It’s not surprising that companies would pay for research likely to show the benefits of their products. But critics say the worry is that they’re hijacking science for marketing purposes, and that they cherry-pick or hype findings.
The thinner-children-ate-candy research is an example. It was drawn from a government database of surveys that asks people to recall what they ate in the past 24 hours. The data “may not reflect usual intake” and “cause and effect associations cannot be drawn,” the candy paper authors wrote in a section about the study’s limitations.
The candy association’s press release did not mention that and declared, “New study shows children and adolescents who eat candy are less overweight or obese.”
The headline at cbsnews.com: “Does candy keep kids from getting fat?”
Carol O’Neil, the LSU professor who made the “thin and clearly padded” remark, told The Associated Press through a university representative that data can be “publishable” even if it’s thin. In a phone interview a week later, she said she did not recall why she made the remark, but that it was a reference to the abstract she had attached for her co-author to provide feedback on. She said she believed the full paper was “robust.”
The flood of industry money in nutrition science partly reflects the field’s challenges. Isolating the effect of any single food on a person’s health can be difficult, as evidenced by the sea of conflicting findings.
The ambiguity and confusion has left the door open for marketers.
Even long-established “nutritional truths” are built on questionable science with industry ties. Milk, a staple of lunchrooms across the country thanks to the ubiquity of the claim that it leads to healthy bones, many people have found that even with a high-calcium diet your bones may still be brittle. Some critics even say milk’s place in the food pyramid is all the result of a wildly successful lobbying campaign decades ago, an example of influenced-science at its best.
And some worry that influence goes all the way to the FDA. Think Progress even thinks that the aforementioned newly proposed voluntary guidelines released this week to help curb the amount of salt in the average American diet was a step in the right direction that was still designed to dodge a battle with food lobbyists:
The FDA currently regulates hundreds of food additives with arcane-sounding names. Adding salt to the list, however, may prove difficult.
The reason is not, as some news outlets have suggested, that the government will face pushback from the scientific community. Although a few studies have shown inconsistent findings about the optimal level of salt intake, CDC director Tom Frieden argues in the Journal of the American Medical Association that “these reports have created a ‘false aura of scientific controversy around dietary salt.’”
“The totality of the scientific evidence supports sodium reduction from current intake levels,” Susan Mayne, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, added in an interview with The New York Times.
So, considering the FDA’s confidence in the science, why didn’t the agency make the guidelines mandatory?
Critics argue the government chose to avoid a costly confrontation with the food lobby. “I’m upset with the White House,” Sen. Tom Harkin (D) told Reuters. “They went wobbly in the knees. When it comes to kids’ health, they shouldn’t go wobbly in the knees.”
Especially since most nutritionists as of late are trying to veer away from mass produced diet guidelines. Sure there’s stuff that’s going to be on the whole worse for you (sugar) than some other stuff that’s generally good (greens), but the key to building a healthy and balanced diet is finding a good balance for yourself.
“While they are written with the best intentions of inspiring the public to eat healthier, I think [listicles titled “Foods Nutritionists Say They Never Eat”] perpetuate a counterproductive message,” said Rachel Begun, a Boulder-based registered dietitian, in a U.S. News & World Report article. “As a profession, we encourage individuals to find the dietary pattern that works best for them. However, these types of articles convey just the opposite – that everyone should eat like us, the nutrition experts. I’d like to start seeing more advice about how individuals can learn to tune into their own bodies and eat according to their individual needs and circumstances.”
At the end of the day, you may be better off taking the FDA’s guidelines the same way they would like you to add sodium: With a grain of salt.
