The Tragedy of American Nutritional Science
Foodthink Says
In a modern society that equates science with progress, this ought not to be a question. Yet one of the greatest tragedies of our time is that science, which could have been wielded to help humanity eradicate poverty, hunger, disease, and environmental degradation, has been irredeemably corrupted by big capital. It now threatens the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food and medicines we rely on.
*The Tragedy of American Science: From the Cold War to the Forever War* examines this very process: how American science, through its extreme reliance on corporate and military funding, has morphed from a creative force driving human progress into a destructive, anti-human one. The author argues that replacing our current profit-driven scientific paradigm with one truly dedicated to human welfare is no utopian fantasy. However, this is only possible if we first confront the reality unfolding before us.
Foodthink has excerpted selected passages from the book’s opening chapter, which offers a critical reflection on nutritional science. These passages prompt us to ask: Can human diet be reduced to mere nutrient intake? Can nutritional science, manipulated by the interests of food corporations, truly lead us to eat more healthily? And what price do ordinary people pay for this?
We extend our gratitude to The Commercial Press, the book’s publisher, for granting permission to publish this excerpt.
I. Is Nutritional Science a Contradiction in Terms?
In the United States, nearly half of all adults (some 133 million people) suffer from at least one of four diet-related conditions: heart disease, stroke, cancer, or diabetes. Deaths attributable to these chronic illnesses account for seven out of ten fatalities in the US each year.
As reported by Anahad O’Connor in a September 2018 New York Times article, the career of Professor Brian Wansink – head of the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University and one of the United States’ most highly regarded food researchers – came to an inglorious end. Following Cornell University’s public finding of academic misconduct against him, which included falsifying research data, Wansink subsequently tendered his resignation.
Some experts argue that this scandal points to far more systemic problems within the fields of food and health research. Critics have noted that ‘a significant proportion of food research is misleading. It lacks scientific rigour, yielding dubious conclusions that are artificially manipulated.’
Dr Wansink’s laboratory was notoriously associated with data dredging, or more accurately, P-hacking. P-hacking involves exhaustively mining datasets to extract seemingly significant conclusions from noisy or inflated data that ought to be disregarded. As critics point out, it is akin to casting a wide net and then formulating a hypothesis post-hoc to support whichever data points appear intriguing – a practice fundamentally at odds with the scientific method.
Regrettably, the exposure of Wansink’s misconduct is unlikely to bring about any substantial improvement in the state of nutritional science. As the following examples demonstrate, studies built on unreliable statistical data are hardly uncommon, and the practice of data dredging shows no signs of abating.
II. How Scientific Are Government Dietary Guidelines?
The federal government publishes and revises the Dietary Guidelines for Americans every five years. Whether or not many Americans actually consult them, these guidelines have undoubtedly exerted a profound influence on the nation’s eating habits. They form the foundation for nutritional education, food labelling regulations and food assistance programmes across the country, as well as a key focus for research by the National Institutes of Health (National Institutes of Health).
Incidentally, these food assistance programmes directly affect a quarter of the US population. School breakfast and lunch programmes, alongside the food stamps scheme now known as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), cost upwards of $100 billion annually simply to supply food that meets federal nutritional standards.
US law mandates that the Dietary Guidelines incorporate scientific and medical knowledge pertaining to nutrition and diet. Prior to the release of the 2015 edition, the government appointed experts to form the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee and tasked them with drafting an initial report. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are then revised based on the committee’s findings and jointly produced by the US Department of Agriculture and the Department of Health and Human Services.
When the report was published in February 2015, it attracted unprecedented public attention almost immediately. In contrast to the previous report, which garnered only around 2,000 public comments, this one received 29,000. Yet this figure represented merely the volume of comments generated during the first round of intense debate among consumer protection groups and legislative lobbyists, centring on issues such as sugar, red meat, sustainable agriculture, and scientific evidence. The British Medical Journal (formerly the British Medical Magazine) conducted a thorough analysis of the report and levelled sharp criticism at it, arguing that its content lacked sufficient scientific rigour.
The crux of the British Medical Journal’s criticism was that the scientific evidence underpinning the report was, in fact, compromised by conflicts of interest. The advisory committee acknowledged that the report relied heavily on data supplied by health advocacy organisations funded by the food and pharmaceutical industries. For instance, the American Heart Association has received “decades of financial support from vegetable oil manufacturers. In return, the association has long promoted vegetable oil products, claiming they benefit cardiovascular health.”
