Transcription
[Music]
This video is almost an hour long, so I want to give you a quick rundown of what's in it. Dr. Nestle is going to tell you about research contract organizations. And these are organizations that go to food companies and say, "What marketing result do you want? What your product will give you the result you want? We'll set up the study, we'll get the participants in the study, we'll handle everything, and then you'll be able to make a marketing claim when we're done."
She's going to talk about how most university researchers have to raise most of their salary. They have to go out and come up with studies and get funding in order to pay their annual salary, and this puts a lot of pressure on researchers. She's going to talk about how food companies pay bloggers and dietitians and doctors to help promote their products by talking about how great these foods are, and that it may not be clearly disclosed that you are listening to someone who's part of a marketing budget.
She's going to talk about the enormous bias in food industry-funded studies. She talks about studies of one food that supposedly showed that this one food, you know, confers big benefits, that these are highly suspect and should be taken with an enormous grain of salt. She talks about how only researchers who deliver a positive result to the company will work with that company again. She talks about how studies can be set up to get rid of whatever result you want, including studies that are being done by the National Institutes of Health.
She talks about how antioxidant levels in food have no relevance to human health. This is according to the USDA and the National Institutes of Health, that there are no specific benefits to antioxidants, and yet companies use them for marketing. People use them to make claims about food and diets, but there's no evidence to support this. She talks about how probably thirty to forty percent of people doing research for companies do not actually disclose the money that they received from that industry. It's not disclosed under complex, and it's a big problem. She talks about how supplements generally do nothing. That the main benefit of supplements are is the placebo effect.
Okay, there's a lot more. That's just a taste. Let's roll.
Hey folks, welcome back. Jeff Nelson here today. We have a really special guest that we're talking to. She is the author of this excellent book here, "Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skewed the Science of What We Eat." And her name is Professor Marion Nestle. Professor Nestle is the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health America at New York University. She chaired the nutrition department there, I believe, from 1988 to 2003, and she's officially retired in 2017. She's also a visiting professor of nutrition sciences at Cornell. She has a PhD in molecular biology, an MPH in public health nutrition from the University of California at Berkeley, and she's got a bunch of honorary degrees and she's got a big stack of New York Times bestselling books.
Now, how I found out about Professor Nestle was in 2002 because of her first book, I think it was called "Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health." And she has studied deeply. She's been involved in the USDA, the FDA, and government policy. She wrote the first federal nutrition guidelines under Surgeon General C. Everett Koop. That was during the Reagan administration. I remember her book "Food Politics" where she talked about the pushback that she got when she would make a recommendation like, "Eat less sugar" or "Eat less meat." You know, the dairy, the meat, the sugar, whatever industries would go to their friends in Congress and, you know, get that line changed, anything that might affect their bottom line. So that was a high opening book about the political landscape of trying to make nutrition recommendations to people. That was a great book.
So I actually invited Professor Nestle to speak at one of my conferences. I think it was in 2002. And I remember Dean Ornish was giving the keynote on a Friday night. And Dean flew back to San Francisco after he gave his talk. And the next morning, when Professor Nestle was about to speak, Dean Ornish was there. And I thought, "Oh, he must have missed his flight the night before." He said, "No, I flew back because I want to hear Marion Nestle speak." So when you can impress someone like Dean Ornish, and let's just say he's not that easily impressed, I knew we were in for a great talk. And we were. So welcome, Marion Nestle.
It's good. Thanks. And thanks for the great introduction.
Well, it's great to be speaking with you. And as they say today, we're gonna talk about your book, "Unsavory Truth." And I want to mention that there are some food companies that really respect and even fear Professor Nestle. And there's an amazing story that has to do with Hillary Clinton's emails. Do you want to tell us a little bit about that?
Oh, the emails. Don't worry. Absolutely. Well, you remember that Hillary Clinton's emails were hacked before the election. And there were two different kinds of, you know, probably the Russians did that. And there was one set of emails that was posted on a site called DC Leaks. That was a new site set up for the purpose of releasing those emails. And those emails were of staff members who worked with Hillary Clinton on her campaign. One of them was a woman named Capricia Marshall, whose role in her campaign I've really never been able to figure out. But she was a friend of Clinton's and traveled with her. And as it turned out, while she was working for on Clinton's campaign, she was also a consultant for Coca-Cola and getting a seven thousand, seven thousand dollar a month retainer by Coca-Cola during that period.
