SWEET LIES
How the food industry fooled us into eating less healthily
IF you’re buying avocados because they’re a superfood, nibbling on dark chocolate because of its antioxidant properties and sipping a soda now and then because you can just work it off at the gym, you’ve been had.
In her new book, “Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat,” Marion Nestle, an NYU professor in nutrition, food studies and public health, delivers unsettling news. A vast amount of nutritional research is funded and influenced by the food industry, who use “science” as a marketing tool, making unhealthy foods seem OK and turning wholesome foods into incredible cure-alls — often against the interest of public health and defying common sense.
“Whenever I see a study suggesting that a single food (such as pork, oats, pears), eating pattern (having breakfast) or product (beef, diet sodas, chocolate) improves health, I look to see who paid for it,” Nestle writes. “If an industry-funded study claims miraculous benefits from the sponsor’s products, think: ‘Advertising.’ ”
One of the most noteworthy research funders is Coca-Cola, which invested more than $6 million in a report called the International Study of Childhood Obesity, Lifestyle and the Environment. It tracked 6,000 children, starting in 2010, looking at their physical activity, sleep, TV habits and diet. Researchers did not look for a correlation between soda and obesity, so they didn’t discover one. Instead they found the most important correlations of obesity were lack of sleep, low physical activity and frequent TV watching. “Coca-Cola could not have asked for a better outcome,” Nestle writes.
The beverage company also funded a group called the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN), which offered supposedly expert advice on the obesity epidemic, while emphasizing the importance of physical activity over avoiding sugary drinks. In 2015, The New York Times reported that Coca-Cola had given millions to the GEBN and those associated with it. At the time, Nestle called GEBN a “front group for Coca-Cola” with “a very clear” agenda: “Get these researchers to confuse the science and deflect attention from dietary intake.”
In the wake of the scandal, Coca-Cola adopted a policy of somewhat radical transparency, revealing startling figures. It reported that from 2010 to 2017, it spent $140 million funding research and on partnerships. Some of the partnerships were especially disturbing. The advocacy group Ninjas for Health found that from 2010 to 2015, Coca-Cola contributed $2.9 million to the American Academy of Pediatrics and $3.5 million to the American Academy of Family Physicians. These are organizations “that might otherwise be expected to advise avoidance of sugary drinks,” Nestle writes. She says those specific ties have seemingly been severed but “Coca-Cola still funds an extraordinary number of minority groups [and] pediatric groups. It’s just astonishing.” The mysterious depth of Coca-Cola’s conflicts of interest came to light during the 2016 election. It turned out that one of the advisers on Hillary Clinton’s campaign, Capricia Marshall, was billing $7,000 a month to consult for Coca-Cola, Nestle reveals in her book. If Clinton had been elected, Marshall — and potentially her conflicts of interest — “would have [likely] had a role in the White House,” Nestle told The Post. (Marshall told The Post that her paid work with Coca-Cola ceased in early 2016 and she wouldn’t have taken a job in the White House due to family reasons.)
COCA-Cola is hardly the only sugary product that connived to appear less unhealthy than it is. In 2009, if you browsed the grocery-store shelves, you might have seen a box of Fruit Loops emblazoned with a check-mark logo from the “Smart Choices Program.” Smart Choices was a food-industry initiative that sought to collaborate with the American Society for Nutrition to supposedly help consumers make wholesome decisions.
“You’re rushing around, you’re trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal,” Eileen T. Kennedy, president of the Smart Choices board and then the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, told The New York Times in 2009.
Of course, this propaganda wasn’t about helping mom feed junior a wholesome breakfast. Smart Choices was created and funded by food manufacturers including cereal makers Kellogg’s and General Mills “to make highly processed foods appear as healthful as unprocessed foods, which they are not,” Nestle said at the time. Facing investigations from the FDA and the USDA, the program suspended operations in 2009.
Perhaps most shocking, Nestle says, is the flood of research funding that pumps up the health benefits of wholesome foods, such as fruits and nuts. Industry-funded research has claimed a number of dubious health benefits: Concord grapes may boost one’s driving abilities; soy snacks and avocados can potentially improve cognition; almonds may reduce body fat; mangos have the potential to improve one’s microbiome and tolerance to high-fat diets. POM Wonderful marketed its pomegranate juice as a miracle elixir saying it had clinical studies showing that the drink and supplements helped reduce the risk of prostate cancer, “treated” heart disease and erectile dysfunction and could even help one “cheat death.” In September 2010, the Federal
Coca-Cola once funded a study that largely pinned childhood obesity on lack of sleep.
Trade Commission said that POM’s research did not adequately support its marketing claims and it had to discontinue its ads. POM responded by suing the FTC, saying its actions “detrimentally impacted [its] freedom of speech.” It also eventually took out a full-page ad in The New York Times reading, “FTC v. POM: You be the judge.”
“POM . . . deserves credit for chutzpah,” Nestle writes.
Another audacious culprit was the parent company of a chocolate-milk drink known as Fifth Quarter Fresh. In 2014, it funded a University of Maryland professor’s research looking into how the chocolate milk might potentially protect high-school football players from concussions. The study was poorly designed and administered, but it delivered seemingly astonishing findings. In 2015, the university issued a press release saying that the “new, high-protein chocolate milk helped high-school football players improve their cogni- tion and motor functions over the course of a season, even after experiencing concussions.” Themedia poked holes in the dubious report, which had never been peer-reviewed, published in a journal or even fully written.
“It was just jaw-dropping that anybody could do something like [that] and expect to get away with it,” Nestle says.
EVEN so, some industry-funded findings have seeped into our consciousness. Dark chocolate being an antioxidant is now considered common knowledge, but that’s partly thanks to Mars Inc., which has been working to give chocolate a healthy glow for decades.
In 1982, it established a chocolate research center in Brazil looking at cocoa flavanols and their antioxidant, anti-inflammatory and heart-healthy properties. Too bad flavanols are present in chocolate in such small amounts that you’d have to eat more than a quarter-pound of chocolate a day, cancelling out any good effects. But Mars didn’t let that fact get in the way. The company started selling cocoa supplement pills with a higher concentration of flavanols, continuing its research and putting out the message that h “cocoa flavanols lower blood pressure and increase r blood-vessel function” and that its chocolate supplements help “firefighters, or anyone, maintain who they are for years to come.” Even though the as assertions were related to chocolate supplements, not candy bars, Nestle says they helped create an aura of health around all cocoa products. (As for the supplements themselves, Nestle says, “it’s hard to imagine that flavanol supplements could make much difference, but they are unlikely to hurt.”)
Unlike the pharmaceutical industry, the food industry lacks clear guidelines and rules of disclosure when it comes to research. While some researchers think it’s possible to accept industry funding and remain impartial, Nestle is doubtful.
So what are consumers meant to do? Nestle says we should first and foremost “be skeptical.” Look out for words like “miracle” or “breakthrough” — good science is rarely so exciting and tends to proceed incrementally. Be wary of any hype surrounding a singular ingredient or way of eating. Good nutrition is actually pretty simple. “Eat a wide variety of relatively unprocessed foods in reasonable amounts,” Nestle writes in her final chapter. “The basic principles of eating healthfully have remained remarkably constant over the years.”