III. Severe Sugar Addiction in Nutritional Science
The Sugar Research Foundation also paid three Harvard professors to review studies selected by the organisation. Their review appeared in July 1967 in the prestigious medical journal, the New England Journal of Medicine. It downplayed sugar’s role in heart disease while pointing the finger at saturated fat as the primary culprit. The release of thousands of pages of archival documents leaves no doubt about the tacit collusion between these Harvard scientists and the sugar industry.
As early as 1964, sugar industry executive John Hickson discussed plans with peers to shift public opinion “through our own research, information, and legislative programmes”. Given that nutritional research at the time was beginning to link high-sugar diets with rising rates of heart disease, Hickson proposed mounting a counterattack against these troubling conclusions through industry-funded studies. “Then we can publish the data and refute those maligning our industry,” he wrote in internal correspondence. In 1965, Hickson recruited Harvard researchers to draft a review designed to rebut the anti-sugar findings. He paid them $6,500—a sum equivalent to $49,000 today. Hickson handpicked the articles for them to assess and made it explicitly clear that he wanted the results to rehabilitate sugar’s reputation. Dr Hegsted of Harvard offered assurances to industry executives, assuaging their concerns.
IV. Sugar Drinks and Confectionery Science
And the figures continue to climb. How rapidly has overweight and obesity spread across the United States? In 1980, fewer than 15% of Americans were obese; today, more than two-thirds of adults and one-third of children and teenagers are classified as overweight or obese. In 1980, type 2 diabetes in children was virtually unheard of. Based on current data, a growing number of teenagers and half of all adults now have the condition or are in the pre-diabetic stage.
The now-defunct Global Energy Balance Network billed itself as the “scientific voice” on obesity research. According to its underlying premise, children gained weight not from excessive calorie intake, but from a lack of physical exercise. The organisation designed studies and cherry-picked data to support this false scientific narrative.
Another investigative report by Anahad O’Connor revealed that Coca-Cola “has been partnering with influential scientists on research projects, who in turn have gone to great lengths to promote this false scientific narrative in medical journals, conferences, and on social media”.
When the Global Energy Balance Network was exposed as a puppet of Coca-Cola, the organisation promptly ceased operations. Around the same time, the company approved the “retirement” of Dr Rhona Applebaum, the chief scientific officer tasked with managing the corporation’s public relations crises.
Professor James O. Hill of the University of Colorado School of Medicine, an obesity researcher, previously worked alongside Dr Applebaum. In an email pitching a research project to Coca-Cola executives, Hill came across more as a salesman than a perceptive scientist.
“My thinking is outlined below. This research could provide a compelling argument for why companies that sell sugar-sweetened beverages should be aggressively promoting physical activity. This would be a large, costly study, but it has the potential to change the game. We need to get this done.”
In a subsequent email, Hill added, “I want to help you move away from the image of a troublemaker and back to a company that brings meaning and fun into people’s lives.” The proposal was submitted on 9 November 2015. A mere six weeks later, the *Denver Post* reported that Hill had received $550,000 from Coca-Cola to fund “obesity research”.
Between 2008 and 2015, Dr Steven N. Blair, an obesity researcher at the University of South Carolina, received $3.5 million in funding from Coca-Cola to shift the attribution for obesity away from sugar-sweetened sodas and towards a lack of physical exercise. Blair’s highly influential findings “largely served as the foundation for the US Physical Activity Guidelines”. Nevertheless, scholars from the Department of Nutrition at Harvard University, alongside 36 other scientists, co-signed a statement opposing Blair’s conclusions, labelling them “scientific nonsense”.
A deeper investigation into the matter revealed the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) as the hidden hand behind it all. ILSI is a “mysterious US-based organisation that influences global food policy”. Backed by more than 400 corporate sponsors including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, and DuPont, it operates branches in 17 countries and wields considerable influence in China, India, and Brazil.
Meanwhile, in the US, Dr Brenda Fitzgerald, an academic who had accepted substantial research funding from Coca-Cola, was appointed in July 2017 by the Trump administration to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). This was a pivotal federal science role. While previously serving as Georgia’s State Health Commissioner, Fitzgerald had accepted a $1 million grant from Coca-Cola to study childhood obesity. In early 2018, Fitzgerald was forced to resign as CDC director following another scandal involving conflicts of interest related to investments in the tobacco industry.
Coca-Cola is not the only corporation attempting to cloak its commercial interests in the guise of science. An Associated Press investigation into the food industry’s influence on food policy, based on records released under the Freedom of Information Act by public universities, exposed thousands of emails detailing wrongdoing.
One so-called scientific study concluded that “children who eat sugar tend to weigh less than those who do not”. The research project that produced this laughably absurd paradox was funded by the American Candy Association, whose members include manufacturers of butter cookies, Hershey’s chocolate, and Skittles.