And I found out about this because on the day after the, the things were leaked, I got calls from two different people. One was Kyle Pfister of a group called Nutrition for Health. And the other one was from Russ Greene of CrossFit. I didn't really know what either of those organizations were at the time. And they both had the same message: "Marion, you're in the emails." And I thought, "What? I didn't have anything to do with Hillary Clinton's campaign." I couldn't imagine what I was doing there. But in the Coca-Cola emails, the ones between Capricia Marshall and a vice president of Coca-Cola, there were several emails that related to my work. And it turned out that when I was a visiting scholar at the University of Sydney in Australia in January and February 2016, I had given a talk to the Australian Nutrition Society. And just before I went into that talk, somebody said, "You know, there's somebody here from Coca-Cola. Are you okay with that?" And I said, "Sure." I had just written and just published "Soda Politics," my book that came out in 2015. And I just assumed it was his book about the soda industry. And I assumed that there was somebody from the soda industry at every talk I gave. I shouldn't give it another thought.
And in these emails were very detailed and absolutely excellent notes on my lecture, along with recommendations that Coca-Cola monitor my activities in Australia, and also monitor the activities of Lisa Barrow, who was the professor I was working with at the University of Sydney. This resulted in a folder, the emails resulted in a full-page article in The Sydney Morning Herald for Professor Barrow, who got a lot of publicity out of that. But I was kind of astounded by the whole thing. It never occurred to me that I'd be caught up in that kind of international intrigue with the Russian hacking. But it turned out it was just a phenomenal gift because I couldn't figure out how to start this book. And that's how I started it.
Well, it's an amazing story. I mean, Coke companies are paying someone seven thousand dollars a month to be close to, you know, a major politician who might become president. So now, and and they're so focused on you. Why do you think Coke and companies, you know, food companies in general, are so afraid of you?
Well, I don't know whether they're afraid of me or not. I actually have very cordial relationships with the president, were the last two presidents of Coca-Cola in North America, who both come to see me in my office. I think they want to know what I have to say, you know, know your enemy, and maybe co-opt your enemy. I don't know. I mean, I don't really know how that works. But the relationships are certainly cordial.
Yeah. Well, that that was just fascinating to see yourself in WikiLeaks. In the book, "Unsavory Truth," you're kind of looking at the questions of, you know, how much, how much can we believe nutrition research? How much is true? You know, should we, we should probably suspect a lot of it. Should we ignore it? And you laid out something that, for me, was really interesting. I call it the perfect storm, you know, for commercial nutrition. And it's kind of what people in academia need in order to, you know, get ahead, which is like to bring in money to pay their salaries and so on. And then that coincides with what companies need, which is marketing. Can you talk about that a little?
Well, yeah. I mean, there's a big problem with funding research these days. And the problem, there are several problems with. One is that the federal government isn't paying as much for research as it used to. And in particular, it's not paying for as much nutrition research as it used to. And food companies are desperate for studies that will prove that their particular product has some unique nutritional value so they can use it for marketing purposes. I mean, it used to be years and years ago that food companies were involved in basic research as a method of developing new products. But then the Wall Street environment changed, and the shareholder value movement came. And it became more and more important for companies to produce dividends for stockholders. Most food companies gave up their research operations because they weren't profitable. And if they wanted research, they started contracting it out to universities.
But the research that food companies want is not basic research, it's marketing research. They want something that will prove that their particular fruit, vegetable, grain, whatever, has an antioxidant value because that's a selling point. If you're a company like Coca-Cola that makes a sugar-sweetened beverage that people would be better off not drinking, what you want is research that demonstrates that your products are harmless, that healthier people are drinking your products, and then anybody who says otherwise is doing such poor quality research that you don't need to pay attention to it. That's all part of the industry playbook for dealing with products that might potentially cause problems. The first thing you want to do is to cast doubt on the science. We learned that from the cigarette, from the cigarette industry.
So, you know, one food company, people who work for food companies or trade associations say to me, "Adam, desperation, but we want this research. How are we supposed to get it if we don't pay for it?" Well, of course, nobody else is going to do that. The government's not going to pay for marketing research, except in the case of the Department of Agriculture, which does. But NIH isn't going to. And so if they want marketing research, they contract it out either with research contract organizations or with academics at universities. And the research contract organizations are interesting. I just saw an interview with somebody who represents them. And he explained that, "If you're looking for a study that has a certain result, we can produce it for you. We can develop the study and organize the protocols and arrange the participants in this study so you'll get just the answer you want." It was stated almost that boldly.
