International Life Sciences Institute, a nonprofit, is accused of being a front group for Coca-Cola and other junk food giants.
In 2019, a series of reviews was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine that concluded the same thing that past reviews have concluded: Adhering to dietary patterns that are lower in red or processed meat intake may result in decreased risks for premature death, cardiometabolic disease and mortality (meaning the risk of getting and dying of diseases like heart disease and type 2 diabetes), and getting cancer and dying from it. Therefore, they concluded in their Dietary Guideline Recommendations, “continue current unprocessed red meat consumption” and “continue current processed meat consumption.” Wait, what? Despite the increased risks of premature death, cancer, heart disease, and diabetes, the advice was essentially keep eating burgers and bacon?
To understand what happened, we have to go back to 2015. The Dietary Guidelines for Americans had just had the audacity to recommend people reduce their sugar intake. Imagine you work for the sugar industry. The evidence is overwhelmingly against you; so, what do you do? Well, what did the tobacco industry do? One method involved the tobacco industry’s “funding of and involvement in seemingly unbiased scientific groups to manipulate political and scientific debate concerning tobacco and health”—groups like the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), which “has enjoyed a long and serious collaboration with the tobacco industry.” That same industry group shapes food policy worldwide.
Technically a nonprofit “with an innocuous sounding name,” the International Life Sciences Institute “has been quietly infiltrating government health and nutrition bodies around the world.” The group was created by a top Coca‑Cola executive and “is almost entirely funded by Goliaths of the agribusiness, food and pharmaceutical industries.” “After decades largely operating under the radar, ILSI is coming under increasing scrutiny by health advocates in the United States and abroad who say it is little more than a front group advancing the interests of the 400 corporate members that provide its $17 million budget,” including Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.
So, when the 2015 U.S. dietary guidelines recommended eating less sugar, the soda-funded International Life Sciences Institute sponsored a review concluding that the sugar guidelines were simply not trustworthy. Who did they pick for this hatchet job? Bradley Johnston. The Annals of Internal Medicine published “The Scientific Basis of Guideline Recommendations on Sugar Intake,” which concluded there basically wasn’t one: “Guidelines on dietary sugar do not meet criteria for trustworthy recommendations and are based on low-quality evidence.”
“This comes right out of the tobacco industry’s playbook: cast doubt on the science,” said professor Marion Nestle. “This is a classic example of how industry funding biases opinion. It’s shameful.” Yes, the paper was paid for by the likes of Hershey, Red Bull, Coca-Cola, and the makers of Oreos, but the authors swore they “wrote the protocol and conducted the study independently from ILSI.” It turns out that was a lie, forcing the journal to publish a corrected version after the Associated Press obtained emails showing the industry front group “requested revisions,” as you can see below and at 4:00 in my video How Big Sugar Undermines Dietary Guidelines. It also came out that a co-author conveniently forgot to mention directly receiving a $25,000 grant from Coca-Cola.
You know it’s bad when candy bar companies criticize an industry-funded paper on sugar. Mars, the maker of Snickers, Skittles, and M&M’s, broke ranks with other food companies and denounced the industry-funded paper. What’s more, Mars itself was a member of ILSI, but telling people to ignore guidelines to cut down on sugar? That just makes us all look bad.
If you look at the relationship between funding sources and conclusions in nutrition-related scientific articles, there are about seven or eight times the odds that the conclusion will skew favorably compared to studies with no industry funding. For interventional studies, the proportion of industry-funded studies that reached unfavorable conclusions about their own products was a whopping 0%, which should not surprise anyone.
So, what can journals do to counter tactics industries often use to promote the safety of harmful products or “question the integrity of science that calls their products into question?” To push back against the tobacco industry’s influence over scientific discourse, leading journal editors have “refused to be passive conduits for articles funded by the tobacco industry.” They just won’t accept tobacco industry-funded studies, period. “Accordingly, high-quality journals could refrain from publishing studies on health effects of added sugars funded by entities with commercial interests in the outcome”—like soda and cookie companies. But they’re not, as evidenced by the ILSI-sponsored review on sugar intake that was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
Fast forward four years, back to the beginning of this blog: The next batch of Dietary Guidelines for Americans is on the way, and the last scientific report of the guidelines committee encouraged people to eat diets not just lower in sugar but lower in meat as well. So, Big Beef decided to follow in the footsteps of Big Butterfinger—the recommendations to continue eating processed and unprocessed meat were published in the same journal, with the same guy, scientist-for-hire Bradley Johnston, as lead author, and the rest is history. We’ll dig into exactly how he pulled it off next.
Doctor’s Note
This is the first in an eight-blog series on how industries impact dietary and health guidelines—stay tuned.
Sadly, sometimes corporate influence infiltrates the scientific Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee itself. See Dietary Guidelines: Advisory Committee Conflicts of Interest. For a fascinating history, see The McGovern Report.
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