Health committee  Yes, there are a number of efforts around the world. One I can point to specifically is called the community guide, which is organized by the Centers for Disease Control in the U.S., whose sole purpose is to take the whole bulk of literature that's out there and ask what we can actually learn from that literature about how to intervene.

Health committee  Unfortunately, we don't actually know the impact of Quebec's decision to do that 15 or 20 years ago in any really serious way. There's no real causal linkage, because the research wasn't done when that policy change was implemented. So when we implement policy, we absolutely must have our systems in place so that researchers can come to the table and understand the impact of it.

Health committee  I've been thinking about and working on this problem for four or five years. I'd say it's only been within the last six to eight months that agriculture has really got it on their radar. Over the last six months, I've been to quite a few meetings with people in industry, from farm gate to dinner plate, if you will, and in government, both nationally and locally, to discuss this.

Health committee  What I would say is that the creation of CIHR was a great vehicle to allow us to engage a much broader range of researchers. As a result of that, some of the funds that you see in that bar chart are going to people who come from sociology departments, who are interested in behavioural aspects.

Health committee  It's a big question. Let me make a few comments in response. One is that the funding you saw on page 4 is for all obesity research, everything from trying to understand the genes that play a role in determining obesity to working with communities in ways that will help communities to find approaches that work for them and to understand whether the approaches work.

Health committee  I would say the two biggest things are to have both a top-down and a bottom-up approach. On the top-down approach, the kinds of actions we could take that would have a huge impact would be related to regulating advertising to children on television. I think there are good estimates to show that could have a huge impact on behaviour.

Health committee  As Stephen alluded to, the evidence that we do have so far about economic incentives and disincentives suggests that economic incentive is a much better driver for making healthy choices. So lowering the price of healthy food or subsidizing nutritious, healthy food--low energy-dense food--tends to have a greater impact on people's purchases and food-related behaviours.

Health committee  We know most people walk as their form of physical activity. We also know there are good relationships between lower body mass index and the use of public transit and walking, having destinations to walk to. If you live in the suburbs, having nice trails to walk to will lead to an increase in physical activity, and if you live in a city, having access to all kinds of stores and things like that is what makes people walk.

Health committee  Let me draw your attention to the list of solutions to complex problems on page 15, because when the problem is this complex, you need to recognize that what you do in one community may not work in another. You need to support individual initiatives, not just those of the individual but of individual communities.

Health committee  They're certainly not off our map. As I said, not only do I, but I know my colleague, Jeff Reading, works closely with the first nations and Inuit health branch in attempting to solve the problem.

Health committee  We have done work specifically with schools to talk about that. But the challenge, in terms of research, is that when you isolate one factor like vending machines and you try to study whether taking vending machines out of schools or changing the content of vending machines has an impact, what you often see is a very small effect, because it's one of, as we say, 50 or 100 different factors.

Health committee  What I can say is that, first, as you may be aware, we do have an Institute of Aboriginal Peoples' Health at CIHR. We've worked closely with my colleague, Dr. Jeff Reading, on issues around aboriginal peoples' health and diabetes. We've co-funded a number of projects. We illustrated one there.

Health committee  Thank you very much for the invitation to be here. I'm quite pleased to have the opportunity to help the committee in its investigation and to tell you about what I've learned over the last five or six years as scientific director of the Institute of Nutrition, Metabolism and Diabetes.