Unsavory Truth: A Review
Share
I just finished reading Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat, by Marion Nestle. As I mentioned in my previous post, (Soy) Curls for the Girls, I have been pursuing a series of credentials in the health and wellness space to be able to better bring true Ultimate Masculinity advice to you, the dear readers. I am now a Certified Personal Trainer (CPT) and a Certified Nutrition Coach (CNC) both through NASM. I'm currently about halfway through an additional program, the Plant-Based Nutrition Certificate, from the Cornell Center for Nutrition Studies. In my studying, I heard about the author Marion Nestle, and in particular, her book Unsavory Truth. It caught my attention because in addition to the science of nutrition, I'm interested in how the science happens. As I've said before, you shouldn't always trust the science, and this book really highlights that.
In Unsavory Truth, Nestle describes a swamp where industry, government, and academia work together to push bad "science" that merely serves to market the newest food-product. We'll get into the details, but the over-arching theme is that "many governments today, our own included ... have been captured by corporations." These corporations have such an influence in our government and private lives, that they have "taken over American society."
The book opens by accusing the food industry of using various time-tested tactics to manipulate public perception of the health of their products and the science surrounding them. The encyclopedia of tactics include: casting doubt on the science, funding research to produce desired results, offering gifts and "consulting" jobs, using front groups, promoting self-regulation, encouraging personal responsibility over common-sense guidelines, and using the court and legal system to silence critics and overturn unfavorable regulation. [1] Any of those are bad, but all together it sounds like the plot to a post-apocalyptic corpo-sci-fi flick. Yet, throughout the book, Nestle successfully shows how the food industry have insinuated themselves into the science and politics of nutrition at all levels, from laboratory to the media to our courts.
Casting doubt on the science is often the easiest and first salvo from a corrupt organization trying to cloud understanding. It's a pattern that we have seen historically with the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer; we see it contemporaneously with the connection of human industrial activity and global warming. In fact, there is an entire sub-industry of nutrition science of shady individuals dedicated to help industry obtain FDA-approved health claims. [2] With the right spin, all it takes is one study that has contrarian evidence to raise doubt among the populace. They compound the effect by casting aspersions on the experts as well; experts who have direct ties to industry are readily accepted to advisory committees, but "federal agencies view experts who avoid industry ties on principle as too biased to appoint." [3]
In addition to buying FDA-approved health claims, industry also directly influences the scientific process by funding science and researchers, as well as giving gifts or other benefits. Nestle asserts that although many researchers are confident they can separate their industry ties from their work and still produce good science, that in pharmaceutical research, investigators with ties to Big Pharma are more than four times as likely to deliver pro-industry results. [4] On top of that, half of US medical journals receive payments from Big Pharma. [5] To give a specific example of how industry ties affect the skewing of nutrition results, Nutrasweet, a producer of aspartame, funded 74 studies, all of which had positive results; however, 84 of 92 independent studies questioned aspartame's safety. [6]
To me, the infiltration of the sphere of public opinion via front groups and the manipulation of the idea of "personal responsibility" are particularly concerning. In some regard, while the puppeteering of the science is scary, we as consumers can, to a certain extent, look at studies and see who funded them and what industry ties the researchers may have. On the other hand, when industry uses front groups to astro-turf public opinion, it can be much harder to trace the influence. For example, the American Society for Nutrition is nominally a professional group of nutrition scientists, but inexplicably they repeatedly support industry stances at the cost of consumer and public health - for example, they consider "the processing level [of processed foods] to be a minor determinant" of nutrition of foods and they opposed including the added sugar section in nutrition labels. [7] Worse yet, they've even infiltrated the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics - the organization that certifies dietitians - and convinced them to endorse Kraft singles as healthy for kids! [8]
The concept of "personal responsibility" is intrinsically tied with "personal freedom," which we Americans take seriously. Nevertheless, the industry takes it seriously too, and uses it against us! All while skewing the available information - via the strategies already discussed - and taking advantage of human psychology, industry advocates for allowing people to take "personal responsibility." They stack the deck against us and then ask us to pick a card. [9] Part of responsibility is being able to make the right choice. They further cloud that choice by inventing propaganda like the concept that there is "no such thing as a good or bad food." This concept appeals to people because it purports to separate morality from health, but really it is a phrase invented by industry to help steer people to unhealthy choices via "personal responsibility." [10]
Finally, industry loves to use the legal system to confound our understanding of and access to good nutrition. Even when the government is working at its best, the regulations are in favor of industry. For example, after the FDA told Mars to stop making certain health claims about one of its food products, rather than fixing the claims, Mars began selling the product as a supplement, thereby skirting the regulations. [11] Worse yet, the industry has captured the governmental agencies: the process for writing dietary guidelines have shifted from having subject matter experts write them to having political appointees write them. This is concerning because of the influence industry has in those appointees - it's not based on merit or expertise. [12] Nestle introduced the worst example of corruption, in my opinion, early in the book, but I saved it for last. Obviously the FDA has rules banning people from making approval decisions on products in which they have a financial stake; but, they often waive those rules with the justification that the people who stand to benefit are the only experts available - it goes without saying that people who stand to benefit vote in their own favor statistically more frequently! [13]
In all, I found Unsavory Truth to be an interesting book that paints a dismaying picture of our current nutritional science landscape. It really highlighted to me how careful we need to be as consumers of nutritional information. I'm feeling even more responsibility to make sure that this blog remains an honest and reliable source of nutritional and health information!
[1] Marion Nestle, Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat (New York: Basic Books, 2018), p. 14.
[2] Nestle, p. 49, 52
[3] Nestle, p. 112
[4] Nestle, p. 23
[5] Nestle, p. 34
[6] Nestle, p. 37
[7] Nestle, p. 135-137
[8] Nestle, p. 145
[9] Nestle, p. 143
[10] Nestle, p. 152
[11] Nestle, p. 56
[12] Nestle, p. 115
[13] Nestle, p. 20