And I get letters all the time from the representative from trade associations for food, foods of one kind or another, yogurt or pomegranates or pecans or grapes or cherries or whatever, saying, "We have a certain amount of money, usually around fifty thousand dollars, for research projects that will demonstrate the benefits of our products." So they're looking for research to demonstrate benefits that they can use for marketing. This is not open-ended scientific research. There's a big difference between designing a study that is deliberately looking for benefits and an open-ended study that asks, "Well, let's find out what this product does or if it does anything." Big difference.
Absolutely. I'm, one of the things that I was completely unaware until I read your book is the, you know, the university, that there's a great pressure to publish in order to advance. And then there's this pressure that a lot of professors have to actually bring in the money. At the university, only university only pays a percentage of their, you know, salary. So they've got to go out and find a way to pay the rest of their salary and bring money in. So they're under a lot of pressure. About pressure. And one of the things that make, that has enabled me to do the kind of work that I do is that I came to New York University with a full, complete, hard, what they call hard money salary. I get the money, no matter what happens. And I, and a full professorship. I have tenure. I mean, that's one of the reasons why I can do what I can do. I don't have to raise my own money. But there are plenty of researchers at major universities who are expected to raise their own salaries or a very large percentage of it.
One of the things you quote in the book is a PR person, I'm not sure if it was a Coke person, who said to the, you know, something along the lines of, "If we have a network of dietitians, we work with every big brand works with bloggers or has paid talent." Is this how the system works? Our food companies, you know, finding allies and then paying them to help get their message across?
Absolutely. I still get, people still send me messages from dietitians and nutritionists who are, according to the rules of the association to which they belong, they are supposed to indicate in their Twitter posts and blog posts that they're paid to do this. But it's in very small print. And Coca-Cola used this technique a lot. And to try to, big, I mean, Coca-Cola has a big problem. Sales are way down for sugar-sweetened beverages in general. And they, they've been falling for nearly 20 years. And there's a lot of bad press around sugar-sweetened beverages. People would be healthier if they didn't drink so many. That word is out. And so they're trying to counter that in any way that they can. And the idea is to minimize concerns about sugar. That's getting increasingly hard to do as the evidence piles up.
Right, right. You know, I'm interested in this question of influence. And you do talk about it in a couple of different chapters. And it's a subtle thing. You know, it's not like a, a somebody is, you know, selling out a researcher. It can be bought. But it's, it's, you know, it's like subtle. What is, how, what's the nature of that? Can you kind of comment on that?
Well, well, it's interesting. Influence has been researched extensively for a very long period of time. And that research, which has mostly been done on cigarette, chemical, and pharmaceutical drug industries, um, demonstrates that gifts have a great deal of influence. Larger gifts are more important than smaller ones and have a greater influence than smaller ones. But the famous example is that all you have to do is give a physician a pen and a prescription pad with the name of a brand with a brand name drug on it, and that physician will increase prescriptions of that brand-name drug over generics. I mean, it's been shown over and over and over again. And it happens at an unconscious level. The physicians aren't aware that they're doing that. They didn't intend to do it. It just kind of happens. And it happens at a subconscious level. That makes it really, really hard to deal with.
And of course, drug companies have a long history of lavish gifts to physicians, giving them, you know, holding meetings with ski resorts or sending them on vacations to the Bahamas or whatever. And certainly, I've been to medical association meetings where there's a big exhibit of equipment and there's a big trade exhibit, and the giveaways are just astounding. You know, they just give away hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dollars worth of equipment and books and swag. I mean, it's kind of amazing. It works. And you, and there's the studies are possible because the, officially now, because the Affordable Care Act had a something in it that said that drug companies must publicly disclose physicians to whom they give money and hospitals to which they give money. And that this information is publicly available on a website. And all you have to do is go on the website and, you know, click on your physician's name, and you can see how much money that physician gets from drug companies. And so that makes, makes studies of easily available.
It's much, much harder to do studies on food companies because that kind of information is not readily available. And it doesn't always seem like it's subtle. In food companies, you've talked about a study that some, I think Canadian professor put together an analysis on NutraSweet and aspartame safety. And that when the industry funded something like, you know, seventy-some studies, every study found that aspartame was safe. But then when he looked at these other 90 independently funded studies, 90% of them raised serious questions. How does something like aspartame kind of even get into the food supply when it's so, you know, there's so much apparent bias in the research about its safety?
