Search results: the corporation not me

Thanks to everyone who flooded my mailbox with this piece from The Guardian: She was fired after not endorsing Splenda-filled salads to people with diabetes. Why?

According to a lawsuit {Elizabeth] Hanna recently filed against the ADA, the organization – which endorses recipes and food plans on its websiteand on the websites of “partner” food brands – tried to get her to greenlight recipes that she believedflew in the face of the ADA’s mission. These included recipes like a “cucumber and onion salad” made with a third of a cup of Splenda granulated artificial sweetener, “autumnal sheet-pan veggies” with a quarter cup of Splenda monk fruit sweetener and a “cranberry almond spinach salad” with a quarter cup of Splenda monkfruit sweetener.

Guess which company gave more than $1m to the ADA in 2022? Splenda.

I also was sent an email from Georgia Warren, the  Guardian’s Interim membership editor: The link between investigative reporting, some nightmarish recipes and the diabetes epidemic.

Why would a public health charity promote a product that its own science shows contributes to the disease it is fighting? Well, as Neil Barsky reported for us this week, the ADA took more than $1m from Splenda in 2022 – and then fired their chief nutritionist when, according to a lawsuit she recently filed, she refused to sign-off on the Splenda-based recipes that her bosses wanted the ADA to publicly endorse.

Neil – creator of our new series ‘Death by diabetes: America’s preventable epidemic’ – told me…“The ADA has bought into a system that requires them to raise money from corporations to fund their research. I don’t for a second doubt that every single person who works there cares about people with diabetes and wants to do the right thing, but being beholden to these groups distorts your judgment.”

..And what else is pharma funding? The ADA. The organization – whose guidance doctors rely on when treating their diabetes patients – boasts a $100m annual budget. Between 2017 and 2024, pharmaceutical and device manufacturers contributed over $134m to the organization – or roughly 20% of its total funding.

Comment: The ADA has long appeared to be in thrall the the drug industry.  I well remember the talk I gave at one of its annual conventions years ago.  I was one of two speakers about diet and diabetes (the other was a session on the role of sugar in diabetes sponsored by Coca-Cola—truly you can’t make this stuff up).  The other talks, hundreds of them, were about drugs.  At that time, the ADA said virtually nothing about diet on its website.

It’s gotten much better.  Here’s what it says about carbohydrates:

• Try to eat less of these: refined, highly processed carbohydrate foods and those with added sugar. These include sugary drinks like soda, sweet tea and juice, refined grains like white bread, white rice and sugary cereal, and sweets and snack foods like cake, cookies, candy and chips.

And here’s what the ADA says about artificial sweeteners:

It’s also important to know that at this time, there is no clear evidence to suggest that using sugar substitutes will help with managing blood sugar or weight or improving cardiometabolic health in the long run. So here’s the bottom line:

• Sugar substitutes are effective alternatives to sugar for some people, but not a perfect fit for all—it’s a personal choice.
• If you’re looking to reduce your intake of sugar or sugar substitutes, start slowly. For example, start by replacing one soda or juice with water or a no-calorie drink at a time.
• Water will always be a great choice! If you start feeling yourself get bored with just water, you can always spruce it up with fruits or herbs like this sparkling strawberry mint infused water.

And, finally for now, here are the ADA’s corporate sponsors, and its national sponsors.

Conflicted?  Sure looks like it.

José Tenorio.  School Food Politics in Mexico: The Corporatization of Obesity and Healthy Eating Policies.  Routledge, 2023.  

I was asked for a blurb for this one:

From first-hand observations and deep research, José Tenorio makes it clear that school food in Mexico is about much more than feeding hungry kids; it’s about how food corporations have taken advantage of social inequalities to replace native food traditions with less healthful but profitable products.  School food politics, indeed!

This book may seem specialized, but it is a useful case study in the politics of school food—not confined to the United States, apparently.

Mexico leads the way in efforts to promote healthier diets.  It has  excellent dietary guidelines.   It also has warning labels on food products (see my post on these), soda taxes, a ban on trans fats, and other measures.

Mexico’s schools do not provide meals for kids in schools.  They sell foods at canteens.

The country set nutrition standards for foods sold in schools in 2011, but compliance is not great.

Public health and food advocacy groups support laws to ban unhealthy foods and drinks from schools.  Despite formidible industry opposition, this may actually happen.

This book provides evidence for why it should.

I was surprised to see a press release from the American Society for Nutrition (ASN—of which I am a member) announcing publication of a research paper the Society had commissioned and published on sugars and body weight: Important food sources of fructose-containing sugars and adiposity: a systematic review and meta-analysis of controlled feeding trials.

