it for its calories (fuel), or we can break it down and use its amino acids to build our own bodies. Most of our body is made out of protein - our muscles, our organs, our skin and hair, and our immune system, which keeps us from getting sick…yay! Different amino acids are used for different things inside your body, so you need a variety of protein to stay healthy - most people get the protein they need from animal sources (from the milk of animals, or their eggs, or their meat), but there are also a variety of sources from plants (like beans, and nuts, and peanuts).

iii) And fats. Fats get a bad reputation, but they shouldn’t - fat is good for you, and an important part of a nutritious diet. The important thing to know about fat is that it has TWICE as many calories per gram compared to carbohydrates and proteins - it’s also delicious. So if you eat too much fat (and a lot of us do), then it’s easy to eat way too many calories…and if we don’t burn all of those calories off, our body stores them, making fat inside your own body. Of course, you don’t need to EAT fat to GET fat - you just need to be eating more calories that you’re using up (there are calories in carbohydrates and protein, too - a person can get fat from eating just vegetables, as long as they add up to more calories than that person is spending). There are lots of different types of fat, and they all do different things, and it’s all very complicated, but the gist is this: most people don’t get enough Omega 3, and most people get too much cholesterol and trans fats.

3. And finally, like the sesame seeds atop a hamburger of nutritional information: vitamins and minerals. There are lots of them, and they’re all important. Different vitamins come from different foods, and in your body they do different things - that’s why it’s important to eat a variety of foods. Different coloured plant foods sometimes have different vitamins inside of them. Missing out on just one important vitamin can make you sick - that’s why some people take multivitamins. BUT you should never take a bunch of multivitamins at once (or drink 5 litres of orange juice in a single sitting) - you’re only going to pee away a lot of money (in the case of water soluble vitamins like Vitamin C), or make yourself really sick (in the case of water insoluble vitamins, like Vitamin A, which you can’t pee away). You need a small amount of all vitamins every day to be healthy.

While vitamins are made by plants and animals, minerals are not - they come from the earth, and the type of ground that food is grown in can affect its mineral content. Like vitamins, you need a small amount of each one every day to stay healthy, and missing out on a single mineral can make you sick. (Menstruating women lose iron every month due to bleeding, so it’s very common for women to have low iron, or anemia. I take pink coloured iron supplements every day. Now you know.)

And…done.

Of course, there’s a lot more to it than that, but that’s actually okay. Because, you see, this stuff is actual scientific fact, which means you can add on to it without having to rewrite the entire system. You can learn stuff about probiotics, and artificial sweeteners, and mercury, and metabolism, and bio-availability - just as long as you understand the basics, first.

And if they seem too complicated…well, tough luck, that’s just the way it is. But every minute you spend figuring it out is a minute spent learning about the actual content of your food, as opposed to a government-invented diet of classificational nonsense, and one less minute you‘ll spend vulnerable to fad diets of ridiculousness…so it’s actually, really worth it. I’m sure it can be explained differently, and better, and by someone with a nutrition degree…but it deserves to be explained, because it’s the actual nature of the food you put in your body. And if a person who eats very little knows all this, then you should, too.

(Note: I am not your science teacher...but you should ask him to confirm all this, too. Because there are a lot of nuts out there, and you need to arm yourself with the basic facts before you listen the what they have to say. And stop drinking lemonade cleanses for fourteen days. That's just stupid. Enough.)

*The tomato, according to its nutritional and biological nature, is a fruit. It’s actually a berry - like the cucumber! But according to import laws, governing how we label and tax foods, the tomato is a vegetable. Now you can sleep at night.