Well, the bias wasn't obvious. And that, that was an interesting study because that study was never published. And so it never got, it never got into the literature. But other studies have been published that are quite similar, but not very many. So that, you know, when I looked at the situation with drug industry funding of research, there are books that go back to the 1970s where people were writing books about what a serious problem it was that drug companies were giving money to physicians and medical students. And there were literally thousands of articles investigating the effect of drug industry funding. When I went to look at the, the ones in food and nutrition, I can only find 11 studies. The first one was in 2003, 35 years after the first book that I could find about drug industry funding. And so between 2003 and 2018, I was able to find 11 studies only looking at the effects of food industry funding on the outcome of research. And those studies tend to follow the pattern. Mensa was established by drug industry funding, where the basic observation is that industry-funded studies tend to come out with results that favored the sponsor's interest, just as you described before. Aspartame.
Yeah, just so that's so there that's sort of automatically the high probability of bias that you're talking about. The fact that so often they count, I mean, there's two things that's going on here. One is, as you say, they're skewing the research agenda. They're doing research to benefit, you know, marketing, being able to make marketing claims. And then the other thing is there's like that place you mentioned where you can basically give them your study, they'll take care of it and give you the result, you know, neatly tied up that you, that you want. That's that's the bias problem.
Yeah, it's a, it's an enormous problem. I mean, it's so bad that I can recognize an industry-funded study by its title. You know, and I've got, you know, and I've been collecting examples since the book came out. I've been collecting examples and I post them on Mondays on my blog, foodpolitics.com. And I post the examples that I think are funniest because I think a lot of them are really funny. But I can recognize these things by their titles. I look at the title and I think, "Who would do a study like that?" Only somebody who wanted to pay for it. Yes, because, because they're about one food or one product. They're not about dietary patterns, which is what really counts for health. So, our, you know, the example that I'm showing these days is a study that showed that mangoes, which I totally love, that mangoes are better than fiber supplements for preventing symptoms of constipation. Well, any fruit will do that, right? Why? You know, but I looked at that, I thought, "I wonder who paid for that one." The National Mango Board. I mean, really. This is totally predictable because this is marketing research. This is not basic science. But it gets into the scientific literature. These studies are published by respectable scientific and nutrition journals. And there they are. There. And the Department of Agriculture helps with a lot of them.
The other side of it, you know, there's the people who will, "Hey, give us your study and what result you want, you know, we'll deliver." There are, you know, researchers who work again and again and again for the same, you know, food companies with the same outfits. And talk for a minute about what happens when you don't deliver the outcome that their food company is expecting.
Well, you don't know. And it's hard to research. But I certainly have my own example. In the 1990s, I did an industry-funded study for the International Olive Oil Council. And I produced what I thought was an edited series of quite honest papers that were looking at the literature and trying to come to the best conclusion they could on it. And apparently, that wasn't good enough because the organ, there was an intermediary organization that had brokered this, and I was never asked back to another meeting after that. And I assumed me, as I assume, I'm sorry, I assumed that people who do research that does not come out with favorable results don't get hired to do more such studies because it's too risky for the companies.
Right, right. So you want a trusted hand. So how do you, how did you teach your students at NYU the reality that if you don't give the results they want, you know, you won't get to work again with them? I mean, researchers have to pay their bills. And I mean, is that a reality that's discussed?
Well, we discuss this kind of thing in classes. I mean, I'm not really, I mean, a teaching department much more than a research department. And the people in my department write books, that's what we do. But the, you know, I say, I was certainly trained when I was, as I got my doctorate in molecular biology, a hundred years ago. And I, my experience of being trained in molecular biology was that it was just punishing about trying to figure out how to control for your own biases. I mean, I didn't realize that was what was going on at the time. But when I look back on it, I can see that that was what we were doing because we were doing experiments on things we couldn't see, at the microscopic level or below the microscopic level. And so everything had to be induced by what happened. And the game was, as graduate students, the game was to try to catch each other up in finding some alternative explanation that could have accounted for our results other than the one we wanted to find.
And so, you know, I think the department that I was trained in was one that had an extraordinarily high level of scientific integrity. It was inconceivable to us that anybody would falsify a result or make up answers. It was just totally inconceivable. And that was the scientific culture that I grew up in. So I'm kind of surprised by what's going on now.
So you guys were trying to ensure that our results were repeatable, that it wasn't just, you know, that it was real. Oh, you had to repeat them a million times.
Yeah. And, you know, we had a joke about it. You know, our, the graduate student joke was, "Never repeat a study, it works on the first try." But it was a joke. And, you know, part of it was that we were endlessly repeating and repeating it, trying to put in all the controls we could think of to make sure that what we had could be repeated by other people. It would have been humiliating beyond belief to have people not be able to repeat our experiments.
