Economics will play an important role for healthier choices, from all sides.  Basics of a healthy diet gives a pictorial to help us grapple with ‘required’ servings.  Look at your lifestyle and try to incorporate more fruits and vegetables in your eating today.

The Ontario Collaborative Group on Healthy Eating and Physical Activity (OCGHEPA), is a provincial not for profit that is looking at the determinants of good health, which includes eating well, physical activities, and includes access to food.

Its mission is to improve the health of all Ontarians by advancing healthy eating and active living initiatives through strategic partnerships, knowledge exchange and collective action.  Our vision for 2015 is an Ontario that supports healthy eating and active living for all.

The Collaborative have been working together for the past few months and will start to formulate the organization’s principles.  They have identified the priority areas and will be working with stakeholders in the near future.

Visit the OCGHEPA is working on the following priority areas:

• Making Ontario the healthiest province
• Developing an Ontario food and nutrition strategy
• Improving access for all Ontarians to healthy food and physical activity opportunities
• Using the 2015 Pan Am games as an opportunity to promote healthy eating and active living
• Childhood obesity
• Food security
• Healthy eating/physical activity in school
• Built environment

This is a documentary that looks at the issue of peak oil  and how Cuba resolved their dependence on oil, food and come together as a country.

Cuba, did not choose to look at new ways to buy oil, instead, it made a shift and survived.  This is an inspiring film that proves that change can benefit community and the Earth for a better and sustainable future. Powerful!

Take a few minutes and watch the Learning from Cuba’s Response.  This is a shift that can be used a model to moved to a more sustainable way of life.

The convenience of harvesting your own produce is also cost effective, sustainable and tasty, of course we can add  nutritious.  The idea of growing vegetables, fruits, berries and small livestock is called home farming.

Joan Kerr’s home gardens ( front and back yard) is full of food, flowers and beauty.  Having planted food interspersed edible flowers,  perennials, herbs and berries for more than thirty years has given Joan the knowledge to share and encourage others to do  the same.

To launch the home farming concept, fbsc.org, though its Windfields Community & Teaching Gardens Project, cultivated the Oshawa Victory Garden an as example of an easily replicated model used used for growing food during both worlds wars.

The model has a prescribed schemata that includes: potato, turnip, corn, tomato, beans, parsnip,

beets, carrots, peas, cucumber,and squash.

We are embracing this model, and expanding it to include other vegetables, fruit and berries, and also canning/preserving your harvest, storing, fermenting, dehydrating, and cooking.

Help to reach our goal of 300 people who are home farming by 2015.

Join us and share ideas as we grow our own food, caring and maintaining, control pests, canning and storing and finally tasting the harvest.

There is just something wonderful about knowing what you grow and eat.

Windfields Community and Teaching Gardens, is home to 27 allotments and 30 demonstration plots that grow  peas, corn, tomatoes, radishes, beans, zucchinnis, cucumbers, beets, lettuce, okra, onions, carrots, leeks, peppers and pumpkins.

Research has shown that grown locally is more nutritious than food that travels for days.

Growing food in a community garden is a great way to try and learn about different types of vegetables, their cultural practices, care and how to eat them.  Try joining and supporting your local community garden, grow your own food, and reduce your carbon footprint.

Youth volunteers help to weed and water the garden while having fun.

This is an increasingly important consideration since a new research study called Obesity in Canada, estimates that about 25% of adults and children aged 6 – 17 over 6% are obese.  Report highlights:

Approximately one in four Canadian adults are obese, according to measured height and weight data from 2007-2009. Of children and youth aged six to 17, 8.6% are obese.

Between 1981 and 2007/09, obesity rates roughly doubled among both males and females in most age groups in the adult and youth categories.

The economic costs of obesity are estimated at $4.6 billion in 2008, up about 19% from $3.9 billion in 2000, based on costs associated with the eight chronic diseases most consistently linked to obesity. Estimates rise to close to $7.1 billion when based on the costs associated with 18 chronic diseases linked to obesity. Factors that influence obesity include:

• physical activity;
• diet;
• socioeconomic status;
•  ethnicity;
•  immigration; and
•  environmental factors.

Strategies to combat obesity and address the environments that encourage obesity fall into three main categories: health services and clinical interventions that target individuals; community-level interventions that directly influence individual and group behaviours; public policies that target broad social or environmental determinants.

The documentary explore the real cost of producing sugar, and how children and families are exploited for profit.

Next time you reach for sugar, think about how it made it to your table.

 Imagine the joy of:

-planting your own vegetables;

- socializing with like-minded people;

- contributing to a local food movement; and

- eating nutritiously

Become part of a global movement, and start eating nutritious food, living healthy, connect with your community and most of all enjoying the fruits of your own labor.

You will feel wonderful, energized, save money and minimize your footprint

Marketing Departments use word that cause confusion, preferring that consumers will just purchase a products by the words that are easily read and not the fine print.

The Organic Consumers Association is promoting organic food and fair trade practices.

It is so important to know what you are buying, eating and using on your body and in your homes.  The reason that companies get away with unethical marketing practices is because consumers are not informed.  Start to support the companies who are trying to be just, ethical, fair and organic.

By supporting local businesses, farmers and producers, you build a trustful relationship, and can hold them responsible for any misleading actions.