Grant: Project Grant

Chronic diseases are on the rise. They are the leading causes of early death and are common reasons for hospitalization. In Canada, unhealthy eating, mostly due to a food environment characterized by energy-dense packaged foods, is largely responsible for chronic diseases and early deaths. To address the rising rates of chronic diseases, international health organizations recommend a shift from policies focused on single nutrients to policies targeting multiple food components/nutrients using nutrient profile models (i.e., "ranking foods based on their nutritional composition for disease prevention"). This project will enable monitoring of health and healthcare impacts of adopting nutrient profile models for regulation of nutrition policies (e.g., front-of-package labelling)-an essential step for reducing diet-related health problems for Canadians. We will evaluate the impact of adopting the most promising nutrient profile models on health outcomes and examine the health and healthcare benefits of strategies to improve the nutritional quality of the food supply. A Canadian-specific nutrient profile model will also be "reverse engineered" to equitably reduce health and healthcare burden among Canadians. We will use Canadian national nutrition surveys conducted in 2004 (linked to health and healthcare outcomes) and 2015 (linked to food supply data) to develop a robust model for evaluating the future health and healthcare outcomes of adopting different nutrition policies. The infrastructure we will develop will be unique internationally, enabling timely and detailed evaluation of nutrition policies for reduction of diet-related diseases and healthcare use among different population groups (e.g., sex, age, ethnicity). These models will create a lasting infrastructure and will position Canada as a leader in population health and healthcare assessment of nutrition policies.