Well, you spend a lot of time in the book here talking about just the complexity of nutrition research. And it's such a complicated thing and hard to suss out what may really be happening. And I look at the way these big association studies are sometimes used. And I've been looking into, you know, the nut industry funded research and other research not funded by the nut industry. And you see, you know, conclusions drawn in one set. And then you see there's another, let's say, between nut intake and cardiovascular disease. And then along comes a big study in Sweden of sixty-some thousand people over 20-some years or something. And they found all these associations with heart disease, except when they factored in how much healthier the nut eaters were. You know, they smoked, they began with, yeah, oh, that's a good amount of exercise more, they don't smoke, they they're lighter, they're healthier, they eat more fruits and veggies, and so on. All of, just about all of those associations went away in the Swedish study. And they, even the sure was quoted in the New York Times saying, "We think we've controlled for more variables than, you know, previous researchers." So what happens? You have an industry-funded person looking at an association. And maybe someone who isn't funded. There's no like hard and fast formula for how to deal with the confounders. They can come out, it seems like, with different results, even using the same data.
Well, there's research on that too. And that research shows that most of the biases in industry-funded research come in the way the research question is asked or in the way the results are interpreted. So if the results come out equivocal, and you really can't come to any conclusion, the conclusion is usually interpreted favorably. So those are two research findings. But it's really not very hard to design studies to give you the results that you want. And the exam, oast egregious example was one I actually didn't write about in the book because most of the story about it came out while the book was in press or after it was published. But this was the incredible story about the National Institute of Alcohol in NIH funding, us or participating in the funding of a study by five alcohol companies who gave 67 million dollars to the NIH to do a study of the effects of one alcoholic beverage drink a day on heart disease risk. Because there's a story out there that one drink a day is better than not drinking anything at all, and a lot better than drinking a lot. And they wanted to test that hypothesis. This was going to be a long-standing clinical trial. Well, maybe not so long, but it was going to be a clinical trial that would look at the effects of one drink a day on heart disease risk. And what a reporter for the New York Times found out, because she was tipped off, was that the alcohol is to have essentially promised the five alcohol companies that they would get the result they wanted. That they would not run the study long enough to demonstrate any risk for breast cancer. And they would organize the patients that were taken into the study to make sure that they were not in particular high risk for heart disease as well. The NIH was hugely embarrassed by this. Did investigation, the investigation was scathing, and they stopped the study. But that's, that reading about that not too long ago, and you were quoted extensively in the New York Times article, I remember about that, talking about sort of like, "Why weren't they doing this already? Why, how could this happen?"
You know, it was absolutely shocking. I mean, and I didn't think I could be shocked anymore. That one shocked me.
Can we talk about antioxidants? Because that is, if you like, I see, you know, everybody is using to sell, whether it's their diet or their product. You talk in the book about blueberries. What's, what's it about blueberries and antioxidants?
Well, they have them, and so do all other fruits. All fruits have antioxidants because they're a method that plants have for protecting themselves against predators and other kinds of problems. And somehow the word is out that more antioxidants is better than fewer, even though they're all different. And the blueberry people figured out years ago that if they advertised that they had a lot of antioxidants, that people would buy more blueberries. And that was very successful. And lived in particularly Maine blueberries, which are the small ones that grow on the ground and are kind of wild. And for a long time, that was really great for the Maine blueberry industry. But all fruits and vegetables have antioxidants. And whether blueberries are better for you to eat than peaches or raspberries or strawberries or any other fruit, I think is really debatable. They don't do comparisons. And even if they did, it would depend on which antioxidants they measured. And there are hundreds of them in fruits and vegetables, or many, many, many different kinds. And whenever there have been controlled clinical trials looking at antioxidants in health, those studies don't show any benefit. And sometimes they show harm. But mostly they don't show any benefit.
Well, you know, I picked out two quotes from the book that I made in my notes here that you wrote. And I just want to read them for a second, have you amplify. You say, "The USDA no longer publishes data on food antioxidant levels, quote, due to mounting evidence that the values indicating antioxidant capacity have no relevance to the effects of specific bioactive compounds, including polyphenols, on human health." And then you go on to say that the NIH judges antioxidants as having no specific benefits. And you talk about the benefits of fruits and vegetables, you know, up to a certain point. Adding more does not show to confer necessarily more benefits. And that basically people don't really know when you're eating more fruits and veggies, you know, is it the fiber? Is it the antioxidants? Is it other components? Or is it the combination? That's what you don't know. I mean, what's very clear is that people who eat fruits and vegetables are healthier than people who don't. That's very clear. I mean, there's just tons and tons and tons of evidence that demonstrates that. But after that, you're not sure why. Or the, the sort of human effort is always to try to reduce fruits and vegetables down to one nutrient or antioxidant. But that's reductionist. It doesn't work. It's really dietary patterns and lifestyles that make a difference. So that's much, much harder to study.
