Nov 4, 2018, 

04:00pm EST

Who Decides What You Eat? (Hint: It's

Not Only You)
Lorin Fries Contributor
Food & Drink
How technology is transforming food and ecological systems

This article is more than 2 years old.

(Courtesy of Getty Royalty Free)

What did you have for dinner last night? Did you think about how nutritious it was?
Where did you get that information?

That last question is at the heart of a new book by the esteemed nutritionist, author and
professor Marion Nestle. Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of
What We Eat was published just last week to positive reviews including in the New York
Times,  Science and Nature. I interviewed Marion at her New York University office, and
she shared her views on how food marketing manipulates our choices, the deterioration of
our society’s relationship with science, and the need for us all to have a healthy skepticism
about nutrition studies.
Lorin Fries: Unsavory Truth just came onto the bookshelves. Why did you
write it?

Marion Nestle: While I was finalizing Soda Politics in 2015, I started noticing a lot of
studies coming out with titles that made me wonder who funded them. I began to collect
industry-funded research, posting it in batches on my blog. Later that year, the New York
Times had an article about Coca-Cola’s funding of the Global Energy Balance Network. It
was an astonishing story. I was quoted in the article, and I must have gotten 30 calls from
reporters the following week. They were shocked that Coca-Cola would fund research so
obviously self-serving, that academics would take money for studies like that, and that
universities would allow their faculty to do so. If everyone was so shocked about such a
widespread practice, I figured I had another book to write.

Fries: What do you hope readers will take away from the book?

Nestle: I hope that food companies will stop funding research designed to advance their
interests. I hope that academics will realize how hazardous it is to take money from food
companies for their research: their studies won’t be believed, they won’t be able to get on
prestigious committees, and it will ruin their reputations. And I hope that the general
public will be more skeptical when they see research studies that get headlines, but that
don’t make any sense at all.
Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, emerita, at... [+] COURTESY OF BILL

HAYES

Fries: Much of what you write about comes down to power dynamics around
food. Could you comment?

Nestle: It’s about who makes the choices. The power in the food system is about who
decides what people eat. Every consumer thinks that he or she has total free choice, but
you only have the options that are in front of you -- and in many cases, the marketing is
designed to make you opt for one thing or another. We have twice as much food available
United States than the population needs. The industry has to sell those calories to make a
profit and please stockholders, and to grow that profit every 90 days to make Wall Street
happy. That's really tough. So they have figured out all sorts of marketing tactics to do that
-- one of which is to fund research to get the answers they want.
If you search online for what influences what we eat, you’ll find lots of diagrams that show
food choice in the middle and lots of spokes coming out: peer pressure, price, religion,
culture … but never anything about marketing. It’s totally invisible. What I’ve tried to do in
Unsavory Truth, and in all my books, is to introduce marketing into that equation.

Fries: The importance of science is at the core of your writing. How would
you describe American society's current relationship with scientific research
and evidence?

Nestle: I worry a lot about that. I think what happened with science is that it got too big
and competitive, and the values somehow got lost. When I was in graduate school, there
was an extraordinarily high ethical standard that we were all expected to meet. You would
never think of cheating on an experiment, and it was beyond comprehension that you
would falsify a data point. If you got bad results, you lived with that. But things changed,
and we began to see stories about falsified research. Now, pressures are so intense that
people are willing to cut corners to get more publications out. Unfortunately, people who
take money from food companies are deeply offended at the suggestion that those funds
might influence them. Yet there are lots of studies, including on social psychology and
reciprocity, that demonstrate how this influence goes below the level of critical thinking.

More broadly, we’re in a situation now where truth doesn’t have the same meaning as it
once did. There’s a powerful force in society saying that science is just one way of looking
at things, and that other ways are equally as valid. That’s a deliberate diminishing of
science. The most obvious example is the denial of climate change; the anti-vaccine
movement is another.

Fries: If influence happens below the radar, how can we see it clearly enough
to resist it?

Nestle: We can gain perspective by looking at the drug industry, drawing on fifty years of
excellent research. That's an industry in which you can show that if the drug company
sponsors research, that study will come out in favor of the sponsor’s product. And if a drug
industry representative visits or gives gifts to a physician, that physician is more likely to
prescribe the brand-name drug. It’s much harder to show this influence in the food
industry. It’s obligatory to say that not all industry-funded research is biased -- but a lot of
it is. If I can look at the title of a study and figure out who paid for it, there’s something
wrong.

Fries: How can we disentangle nutrition research from industry’s influence?

Nestle: One of the big issues in research is the lack of disclosure. For drug industry
funding we have the open payments database where you can see how much money is being
spent to influence physicians. You can look them up by name. We should do that for the
food industry.

I thought of one way that the food industry could fund research that is untainted by
influence: if the funding were mandatory, such as through a tax proportionate to sales,
those resources could be put in a common fund and distributed by a third party. But it’s
very unlikely that would happen: it’s a tax. Many of the solutions are politically impossible.

There are many people who think this is a ridiculous issue and there are more important
reasons for bias. I disagree. I think this is one you can do something about.

Fries: What is one thing that readers of this column can do?

Nestle: Read reports about nutrition studies critically. If it’s too good to be true, it
probably is. One of my favorites is, “Everything you ever thought you knew about nutrition
is wrong.” That is a red warning flag – it’s just not how science works. I'm told all the time
that people are confused because nutrition information changes all the time. No, it
doesn’t. As Michael Pollan summarized, Eat Food. Not too much. Mostly plants. We’ve
been saying that in different ways for years.

Food is wonderful. It’s one of life's greatest pleasures. So be skeptical … and then go enjoy
your dinner.

This interview is part of a series on how technology and innovation are transforming
food and ecological systems – and how to get it right for people and planet. The
conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Lorin Fries

Like many of you, I’m fascinated by transformations underway in the current technology revolution. Yet
few of these address the greatest social and environmental… Read More

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