In the journal Public Health Nutrition, six authors from various universities around the world (Ireland, Spain, United States, and United Kingdom) gathered and presented hard evidence of the serious conflicts of interest running rampant among the advisory committee for the 2020-2025 US Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

Why should we care about some committee’s recommendations, anyway? Most people reading this have long discarded the over-educated nonsense that spews from any mainstream batch of “experts.” Among the many lessons I hope we have taken in the last two years, one of the most important is that we should never underestimate how strong the faith in credentials is in the majority of our fellow men. Guidelines from any alphabet agency or sufficiently stuck-up university are blindly followed because the right titles have been bestowed. If we’re to help reverse course, we have to understand where the tendrils of our opponents reach.

The Dietary Guidelines for Americans are published every five years by the US Department of Agriculture and the US Department of Health and Human Services. Of greatest consequence are their dietary recommendations for infants, and their recommendations for pregnant women. Whether we like it or not, most Americans follow whatever the USDA guidelines are, despite their terrible track record. Nonetheless, by US statute, these guidelines are required to be the foundation of all federal nutrition and health programs, costing American taxpayers $100 million per year. States and local governments also tend to outsource their decision-making to whatever the federal government recommends.

The five authors of the study here provide a full report on the financial conflicts of interest of each committee member and the companies looming in the background influencing these decisions. Conflicts of interest were defined as any relationship between a committee member and an industry group or company and primarily took the form of payments for studies done by the committee member. The paper goes into further detail about their methodologies and definitions of conflicts of interest.

They found that 19/20 members had at least one relationship considered a conflict of interest. I’ve reproduced their table below:

The authors do have other figures detailing the type of relationships, but the legends on the images are too blurry to reproduce effectively here. The interested reader is welcome to visit the pdf of their paper. Of note are the types of conflicts they found. Most of the conflicts come in the form of research funding, but speaking engagements and straight up “compensation” are also included. This is analogous to the different ways doctors are paid by pharmaceutical companies to prescribe you medication and recommend potentially unnecessary procedures.

The study created some great network graphs showing the companies and committee members’ connections to each other, but the image quality is atrocious. If I squint hard, I can make out some of the company names:

  • Kellogg
  • Abbott
  • Kraft
  • General Mills
  • Dannon
  • California Walnut Commission
  • International Life Sciences Institute (ISLI)

The last one piqued my interest. Visiting this nonprofit’s website, the organization openly states that they “expressly forbid lobby activities of any kind”, and “does not make policy recommendations or seek to influence legislative outcomes toward a particular decision.” Oh really?

I could not glean from their website or IRS Form 990 where they get their funding (though some of the directors are paid quite handsomely), but their 2020 annual report notes funding comes from “membership dues, committee assessments, grants, and government grants”. I don’t know what “committee assessments” means and could find no definition. You can also find their audit posted here. I will not make any further comments on their finances, as I lack the (actual) expertise in accounting to do so. Perhaps an intrepid reader will investigate this organization.

They freely admit to using the manipulation technique of nudging to “encourage healthier consumer food choices”, though there is no clear explanation of what this means. Visiting the page on “sustainable agriculture and nutrition security” the organization sneaks in a couple anti-meat phrases and whines about increased meat consumption as a problem.

What’s quite certain is that their claims that they do not engage in lobbying might be stretching the truth a bit, given the findings (from publicly available sources) here.

In conclusion, what makes this study worth discussing isn’t the conclusions they came to, but rather a glimpse into the muck that corporate interests and NGOs have created around every aspect of our lives. Nebulous global NGOs and corporations that have arguably contributed to a serious worldwide obesity problem are clearly lurking in the shadows buying off the very positions most people trust to give objective recommendations. The first thing we can do personally is to nurture a healthy skepticism inside us. The next is to seed and nurture it in others. Everyone is responsible for his own life, and should make his own decisions. Studies like this one provide fertilizer for such healthy skepticism, which builds the strength to quit the habit of outsourcing personal autonomy to clearly bought-and-paid-for “experts”.