Yeah. You write that there is no one food that makes a diet healthful. There's no, so nuts are not a crucial component, or bananas, or any particular food. It's not going to be the answer to ensure that you, you know, live longer.
No, I mean, I get asked all the time, "Doesn't Matt and he make any difference? What time I eat? Doesn't make any difference whether I eat this? Does it make any difference whether I eat the same thing?" I was asked yesterday, "What happens if I eat the same thing for lunch every day?" Well, it depends on what you eat. What it is. The secrets of healthy diets are actually, they're not secrets, are they? Eat a wide variety of relatively unprocessed foods in amounts that don't make you fat, you know, that maintain your body at a reasonable weight and don't make you gain weight. You know, that's really simple. And beyond that, you have lots and lots and lots of choices.
I know they used to have, I guess USDA is talking about the ORAC scale where they looked at some sort of measure of antioxidants and different foods. People have made charts and companies, I guess, were, you know, misusing it to try to sell their particular product. There was a Whole Foods had a scale, the Andy scale for a while, that gave kale, you know, one thousand, and this food five hundred, and that food three fifty or something. They ended up getting rid of it because no one could, you know, there was no like formula. Well, how do they arrive at that? No one could even say. But so, what, what is your view when you see these studies that come out, and we see them all the time about touting the antioxidant level of this food or that food? You know, this food is going to protect you from cancer because of these antioxidants.
Well, usually I laugh. But I remember when there were cereal boxes that were advertising their antioxidant capacity as a way of protecting children's and immune systems and that kind of thing. The FDA got involved in those and ran, they're not just, they're not doing any of that anymore. In fact, the cereal aisle used to be more fun than anything because he, every new possible health claim that you could possibly think of was on cereal boxes because they changed the boxes often. But they're not, not doing that so much anymore. And it's not nearly as much fun.
Well, let's talk about, because you've been so deeply involved in the nutrition guidelines over the years. The 2015 ones, the guidelines that said there's no need to limit cholesterol, but eat as little as possible. How does that work?
I don't know. It gives me a headache to think about it. I was a reviewer on an early draft of the 2015 guidelines. And if that had been in there, I would have caught it and and said something about it. I think I was just floored when I saw the final guidelines because the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, the scientific advisory committee, had said, "Forget about cholesterol. You don't need to worry about this." That was a big problem for groups that favor plant-based diet approaches. And they actually did a lawsuit too, because they were arguing that the data on which that decision had been made, all came from studies that had been funded by the egg industry. Egg is the biggest source of cholesterol in American diets by far. So the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee said, "Dietary cholesterol is no longer a problem. We're not going to worry about it. It doesn't have much of an effect on blood cholesterol. That's always been true. Saturated fat has a much greater effect." And the, and then the guidelines came out and said, "You don't have to worry about cholesterol at all, but really, you should eat as little as possible." Now, you tell me what that means. I find it head-spinning. I just couldn't believe it when I read it. Really. They have to be kidding. Oh, heaven knows what they'll do with the 2020 guidelines when they're coming next, every five years.
Yeah. You know, they've just appointed the committee. I don't envy them. Mmm, that's got to be tough.
Now, you also talked about Freedom of Information Act inquiries, or you know, people sending in these questions to see, you know, on a study, I guess it's that the NIH is involved in all of those emails are preserved. And so somebody can go in and find out, you know, what were their researchers talking about? Who were they talking about? You know, where, was the funding company? If a company was funding, was involved, you know, were they involved in these discussions? And then you talk about how corporate America is using this same tool to kind of go after its critics. What is your take? You know, what's your comment on these Freedom of Information Act things going in?
Well, first of all, I speak from a position of great privilege again, because I work for a private university that's not subject to FOIA. So, and I have to say, I'm really happy about that. But if you work for a public university, then you're, and you make statements that get some industry upset, and this is particularly true of people who are talking about GMOs or chemicals, then there's going to be somebody who's going to want to fire their cork, their correspondence. And of course, nobody is as careful about their email correspondence as they should be. Even when you try to be, you just can't be and function. And it's really easy to be snarky in email, and you don't, it's hard to think every time you're writing an email, "What if this was published on the first page of the newspaper? How would I feel about it?" It takes too long to go through that consideration.