The study was authored by three individuals: two of whom were Carol O’Neil, a professor of nutrition at Louisiana State University, and Theresa Nicklas from Baylor College of Medicine. The third was Victor Fulgoni, a former executive at Kellogg Company. According to the Associated Press, he now focuses on helping multiple companies carry out “proactive, science-based product promotion”. These three authors have been remarkably prolific. Since 2009, they have “published more than 20 papers, funded by Kellogg and trade organisations representing beef, milk, and juice”.
V.Nutritional Science and “Nutritionism”
“150 years,” notes science historian David Singman, the sugar industry “has consistently influenced government policy to encourage sugar addiction.” In the nineteenth century, to shield the domestic market from foreign competition, the American sugar trade pursued a two-pronged strategy. They lobbied for higher import duties on sugar; “the government’s unwitting complicity meant that by 1880, sugar-related spending accounted for one-sixth of the federal budget.” At the same time, they pushed legislative reforms that legally defined “refined sugar” based on sucrose measurements, thereby placing Caribbean competitors at a distinct disadvantage. According to Singman, this ostensibly reasonable appeal to scientific objectivity “masked a sinister purpose”:
Much like the tobacco industry in the 1960s, these refined sugar producers understood that scientific matters are difficult for outsiders to assess, making them far easier for industry insiders to manipulate to their own commercial advantage.
To this day, the American sugar industry continues to deploy such tactics, diverting public attention from sugar as a whole to the isolated molecule sucrose, thereby steering nutritional research in a direction that favours the interests of major food corporations.
Examining how the sugar industry rebranded sugar—an edible substance extracted from plants—as sucrose—a discrete molecule—reveals the core of “nutritionism” within American health policy. This ideology posits that human health is not shaped by food as a whole, but by isolated biochemical compounds.
“Nutritionism,” explains food critic and author Michael Pollan, “is not quite the same thing as nutritional science. As the suffix ‘-ism’ implies, it is not a branch of science but an ideology.” Its foundational premise is that the legitimate concern of food science should be nutrients. Moreover, because “invisible nutrients carry a certain mystery compared to food,” we are led to rely on scientists “to reveal the hidden truth behind what we eat.”
Michael Pollan points out that it is worth noting how such phrasing erases the distinctions between entirely different entities such as fish, beef, and chicken. These three foods each represent a distinct category, yet here they are lumped together and uniformly labelled merely as delivery systems for a particular nutrient. One must also observe how this new mode of expression absolves the food itself; in this context, the culprit is an elusive, invisible, tasteless, and politically neutral substance called “saturated fat”. This substance may or may not be present in the food.
From then on, government dietary guidelines began to “discuss nutrients under the guise of scientific euphemisms”. In 1982, the National Academy of Sciences published a highly milestone report on cancer and nutrition,
which ushered in a new official dietary lexicon. Corporations and the media followed suit, and terms such as polyunsaturated fats, cholesterol, monounsaturated fats, carbohydrates, fibre, polyphenols, amino acids, and carotenoids quickly came to dominate much of the cultural landscape. Before this, people discussed tangible substances known as food. The age of nutritionism had arrived.
Reducing food to mere nutrients is a fallacy of reductionism, which Pollan proceeds to deconstruct. “Even the simplest food,” he explains, “is extraordinarily complex to study. Food is actually composed of combinations of multiple compounds, many of which exist in complex and dynamic relationships with one another. All of these compounds are in a constant state of flux, shifting from one form to another.”
A major flaw of reductionist science is its tendency to offer mechanical explanations: “introduce one nutrient, yield one physiological outcome.” This mode of explanation not only overlooks physiological differences between individuals but also ignores differences across cultures and societies.
Some populations metabolise sugar more efficiently than others; evolutionary genetics determine whether an individual can digest the lactose in milk; and the specific ecology of the gut dictates digestive efficiency. Consequently, different individuals may derive different amounts of energy from the same 100 calories, depending on the ratio of Firmicutes to Bacteroidetes in their gut. Human eating is not akin to refuelling a machine. The body is not a machine, making the simplistic equation of food as bodily fuel fundamentally flawed.
The academic development of nutritionism demonstrates how corporate interests have influenced and hindered holistic research into food categories. This is merely one tactic in dismantling food science as an integrated discipline. Alongside numerous other tactics, it threatens the physical health of the American public. A word of warning: corrupt science will ultimately harm public health.
– Notes and references are omitted due to space constraints –
Edited by: Yu Yang