![]() ![]() The influence is largely unconscious, and people think industry funding doesn’t affect them, so it just hasn’t come up very much. Why aren’t your nutrition and food science colleagues taking this more seriously? Marion Nestle There are only 11 studies on how industry funding has influenced food and beverage research, even though there are thousands of such studies on how drug company money has influenced the practice of medicine. Yet in the book, you find there’s hardly any systematic studies of these problems. That’s where the influence tends to show up. But research on where the bias comes in says the real problem is in the design of the research question - the way the question gets asked - and the interpretation of results. People who do the studies say the conduct of their science is fine, and it well may be. So I consider this kind of research marketing, not science. ![]() But it’s pretty clear that It’s much easier to find industry-funded studies with favorable results than not.įood companies don’t want to fund studies that won’t help them sell products. At the end of a year, I had collected 168 industry-funded studies, and 156 of them had favorable results only 12 did not, despite my begging readers to send me examples. For a year, I collected industry-funded studies with results favorable to the sponsors’ marketing and posted them on my blog. That was part of the genesis of this book. You kept finding studies that made almost laughable health claims - ”Concord grape juice, cognitive function, and driving performance,” or ”Walnut ingestion in adults at risk for diabetes” - funded by big grape juice and walnut growers, respectively. It was your informal study of industry-funded food research that got me interested in this issue. I now give talks at the Pepsi auditorium at Cornell. So these scientists were part of the food industry - and the food industry supports food science. Faculty did research on the best way to feed animals to maximize their growth.Īs the processed food industry became more developed, universities began hiring scientists who could help food companies make and develop new products. In the early 20th century, Cornell University developed departments of dairy, meat, and poultry science in order to support those industries. Cornell’s food science department is a good example. Can you unpack it? Marion Nestleįood science started out in universities as a way to support the food industry. You write, “Food science is the food industry.” That’s a strong claim. Here’s our conversation, edited for length and clarity. I talked to Nestle about how the food industry became so influential in academic science, why her food science and nutrition research peers haven’t taken the problem seriously, and how consumers can navigate confusing health claims. We eat many different foods in combinations that differ from day to day varying our food intake takes care of nutrient needs.” “To ask whether one single food has special health benefits defies common sense. She also explains why the very notion that any single food might have miraculous health benefits is absurd. Through her investigation into how money flows from companies and trade groups to labs, she shows how pervasive the problem is - and why it’s distorting how we think about health. In a new book, Unsavory Truth, Marion Nestle - a nutrition researcher at New York University, writer, and longtime crusader on conflicts of interest in food science - charts dozens of fascinating examples like this, from the likes of Hershey and Coca-Cola, to the Corn Refiners Association and the Royal Hawaiian Macadamia Nut Inc. This research, and the media hype it inevitably attracts, yielded a clear shift in the public perception of chocolate products that, are also, ahem, full of sugar and calories. Here at Vox, we examined 100 Mars-funded studies last year and found they overwhelmingly drew glowing conclusions about cocoa and chocolate - promoting everything from chocolate’s heart health benefits to cocoa’s ability to fight disease. Take chocolate: Over the past 30 years, Nestle, Mars, Barry Callebaut, and Hershey - among the world’s biggest producers of chocolate - have poured millions of dollars into scientific studies and research grants that support cocoa science. Turns out our beliefs about how nutritious these products are is increasingly shaped by scientific research dreamed up and paid for by major food companies and interest groups. Do they include antioxidant-rich chocolate bars? Or immune system-boosting juice? Or maybe “superfoods” like pomegranate granola bars? ![]() Consider the foods you’d like to think of as healthy. ![]()
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