So I was very happy about the FOIA because the New York Times was able to get thousands of emails from the participants in the Coca-Cola funded Global Energy Balance Network and were able to demonstrate through those emails how closely Coca-Cola executives were in developing the research that these investigators were doing and how, and what cozy relationships they had with these investigators. So you never know that any other way, right? Does, I mean, the disclosure statements in in papers usually say, "The funder had no input into the design, conduct, interpretation, or publication of the study." What the emails showed was that that sometimes not true. That in fact, the funder had a great deal to do with it. And so if you don't have access to private privileged information, you have no way of knowing that.
You know, that was there were lots of studies of that kind of thing with pharmaceutical drugs. But with foods, it's much harder because you don't have basic information available on. And so the other way that these things are coming out is through lawsuits or discovery documents in lawsuits, particularly with genetically modified foods. A great deal of information is coming out about how the industry attempted to manipulate the research and the public relations on it. But the amount of evidence that I put together, pretty much all of the evidence that I could find, and as organized a fashion as I could possibly organize it, so the book didn't go on forever. And there's a very limited amount of evidence. But that limited amount of evidence, it seems to me, is quite consistent with the evidence for the same kinds of patterns with pharmaceutical drugs, cigarettes, chemicals, and so forth.
So my question is, if someone does a study, gets published, they don't disclose that they might have an interest. How often do you think that happens? And what do journals do?
It does happen. I don't know how often. There have been some studies that suggest that up to 30% of investigators are not fully disclosing. Journals usually make the person who didn't disclose, disclose, and they publish a correction on their websites. But people who read the paper generally won't see it. And in the case of drug industry situations, it can, it's had dire consequences. So that the head of research at Sloan-Kettering in New York, for example, was found to have published a bunch of papers in which he did not disclose that he had financial relationships with about 30 pharmaceutical companies. And he was writing about their drugs. And that was very easy. Whoever blew the whistle on it to find out because all that information is on the web, on the Open Secrets website. It's just right there. You just click on it and there it is. And so the newspapers published all the, and it not only did they publish who the drug companies give money to, but they publish the amounts of money. So you can add it up. And he was getting millions from his associate financial associations, drug companies, and writing favorable things about their drugs and not disclosing. And he lost his job at, or he was, I guess, forced to resign his job at Sloan-Kettering. And now he's working for a drug company. As they take care of their own.
He landed on his feet. It sounds like he landed, he landed quite well. But again, because you don't have this database online for food companies, you have no way of knowing who gets money from whom, whose consulting, or who's doing, or who's participating in any of these contract research organizations until their papers are published in the names of the authors appear with, there was usually a statement of who funded it, sometimes complete, sometimes incomplete. It takes quite a bit of investigation to track this kind of thing down.
Be, and I should say something about Coca-Cola, because let's talk about Coca-Cola a lot. I wrote a book about it. And and they do a lot. And one of the things that happened after the Global Energy Balance Network was exposed as being funded by Coca-Cola was that Coca-Cola didn't like the negative publicity that it got in a front-page story in the New York Times. And it reforms its practices and it said that it would go transparent and would list on its website everybody that they give money to and how much money they give. And that they would update that every six months. And they have been doing that. Hmm. They have been adhering to that promise. And that means you can, if you Google Coca-Cola transparency, you can go on their website and it's fun. It really is. You can, you know, you can just go through the whole thing and look at who they fund and what organizations and what individuals and how much they're getting and what they're doing and all that kind of thing. It's really interesting. But it also opens Coca-Cola up for a level of analysis that no other company is subject to because that information is now available. So investigators can look at how Cola-funded studies come out in relation to independently funded studies. And they can also look at whether people that Coca-Cola says that the company funds are disclosing that funding on their papers. And so they've been, those kinds of analyses that have been done that show that there is a very high percentage, thirty, forty percent of people who receive money from some companies tend not to disclose it.
Well, I've got two more quick questions for you. We're running a little over, but and I, you talk in the book about even media outlets that where writers may not be disclosing that they're somehow, you know, getting payments or whatever from companies. And so I guess my question is, what, as we as consumers, what can we do kind of to protect ourselves? I mean, one thing I do is I subscribe to your blog, foodpolitics.com. And you send out these emails where you're alerting and even kind of poking fun at some of this outrageous stuff. But you know, what, what do we do? We watch TV, and you know, we, we're not really sure, right?
