Canada's Food Guide to Healthy Eating

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1. What are the differences between Canada's Food Guide to Healthy Eating and the Dietary Reference Intakes?
This is a good question. One of the first steps to healthier eating involves learning what types of foods supply the nutrients our bodies need, and how much of these foods we should be eating every day. The Canada's Food Guide to Healthy Eating and the Dietary Reference Intakes are two reliable sources of meeting this goal. However, they are coming from a slightly different vantage point.
Canada's Food Guide to Healthy Eating is the primary healthy eating resource in Canada. It incorporates years of nutrition research into a booklet that is easy for Canadians to understand and use. That is one of its advantages; the researchers have calculated the nutrients and grouped them into easy to follow categories, mainly 4 groups of food and portions that are recommended as daily requirements that assures that we get the essential nutrients. However, it leaves the number of portions to eat open for the person to decide - which is one disadvantage for those who know very little about caloric intake and the relation to body size and the likes. For example, someone with a very small frame may be eating the upper recommended daily portions and thus getting too many calories for body weight and thus gain too much weight (see the Canada's Food Guide attached). Overall, though, it is an easy to follow, flexible, nice visually represented chart to maintain good health for the general population.
On the other hand, the Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs) are a set of scientifically based nutrient reference values for healthy populations, but in comparison to the Canada Food Guide, are NOT all that easy for Canadians to understand (i.e., a potential weakness of DRIs). The DRIs for various groups of nutrients are being developed over a span of time, with the ...