Pushing aside a makeshift podium in the modest hospital at CFB Trenton, Dr. Barbra Allen Bradshaw says she told a crowd of army nurses, doctors and dietitians that “Canada’s Food Guide is making you sick.”Eating a diet high in carbs and low in fat, like the nation’s food experts suggest, isn’t the way to a healthy heart or physique, she said. “It’s bad advice.”Allen Bradshaw, a pathologist from Abbotsford, B.C., is part of a group of doctors from across the country who have been on a crusade to change the way Canadians are told to eat. For the past two years, she and her colleague Dr. Carol Loffelmann, an anesthesiologist in Toronto, have spent much of their free time travelling the country, urging colleagues and regular Canadians alike to eat fewer carbohydrates than what’s recommended by the government and indulge in fat from sources such as steak and cheese — even if that flies in the face of conventional wisdom. It’s all they can do as they wait to see whether Health Canada will heed the message from their grassroots campaign. Since 2016, the women, who founded Canadian Clinicians for Therapeutic Nutrition, a national non-profit, have lobbied the government, with letters, an Ottawa meeting and a parliamentary petition signed by nearly 5,000 Canadians, to reconsider the diet advice they believe Health Canada plans to deliver in the next iteration of the Food Guide, which is due out in early 2019, according to a Health Canada spokesperson.Allen Bradshaw and Loffelmann, who works at St. Michael’s Hospital, say some of the new recommendations may not be based on the most current, relevant scientific evidence and could continue to make Canadians overweight, reliant on medication and suffer from diabetes, fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome.In an email to the Star, Health Canada said that as the new advice is finalized, it is also updating its evidence base with the latest nutrition sci ...
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