What are the healthy habits of Canada's Food Guide?

November 12, 2025 •

4 min read

In 2019, Health Canada updated its Food Guide to focus on healthy eating patterns and habits, moving away from prescriptive serving sizes. This shift emphasizes that what and how we eat profoundly impacts our health, making the healthy habits of Canada's Food Guide a cornerstone of modern nutrition guidance.

Quick Summary

The revised Canada's Food Guide promotes comprehensive healthy eating practices beyond food groups, focusing on mindful habits, cooking more often, limiting processed foods, and choosing nutritious ingredients like vegetables, whole grains, and plant-based proteins.

Key Points

Mindful Eating: Take time to eat, pay attention to hunger and fullness cues, and savor your food to improve your eating habits.
Cook More Often: Preparing meals at home gives you more control over ingredients, helping to limit highly processed foods.
Balanced Plate: Fill half your plate with vegetables and fruits, a quarter with whole grains, and a quarter with protein.
Choose Plant-Based Protein: The guide recommends prioritizing plant-based protein sources like legumes, nuts, and seeds more often.
Water is Best: Make water your drink of choice and replace sugary beverages to stay hydrated without added calories.
Limit Processed Foods: Reduce your intake of foods high in sodium, sugar, or saturated fat, such as fast food and packaged snacks.
Eat with Others: Enjoying meals with family and friends can foster a positive and social eating environment.
Read Food Labels: Use food labels to make informed decisions and compare products for lower sodium, sugar, and saturated fat content.

The modern approach of Canada's Food Guide extends far beyond a simple food pyramid or plate; it's a holistic framework for a healthier relationship with food. The guide promotes key principles that emphasize mindful eating, cooking more often, enjoying food, and sharing meals with others, alongside specific dietary recommendations. These principles work together to build sustainable, lifelong healthy eating habits.

Practicing Mindful Eating

Mindful eating is a central tenet of the new Food Guide, encouraging Canadians to pay attention to how, why, and when they eat. By focusing on the eating experience itself, you can better connect with your body's natural hunger and fullness cues, preventing overeating and fostering a more positive relationship with food. This practice involves eliminating distractions like phones and television during mealtimes and taking the time to savor each bite.

How to become a mindful eater

Slow Down: Put your fork down between bites to give your brain time to register fullness.
Engage Your Senses: Notice the aromas, textures, and flavors of your food.
Listen to Your Body: Recognize the physical signals of hunger and satisfaction.

Cooking More Often and Limiting Processed Foods

Regularly preparing meals and snacks at home is another critical habit endorsed by the Food Guide. When you cook more often, you gain greater control over the ingredients, allowing you to reduce your intake of highly processed foods, which are often high in sodium, sugars, and saturated fat. Highly processed foods, like frozen pizzas, sugary cereals, and processed meats, should be consumed less often and in small amounts.

Benefits of home cooking

Cooking allows you to experiment with different healthy ingredients, learn new skills, and save money compared to eating out. You can use simple and healthy cooking methods such as baking, roasting, steaming, and stir-frying to prepare delicious, nutritious meals. Involving family and friends in meal preparation can also create a more positive and social food environment.

Plate Proportions: The Visual Guide

The Canada's Food Guide plate is an intuitive visual tool for building balanced meals without focusing on strict portion sizes. It recommends filling:

Half your plate with vegetables and fruits: These are packed with fiber, vitamins, and minerals.
One-quarter of your plate with whole grain foods: This includes options like whole grain bread, quinoa, brown rice, and whole grain pasta.
One-quarter of your plate with protein foods: The guide encourages choosing plant-based protein sources, like beans, lentils, nuts, and tofu, more often.

Making Water the Drink of Choice

Staying hydrated is essential for health, and Canada's Food Guide is clear: water is the beverage of choice. The guide recommends replacing sugary drinks, like juice and pop, with water, which helps promote hydration without adding extra calories or sugar. Keeping a reusable water bottle handy is an easy way to make this a habit throughout the day.

A Comparison of Key Food Guide Habits


Feature	Old Food Guide Approach	New Food Guide Approach
Focus	Specific number of servings from four food groups.	Holistic eating patterns and habits.
Mindful Eating	Not explicitly addressed; focus was on quantity.	Central to the guide; encourages paying attention to hunger and fullness.
Cooking	No strong emphasis on meal preparation.	Strongly encourages cooking more often at home.
Processed Foods	Included some processed options within food groups.	Advises limiting highly processed foods.
Plate Visual	Did not feature the 'plate method' for meal composition.	Half plate fruits/veg, quarter grains, quarter protein.
Protein	Categorized 'Meat and Alternatives' and 'Milk and Alternatives' separately.	Combines into one 'Protein Foods' category, emphasizing plant-based sources.
Beverage	Included milk and juice as key components.	Recommends water as the drink of choice.

Enjoying Your Food and Eating with Others

Beyond the food itself, the guide recognizes the social and cultural significance of eating. Enjoying your food, embracing cultural traditions, and eating meals with others are all considered healthy habits. Sharing meals with family and friends can improve relationships and lead to more positive, healthy eating behaviors. For many, food is more than just fuel; it's a source of pleasure, connection, and identity.

Reading Food Labels

The Food Guide encourages using food labels to make informed decisions. By reading the labels, you can compare products and choose those lower in sodium, sugar, and saturated fat. This helps you become a more aware consumer and avoid the influence of marketing on your choices. Learning to use food labels effectively is a simple yet powerful step toward better nutrition.

Conclusion

The healthy habits of Canada's Food Guide offer a comprehensive, modern, and practical approach to nutrition. By shifting the focus from rigid portion sizes to overall eating patterns, the guide empowers individuals to build a healthier relationship with food. From practicing mindful eating and cooking more often to embracing plant-based proteins and prioritizing water, these habits contribute to better health outcomes and a higher quality of life. Embracing these principles is a sustainable way to improve your well-being, one meal at a time. The official Canada.ca website offers extensive resources on these recommendations.

Frequently Asked Questions

The core philosophy is a holistic approach that focuses on overall healthy eating patterns and habits, not just individual nutrients or food groups. It emphasizes mindful eating, cooking more often, and enjoying food.

The plate model recommends filling half your plate with vegetables and fruits, one-quarter with whole grain foods, and one-quarter with protein foods. This is a simple visual guide for balanced meals.

The guide recommends choosing plant-based proteins more often because they are often higher in fiber and lower in saturated fat. Examples include legumes, nuts, seeds, and tofu.

Highly processed foods often contain high amounts of sodium, sugar, and saturated fat. Examples include candy, sugary drinks, frozen meals, and processed meats.

You can add extra vegetables to casseroles and soups, add fruit to oatmeal, or keep pre-cut vegetables and fruit on hand for easy snacks. Fresh, frozen, or canned options are all acceptable.

Water is recommended as the drink of choice because it keeps you hydrated without adding calories, sodium, or sugar to your diet, unlike many other beverages.

Cooking more often gives you greater control over the ingredients, allowing you to limit added sugars, sodium, and saturated fats. It also promotes healthier eating by reducing reliance on convenience foods.