Who We Are

Nutrition Connections, formerly the Nutrition Resource Centre, is a centre for nutrition services and resources, education, training, knowledge and collaboration. We help health professionals, businesses, government and community organizations, educators, researchers and others working in food and nutrition meet organizational needs, and learn, connect, and share information.

Nutrition Connections is housed within the Ontario Public Health Association (OPHA), a registered charity. The proceeds from our paid services go towards work that promotes public education on nutrition and healthy eating. If you would like to make a donation and support our work, please follow this link to the Canada Helps website.

As a key program of the OPHA, Nutrition Connections is able to:

• Engage in revenue generating activities that support the mission of OPHA; and
• Issue tax receipts for charitable donations to OPHA.

A primary focus of our work at Nutrition Connections is food literacy, which can be defined as:

• knowing about food and nutrition;
• having food skills;
• feeling confident when choosing, preparing, and eating food;
• making healthier food decisions most of the time;
• understanding how the food system, food environment, living situations, and culture and traditions impact food decisions; and
• recognizing that each of these components are interconnected.

• Our History

  Nutrition Connections (NC) is a centre for nutrition knowledge and collaboration. We have operated under the Ontario Public Health Association since 1999, and were founded as one of several health promotion resource centres funded by the Government of Ontario. Originally known as the Nutrition Resource Centre (NRC), our original mandate was to support the implementation of four Ontario-wide healthy eating and nutrition programs: Colour It Up, Community Food Advisor, Eat Smart!, and NutriSTEP.

  In 2013, we assumed a new mandate to focus on strengthening the capacity of health intermediaries involved in healthy eating and nutrition across the health continuum. Among many other projects and initiatives, NRC was one of the healthy kids resource centres which supported the Healthy Kids Community Challenge from 2015 – 2018. This was a cross-government initiative to promote children’s health in Ontario through physical activity and healthy eating.

  When government funding for the health promotion resource centres was discontinued, the NRC rebranded itself as Nutrition Connections in 2019. With a new focus on food literacy, we have now been able to expand the scope of our work beyond Ontario, as well as launching several exciting new services.