The paper, the press release said, “Illustrate[s] The Need for Nuance in Public Health Guidance Related to Consumption of Sugars: Findings call into question recommendations that imply all sources of fructose-containing sugars carry the same risk.”

The press release notes that “this comprehensive review is timely as the 2025 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee currently assesses the latest science to inform updated evidence-based recommendations,” and it quotes the lead author: “There is an opportunity for more food-based guidance around sugars to help ensure Americans don’t inadvertently eat less health-promoting foods containing fructose – especially at a time when most people don’t eat enough of all forms of fruit, which offer significant health benefits.”

Uh oh.  This is an easily misinterpreted message.

My immediate question:  Who wrote the paper ?

No surprise.: authors with extensive conflicts of interest.

I’ve written about some of these authors’ conflicts of interest disclosures previously.  See, for example. this, this, and this.

Just for fun, I’ll post this particular statement of the conflicted interests at the end of this post.

Basically, these authors do not understand the difference between a conflict of interest (financial ties, which are discretionary) and non-discretionary viewpoints (all researchers have them).  In this case, consulting for a sugar company is a conflict; being a vegan or avoiding sugar-sweetened beverages is not.

My second question: Why did ASN commission this paper, and from these particular authors no less?

I contacted John Courtney, the long-time executive director of the ASN.  He said this was a leftover from an initiative started ten years ago.  Since then, the ASN has decided not to commission papers on controversial topics and this will not happen again.

Good.  It shouldn’t.  Commissioning papers like these make the ASN look like an arm of the food industry.  The ASN should avoid even teh appearance of conflicts of interest as much as it possibly can.

You don’t believe this is a problem?  Take a look at this conflict of interest statement.  Enjoy!

This photo was just sent to me by Murray Carpenter (@Murray_journo).  I don’t know him personally but he is the author of  Caffeinated, which I blurbed and wrote about in 2014.

He wrote that ILSI, a well known front group for the food industry, must have hired someone to track media reception to my 2018 book, Unsavory Truth: How the Food Industry Skews the Science of What We Eat.  ILSI is the International Life Sciences Institute, which has since changed its name to the Institute for the Advancemement of Food and Nutrition Sciences.

Murray said that on January 19, 2019, he was in the audience for the annual ILSI conference  in Clearwater, Florida.  He sent me this account of that occasion [my emphasis in red below]:

As the conference ground on, attendance fell off. So there were plenty of empty seats when Clare Thorp took the podium. Thorp had newly assumed the position of executive director of ILSI North America. She talked about scientific integrity ad nauseam. The emphasis seemed a corrective, an effort to reinforce the message among the membership. Because for an organization that prides itself on independence and integrity, ILSI kept getting caught doing the bidding of its members, over and over again. It just couldn’t seem to rein itself in.

It wasn’t just that ILSI’s Applebaum, Hill, and Sievenpiper had become the public faces of pseudoscience [Note: scientists caught up in conflicts of interest with Coca-Cola]. Thorp also referenced the Mars situation. The corporation had first criticized ILSI-funded science, then left the group entirely.

“Our membership comes with some major challenges and opportunities,” Thorp said. “We’ve lost a major member. It happens. We keep going.”

Unwittingly, Thorp worked doggedly to prove the aforementioned axiom—the degree to which you have scientific integrity is inversely related to the number of times you claim it.

“I have a passion for sound science…I come from a family of scientists, whether practitioners or academics,” she said. The science statements came out in torrents. “Unbiased and credible research…Scientific integrity is not something we made up overnight, it’s a journey.” She displayed a slide touting the Scientific Integrity Consortium, in partnership with the USDA, which she called “a coalition of the willing.”

“We are not an advocacy or a lobbying organization. But we are actually something entirely different,” she said.

“ILSI is an industry-funded organization where these companies support research that doesn’t directly serve their private interests. They agree to be hands-off…and they bravely commit to publishing the data, no matter what it says. This is very scary. And then, why would they do it?…It’s actually altruistic. They genuinely believe it’s important. They also believe that having a collaborative forum where everyone’s voice can be heard is really necessary.”

But it wasn’t enough to just focus on the science. Thorp also considered the public perception of ILSI. She said she wanted to communicate their work more broadly, to step outside this circle of friends and take a more proactive approach.

“We need to have a better understanding of who ILSI North America is, and what we do, and how we do it.” In response, ILSI was developing more communications materials, she said, and new website graphics.

Then she displayed a slide showing an elaborate, graphically elegant word cloud. Some of the big words in the center of the cloud: “science,” “truth,” “food,” “unsavory,” “industry,” “Nestle,” “Marion.”