Well, I think it's impossible for anybody who isn't a reader of the scientific literature to know who paid for the study. I hope the journalists, when they're reporting on these really some studies that come out, will at least look to see who paid for them. And I think journalists are getting better about that. I'm seeing more comments in articles about these funded studies, noticing who the funder is. So that's that's helpful. But I think that the public has to be just generally skeptical about nutrition research. And there are certain things to watch out for. If it's a breakthrough, it's probably not. That's not how science works. If it's talking about one food product having a really terrific benefit on one disease, you want to be a little careful about that. It's amazing to think that one food would make that much difference in the complicated diets and lifestyles that people have. If it says one food will take care of multiple diseases, then you want to be even more suspicious because the idea that one food would have that kind of health benefit seems kind of amazing. And then my favorite is, "Everything you thought you ever knew about nutrition is wrong." I can't tell you how many times I've seen that. Whenever, whenever you see that statement, you, that's an enormous red flag that goes up in the air because that's not how science works. So I just say, when you see things that look like they don't make sense or too good to be true, they probably are.
Right. Great. So my last thing, it's in, is you write at one point about supplements and research that are done on supplements. This is an area that my audience is also interested in. And, you know, basically pills that make up for eating a less than perfect diet or for, you know. And you talk about research that is funded by the pill sellers. You wrote, "This industry is highly skilled at getting the research it needs to exploit anxieties about dietary inadequacy. Caveat emptor." So I've come across, I'm sure we all have, websites and places, doctors, a, you know, where you can get a personalized recommendation on the supplements you need. And I experimented with some of these. And it doesn't matter what age I put in for the person, whether it's a male or a female, and whatever, whether I include, you know, health problems I supposedly have or don't have, it always seems to come back with, you know, recommendations that I need about $300 worth of supplements. And the place, the website that I'm on just happens to sell all of those supplements. And I can, you know, push a button and then order them, and even order them to come every 30 days, you know, my replenishing. So how does, how does that work? And sort of, I feel, you know, how do people get away with that when they get away with it?
Because people are very worried about their own diets. And that you're being offered a solution to dietary problems that you think you might have. And it's a personalized solution. And we're human, and we really respond to these personalized kinds of things. I was on a cruise, cruise ship, not long ago, a small one, where there was a nutritionist who was giving a lecture on what you could do, you know, three steps to make you healthier in five days, kind of thing. And and my partner, who is also a nutrition scientist, and I went. And we were the only people there. We were very embarrassed. And it was, I thought, "This is just such a mean thing to do to this poor woman." But she was talking about the need for these herbal supplements that she just happened to be selling. They were only $200. So I guess we were getting a bargain. But, you know, I mean, both of us, neither of us thinks that supplements do anything. And that unless you have defined, diagnosed deficiencies of a particular nutrient, there's very little evidence that Americans are deficient in nutrients. Very little evidence. So the, you know, the idea that you need vitamin and mineral all supplements is a marketing idea. But really, they make people feel so much better. You feel like you're doing something for your health. Somebody is telling you that this is personalized, and that if you just do this, you're going to feel better. That people feel better when they take them.
Yeah, that's like the old placebo.
Yeah, I mean, the supplements are fabulous placebos. The best. The absolute best. And fortunately, fortunately, most of them are harmless. They don't cause, hopefully, a nutritional imbalance or something. I sometimes wonder when people are bombarding themselves with one with vitamin, with vitamin, yeah, whatever it is, whether, yeah, I worry about the vitamins. But I mean, but really, most of the water-soluble vitamins are peed out. So it's hard for them to do anything bad. The fat-soluble ones are a problem. But, you know, not that many people take that much. And there's a wide range of intake that's okay. And, you know, sometimes I think, you know, if that's all it takes to make you feel better in today's day and age, I don't get too upset about supplementation.
$300 a month. Oh, that, that does.
Well, presumably from people who can afford it. Exactly.
Yeah. Hey, I want to thank Professor Nestle for joining me today. I really enjoyed this. And I really want to give her book here, "Unsavory Truth," the highest possible recommendation. I'm going to put a link down below in the description where you can order it from Amazon. It, it's an eye-opening read. It is very entertaining. And it's very well written. And Professor Nestle, thank you so much for joining me today. I really, really appreciate it.
Oh, it was my pleasure. I thought it was fun.
All right. Well, we'll do it again, maybe before too long.