OP-ED: The U.S. redesigned its food guide while Canada keeps lecturing

"Canada’s 2019 Food Guide struggled in the real world because it framed food primarily as a behavioural problem to be corrected and the food industry as something to be restrained."

Source: Adobe Stock

Author: Sylvain Charlebois

The “new” Canadian Food Guide was introduced on January 22, 2019—seven years ago. At the time, Health Canada committed to revising it within five years. That revision was due in 2024. It never happened. The guide remains frozen in time, untouched by inflation, affordability pressures, or a rapidly evolving food system.

When unveiled, the 2019 guide marked a complete departure from every version that came before it. Long-standing food groups were abandoned. Milk was effectively sidelined, with water promoted as the beverage of choice. The guide pivoted decisively toward plant-based eating, positioning fruits and vegetables as the foundation of daily diets. Among dietary professionals, the shift was widely celebrated as modern and forward-looking.

Among many Canadians, however, the reaction was far more cautious. The new guide felt less recognizably Canadian—less reflective of regional food cultures, climate realities, and household constraints. It was nutritionally ambitious, but culturally detached. Food, after all, is not consumed in policy frameworks; it is consumed in homes shaped by habit, income, access, and tradition.

More fundamentally, the guide repositioned the food industry as an antagonist. Marketing practices were criticized. Food processing was broadly framed as suspect. Packaged foods were treated less as tools of modern food access and more as symbols of a system in need of correction. Farmers, processors, retailers, and manufacturers—key actors in ensuring availability, safety, and affordability—were largely portrayed as part of the problem rather than as potential partners in improving public health outcomes.

Most strikingly, Health Canada admitted at the time that it had not even considered the cost of the new guide compared with the old one. That admission should have triggered a national pause. Instead, it was brushed aside. Yet affordability is not a secondary issue; it is foundational. When half of what Canadians are encouraged to eat consists of fruits and vegetables—the most price-volatile category in the grocery store—cost cannot be an afterthought. Produce prices fluctuate with weather events, transportation costs, labour shortages, and exchange rates. Advising Canadians to eat more of the least price-stable foods without assessing affordability is not evidence-based policy; it is aspirational thinking.

This week, the United States took a markedly different approach. Its newly released food guide represents a genuine reset—one that goes back to basics and, more importantly, back to the dinner table. The American framework is notably free of ideological signalling and grounded instead in science, cultural realism, and practicality. Rather than vilifying the food system, it focuses on improving it, with clear targets to reduce sugar, sodium, and unnecessary additives.

Following dietary science is important—but it can be overdone. If every country in the world followed dietary science perfectly, we would all eat the same thing. But food has never been only about science. It is also about geography, culture, income, and access. Diets emerge from ecosystems—economic and social as much as biological. Ignoring those realities does not improve health outcomes; it weakens them.

Canada’s 2019 Food Guide struggled in the real world because it framed food primarily as a behavioural problem to be corrected and the food industry as something to be restrained. By contrast, the U.S. approach treats the food system as something to refine and improve—working with it rather than against it.

Food policy works best when it is humble—when it recognizes trade-offs, respects how people actually live, and understands that eating well requires systems that make doing so possible. This week, the United States remembered that. Canada still has not.

– Sylvain Charlebois is director of the Agri-Food Analytics Lab at Dalhousie University, co-host of The Food Professor Podcast and visiting scholar at McGill University