It turned out that the nonprofit had chosen to spend some of its money to hire a media tracker to follow the press coverage of Marion Nestle’s recent book Unsavory Truth. The book focused on corporate influence in nutrition policy. The word cloud represented an analysis of the press coverage.

And here, Thorp was actually pleased. “The themes of manipulation, deception, and conspiracy that Nestle is promoting are not coming through as main themes in the media coverage.”

Thorp said that one of ILSI’s challenges was the public perception that it’s an industry front group, and that gets onto the web. “We are working very hard to get our Wikipedia page updated, and then it gets changed again, and then we have to update it again, but it’s important,” she said.

Leading ILSI had become a tough gig. Thorp would not last a year at the helm.

Comment

Of course the word cloud did not include maniputlation, deception, or conspiracy; those words do not appear in Unsavory Truth.  The whole point of conflicts of interest induced by food industry sponsorship—which is what the book is about—is that the conflicts are almost always unintentional, unrecognized, and denied.  Researchers who take industry funding do not believe it influences their science, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary reviewed in my book.

What’s especially interesting to me about this is that from my perspective, Unsavory Truth had little impact.  It generated much less media coverage than most of my books, and led to few speaking invitations.  I thought it had disappeared without a trace.

Apparently not.  I am pleased and honored to learn about this incident.

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From Oxford University Press:

I was happy to be asked to contribute to this book: 

My thanks to Eric Crosbie, who did the heavy lifting on the chapter and also co-authored two other chapters (on trade and investment and on teaching commercial determinants of health.

This book brings together multiple authors and perspectives on how corporations selling unhealthful commodities—tobacco, alcohol, and junk food, for example—act to protect sales and marketing, regardless of effects on individual and collective health.

Chapters cover the policies and politics, the ways commercial interessts have taken over culture, how companies influence science, research, and marketing, examples of such influence, analyses of the legal issues, and recommendations for countering corporate actions.

The chapters are so informative and so well referenced that it’s hard to select specific examples.  But here’s one from George Annas’ chapter on “Corporations as Irresponsible Artificial People.”

The public health goal is to make the social responsibility of corporations a reality rather than just a feel-good marketing slogan.  This will require transforming the corporation from an instrument designed and run to make money while indifferent to polluting the planet and destroying the health of humans to an entity whose money-making must be consistent with preserving the health of the planet and its inhabitants.  Central to this objecti8ve is to replace the currfent post-2008 system in which profits are kept by the owners of capital, and losses are socialized by being paid for by governments, most notably for corporations that are “too big to fail.”  Any sustainable system requires that both gains and losses are shared by corporations and governments.  Sharing gains and lossers will require a restructuring of corporate tax, including a minimum tax for all corporations, but domestic and multinational.

Amen.  Everyone needs to understand that food corporations are not social service or public health agencies.  They are businesses stuck with responding to the shareholder value movement, which forces them to make profits their first and only priority.

This system needs to change.  This book provides the evidence.

Note: I discussed many of these same issues in Unsavorty Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat.  

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The advocacy group, U.S. Right to Know, sent out a press release to announce publication of an article in the British journal, Public Health Nutrition: The corporate capture of the nutrition profession in the USA: the case of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics [AND, formerly the American Dietetic Association] accepted millions of dollars from food, pharmaceutical and agribusiness companies, had policies to provide favors in return, and invested in ultra-processed food company stocks, according to a study published today in Public Health Nutrition…The study was produced by public health scholars and U.S. Right to Know, a nonprofit investigative public health group that obtained tens of thousands of pages of internal Academy documents through state public records requests.

I’ve been writing about corporate capture of AND (formerly the American Dietetic Association) for years (see below), but this study shocked even me, for two reasons.

• AND holds stock in food companies making ultra-processed foods.

The documents show that the Academy and its foundation invested funds in ultra-processed food companies. The Academy’s investment portfolio in January 2015 included $244,036 in stock holdings in Nestle S.A. and $139,545 in PepsiCo. The Academy foundation’s investment portfolio in June 2013 included $209,472 in stock holdings in Nestle S.A and $125,682 in PepsiCo.

• The list of food companies donating to AND is extraordinarily long; it goes on for pages.

The Academy accepted more than $15 million from corporate and organizational contributors in the years 2011 and 2013-2017. The Academy’s top contributors in 2011 and 2013-2017 were:

• National Dairy Council $1,496,912
• Conagra Inc. $1,414,058
• Abbott Nutrition $1,246,389
• Abbott Laboratories $824,110
• Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics Foundation: $801,261
• PepsiCo Inc. $486,335
• Coca-Cola Co. $477,577
• Hershey Co. $368,032
• General Mills Inc. $309,733
• Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality $296,495
• Aramark Co. $293,051
• Unilever Best Foods $276,791
• Kellogg USA $273,272

The Academy’s response: Inaccuracies in U.S. Right to Know Article

The report is disjointed, mostly opinion, emails taken out of context, picking and choosing items based on words out of Board reports, etc.

