Marion Nestle

Conflict of Interest as a career

If you have followed Marion Nestle’s books as I have, you will note not so much a progression, as a regression. They started with the nutritional value of foods in the body, worked their way back to manufacturing and chemicals, and now with Unsavory Truth, there is almost nothing about food at all - just money. It’s as American as – individual apple pie in a cardboard sleeve.

The issue is the discipline of nutrition. It is decades behind other sciences in show more recognizing that money corrupts. They’ve only just begun arguing about it, as they are absolutely inundated with cash, gifts and samples to help sell pretend food. Just like doctors with pharmaceuticals. Netsle opens with the real foundation of the issue: the slightest gift influences the recipient. Those pens and umbrellas and freezer bags and coffee mugs, all serve to make the recipient feel indebted. They make them remember the donor’s company when it is time to buy, recommend or prescribe. It works. Beautifully. Or they wouldn’t do it.

The recipients whine and complain they aren’t that gullible or stupid. But they are. Worse, medical practitioners claim they are actually entitled to the gifts because of all the hard work and expense they went thorough to get to where they are. So bring on the junkets, the conferences in resorts around the world and all expenses paid plus honoraria. They earned it all! There’s an entire chapter just on Coca-Cola’s masterful efforts. She also includes a delightful cartoon – a bingo card one of her colleagues created, with a box for every moronic excuse why researchers can and should accept corporate money.

And it has been going on for so long, it is an accepted part of the culture. “The link between drug industry gifts and prescription practices is so firmly established that it is considered beyond debate,” she says. They live a career of conflict of interest. And so does nutrition.

Possibly the most important new bit of information in the book is what Nestle calls nutrifluff. Any study that claims one single food or additive improves health, prevents disease or provides all the nutrition you need – is nutrifluff. Those news releases come out all the time. Reporters take them at face value. But the world, nutrition, and science don’t work that way. Taking one element out of context is a scientific absurdity. Similarly, there is no such thing as a “superfood”. Foods work in combination. They each contribute in their own way. Alone, they can’t do the job. And none is endowed with special powers.

Companies are forever funding studies to prove their product performs exactly that way. Industry and foundations account for 70% of food-related research. NutraSweet funded 74 studies, all of which found it safe. In 94 other studies, 90% (84) questioned its safety. Since studies without corporate backing are becoming an endangered species, all studies should be read with a cynical eye. But they should actually be read, Nestle says, because the truth is often easy to see, and it doesn’t appear in the news release or the news report.

There are exceptions to the corporate study plague. The honey industry paid for a study to show that honey is healthier than high fructose corn syrup. It isn’t. It turns out that honey has about the same levels of fructose, and therefore all the problems of fructose. That the study was published at all is a small miracle.

Some frauds are easy to spot. Fifth Quarter Fresh brand chocolate milk claimed it alleviates symptoms of concussion in high school football players. It had the study to “prove” it. And it got school districts to switch to its products on that basis.

Nutritionists want to know what are the real of effects of various additives. ”We would find out a lot sooner if trade association agendas were not involved,” Nestle says. All the studies to prove chocolate is a beneficial supplement to any diet, diverts scarce research resources from more worthwhile studies, she adds.

At bottom, the industry uses the playbook devised by Big Tobacco. It is, as everyone now knows, a combination of diversion, selective use of data, obfuscation, flooding the market with sponsored “research”, quoting out of context and out and out lies. Later, the industry learned to create “grassroots” groups, fake associations of consumers demanding the freedom to consume at will. Apparently, you can get four or five decades of obscene profits using those tactics, while customers become ill and die by the millions. Whatever works.

What all this leads to is somewhere Nestle won’t go. She recommends consumers call food producers and demand to know where the money goes, and that companies pool donations in blind trusts to be doled out to worthy studies. But she acknowledges this is a longstanding disaster, the result of the takeover of the government by huge corporations. It is capitalism that is the problem. Giving the FDA, the EPA and other agencies the ability to force disclosure, retract false claims, prevent false advertising and fund research without strings would go most of the way to solving Nestle’s issues.

Not happening. The best we can hope for is being informed. Unsavory Truth meets that requirement.

David Wineberg show less

The other cola wars

From the woman who told The New Yorker: “The best thing Pepsi could do for worldwide obesity would be to go out of business.” comes the ultimate, complete explanation of why sodas and the firms behind them are bad, who is doing what about it, and how you can help move it all along. Marion Nestle has long been the rational, thorough and fair rapporteur of food crime. Soda Politics is a standalone compendium of her personal knowledge and direct and indirect experience in show more the battle to corral it.

As with tobacco, soda makers know to start ‘em young. Kids meals come with sodas by default. A child’s portion is 12 ounces –their new normal. Big Soda has been paying schools a pittance for “exclusive pouring rights”, plastering the campuses of even elementary schools with dispensing machines, posters and signs – not just for their drinks, but for their even more unhealthy snack foods. It’s the kids’ normal environment. For this, the school gets $2 per child. $4 for highschoolers. Nestle calls this an unprecedented attack on schools. Interestingly, kids who aren’t allowed sodas at school don’t then go home and guzzle them to make up the deficit. They can live without, and if we could simply substitute the default drink, everything would improve.

Despite the “voluminous, consistent and compelling research”, Big Soda maintains there is no direct link to all the new obesity and diabetes we see here, and in every nation they invade. In the USA, the amount of sugar they sell works out to 13 teaspoons for every man woman and child – per day. But then, some theaters sell a 44 ounce “medium”.

The soda companies recognize that health advocacy has become the single biggest threat to profits. And that the Big Tobacco playbook is not enough. So while they still claim soda is beneficial and limiting it will have no effect on obesity, they are also busy weaving themselves into the landscape, donating money to all kinds of nonprofits, paying off scientists and politicians, and ensuring that pretty much anyone who might bring harm to their bottom line has been the recipient of their largesse at some point. For example, Nestle says the president of the 16th World Congress of Food Science and Technology cancelled a debate on the causes of childhood obesity explicitly because it might drive away food company sponsors. It’s that overt. It’s that saturated.

Big Soda also enjoys some success from all the pop-up (fake) grassroots groups they set up wherever anyone tries to rein them in. Soda is, they claim “capitalism in a bottle” and no blow is too low to shame it. So they pay locals to march in protest over proposed sales taxes, or portion caps. They create websites and petitions allegedly from locals who would grieve over such horrors.

I particularly appreciate Nestle’s “translation” of corporatespeak in the many lists of goals, activities, and principles the companies espouse publicly, seemingly daily. She dismisses “Corporate Social Responsibility” as a self evident conflict. If our aims were aligned, it would be automatic. That it is such big deal shows the inherent conflict between their goals and society’s needs.

In some ways, Soda Politics reminds me of the Opium Wars, in which the huge multinationals of the day forced the Chinese to buy and consume Indian opium. They got the British government to fund whole wars to make them take it. Today, Big Soda spends millions fighting any hint of a sales tax, bottle deposit, cap on serving sizes, advertising to children, the default drink with a fast food meal or any effort to impose healthy logic. Their strategy has been to get everyone to consume more every day (“share of stomach”), and nothing and no one can be allowed to stand in their way.

The good news is that people recognize the nonsense. Soda is in a long term decline in the USA. More and more groups, towns and states are leaning towards regulation and taxation. Soda Politics collects the successes and the failures to help anyone wanting to carry the torch in their own community. It’s all presented sensibly, rationally and usefully in this one valuable volume.

David Wineberg show less

I requested Unsavory Truth by Marion Nestle from Netgalley because I was interested in learning more about just how the unsuspecting and trusting public is being manipulated by companies. I've known for years how news articles about health have been manipulated, ever since an article I read years ago about how doctors who ate nuts were healthier than those who didn't. The last paragraph in the article mentioned that the study was sponsored by The Nut Growers Association. Hmmm.

I had to read show more this book in fits and starts because it was rage inducing! The book was fascinating, unsurprising (because I'm a cynical grump) and infuriating! As I got into the book, the author discusses how the strawberry industry was actively seeking studies linking their product to good health and realized I had just seen a headline about how strawberries are good for digestive health. Ugh.

This book tackles the myths with the hard truth behind all the hyperbole and psuedo-science thrown at us every day in the news. From scientists' bias, whether conscious or sub-conscious to active marketing of these biased findings to the public. So maddening! At this point, they could try to sell me a study about how the sky is blue and I still wouldn't believe it.

This was an excellent read, and one I've already recommended to several people and will continue to do so. It's an important tool against this bad "science" they're peddling and will only be of benefit in the long run. show less

Eat Drink Vote is a salute to cartoons and cartoonists. It is a collection of 250 or so cartoons, all on a food theme, framing Marion Nestle’s unsurpassed mastery of the subject. I’d go farther than that. The cartoons take precedence, and the text simply accompanies them and sets them up, by adding framework, facts and figures. The whole thing could be a Marion Nestle presentation, with the cartoons being her powerpoint accompaniment. The text sets up the visual laughs. It’s easy to show more read, easy to absorb, and hits home loud and clear.

My favorite cartoon pictures the new official American place setting: napkin, fork, knife, plate, and shovel. How elegantly eloquent.
The best quote is attributed to Tommy Thompson, as he resigned as Secretary of Health and Human Services: “I for the life of me cannot understand why terrorists have not attacked our food supply, because it is so easy to do.” That was in 2004. Nothing has changed since.

The message that she gives the most play to is that eating less is bad for business. Everything the corporate food complex does is aimed at getting us to eat more, and more often. We now eat all day long, in meetings, in breaks, in front of the tv – anywhere, any time. That is dramatically different than any other period in history, and it is making a difference – in profits, in obesity, and in healthcare.

Marion Nestle hits all the hot button issues in one entertaining package. It’s an excellent primer on the state of the nation’s approach to food. It’s a message that needs to be spread wider.

But while we get a thorough treatment of Eat and Drink, Vote remains unexplored…. show less