The Academy lists facts

• One of the authors has strong financial ties to CrossFit, a staunch opponent to RDN licensure.
• Less than 9% (12 out of 149) of named scholarships, awards and named research grants were established through industry. The funds that are established have input into scholarship criteria, which are approved by the Foundation’s Board. An independent review committee then reviews applications and selects recipients.
• Less than 2% (32 out of 2,812) of donors to the Academy’s Second Century were industry donors.

Additional Academy facts

• Fact: The Academy is NOT influenced by sponsorship money
• Fact: Less than 3% of the Academy’s and the Foundation’s investments are in food companies.
• Fact: The Academy has never changed a position at the request of sponsors.
• Fact: Less than 9% of Academy funding comes from sponsorship.
• Fact: The Foundation’s Fellows program allows participants to serve as catalysts for change and advancement in emerging areas of need for the evolving nutrition and dietetics profession.
• Fact: The Academy and Foundation have always been committed to accountability through transparency and fiduciary responsibility.

Comment

I have been writing about the Academy’s ties with food companies for years.  See, for example,

• March 17, 2008  OK. Time to talk about the American Dietetic Association’s alliances with food companies
• March 13, 2015  Dietitians put seal on Kraft Singles (you can’t make this stuff up)
• March 18, 2015  Dietitians in turmoil over conflicts of interest: it’s about time
• March 1, 2017  The recent Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ election: controversy over non-disclosure of industry ties
• September 9, 2020  Dietetic Association lets Bayer, owner of glyphosate, educate its members about pesticides (but see correction below)
• A chapter in my book, Unsavory Truth: How the Food Industry Skews the Science of What We Eat

In my book, I document how food companies exert influence through sponsorship of research and professional societies.  Typically, recipients of industry funding do not recognize the influence of sponsorship and deny it, as we see here.

If AND wants to be taken seriously as an organization devoted to public health, it needs to set strong guidelines for conflicts of interest and adhere to them.  At the moment, this organization gives the appearance of a public relations arm of the food industry.

The same can be said of the American Society of Nutrition, but that’s another story.

Resources

• U.S. Right to Know publishes a fact sheet on AND: available here.
• MedPage: Nutrition Group Has Close Ties to Food, Pharma Companies —
• Washington Post: Group shaping nutrition policy earned millions from junk food makers (I’m quoted in this)

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The Access to Nutrition Initiative (ATNI) has released its latest Index report on the progress of the 11 largest U.S. food and beverage companies on their commitments to make, market and sell healthy food and drinks.

The report’s dismal conclusion:

While all companies have placed a greater focus on nutrition in their corporate strategies since the first index was released in 2018, their actual products have not become healthier, and they are not making sufficient efforts to safeguard children from the marketing of unhealthy products.

Collectively, these copanies have sales of about $170 billion annually and account for nearly 30% of all U.S. food and beverage sales.

The report’s overall findings (the Index is a composite on a scale of 10):

Specific findings:

• Only 30% of their products meet criteria for “healthy,” 70% do not. This is only marginally better than in 2018 (see link to my post on this below).
• Companies say they have a greater focus on nutrition and health, but are not doing much about it.
• Only four companies are trying to improve the affordability of their healthier products.
• Companies say they are trying to protect children from the harmful effects of marketing unhealthy products, but they are not doing much about it.

ATNI recommends that companies fix these problems and that the government “support such changes by introducing more effective and enforceable standards and legislation that prevent the marketing of unhealthy products and push companies to apply reformulation strategies on their products.

I like this recommendation, despite its being couched as “encourage,” rather than as a demand:

Companies are encouraged to actively support (and commit to not lobby against) public policy measures in the US to benefit public health and address obesity as enshrined in the National Strategy on food, hunger, nutrition, and health

Comment: Results liket these come as no surprise.  To repeat: food companies are not social service or public health agencies; they are businesses with stockholders who demand returns on investment as the first priority.

Expecting companies to change products to make them less attractive or to stop marketing to children means asking them to go against their business interests.

Until companies are rewarded for focusing on social values, public health, and environmental sustainability, ATNI’s evaluations are unlikely to have much of an impact on corporate behavior.

Documents

• The press release
• ATNI US Index Executive Summary
• My post on the 2018 ATNI release
• Note: ATNI is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

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