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Researcher promoting red meat, sugar failed to disclose industry ties—again:
A controversial researcher known for bucking the well-established dietary advice that people should limit their sugar and red meat intake has, once again, failed to disclose his financial ties to the food industry.
Epidemiologist Bradley Johnston failed to report funding from a research agency backed by the beef industry when he published a high-profile review on red meat consumption, according to the journal that published the review last year, Annals of Internal Medicine. The review concluded that consumers should continue—not reduce—their consumption of red and processed meats, which has been fiercely criticized by nutrition experts.
Annals issued a correction on the review last week, updating the review's accompanying disclosure forms.
In the correction notice, Annals editors stated that Johnston's industry-linked grant money was specifically for studying saturated and polyunsaturated fats. The Washington Post reported further detail on the grant money, saying that Johnston and his former employer Dalhousie University received $76,863 to conduct a new meta-analysis on saturated fat.
That grant money came from AgriLife Research, a part of Texas A&M University that is partially funded by the beef industry. According to Patrick Stover, vice-chancellor and dean of AgriLife, the Texas research agency received more than $2 million in funding from the beef industry in 2019 alone.
Stover was also a co-author on the Annals study with Johnston, along with an international team of researchers. Stover has since hired Johnston as an associate professor of community health and epidemiology at Texas A&M.
All of this raises questions about whether Johnston had an agenda to downplay the health risks of red and processed meats—which can be high in saturated fats.
Are any researchers on diet less tied to monied interests?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Friday January 10 2020, @12:50AM (2 children)
Thanks. Saved me a job.
Some people on this site don't seem to understand industry-funded propaganda when they see it.
Oh well, at least those liberals are getting owned.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @07:42AM
"liberals are getting owned"
Christ in a cracker! Are we back to slavery already??
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10 2020, @09:47PM
Problem is, when it comes to the food game, some of us on the site are now so cynical that we don't necessarily differentiate between the commercial 'industry-funded propaganda' and the propaganda that is generated by the 'professional nutritionists', who, obviously, have no vested interests in promoting their current understanding (and/or associated favoured 'food fad du jour' ) of the thorny problem of human nutrition.
Just to get this out of the way, I'm a vegetarian (hey, we're renowned for telling everyone this..it's an old charter, or something..), started going that way in my teens back in '76, been almost a vegan since '83 (I *refuse* to give up cheese..it can cause as many rashes as it fscking well likes, I can live with them), prior to that, I was a proper little carnivore, that was, up until the consumption of any meat/fowl/fish/etc started causing me various degrees of grief, ranging from stomach pains and cramps through to anaphylaxis.
I still cook meat dishes (with the exception of poultry, my kryptonite) for the family, as such, I have had to put up with years of the faddery surrounding meats and processed foods, I've fucking ignored them, on the whole, as I've always suspected there's a shyster or three behind these fads getting rich.
Industry driven bullshit is usually easy to spot, however, as a horribly recent example of why I'm also cynical about the pronunciations of 'professional dieticians', I'll throw this in. One of my sisters is chronically ill, her condition was, according to one school of thought treating her, exacerbated by the type and volume of meat she was consuming, so after consultation with said hospital specialist, a new diet was planned, and things like red meat were cut from her diet, in fact, under this regime, it became almost as vegetarian as mine.
Fast forward several months, her condition worsens and finally she ends up in hospital where a different set of specialists now get involved, who, when told about the diet she was on, went 'what the fuckety fuck?, who told you this shite?' (though not using such 'salty' language..), apparently, the combination of the medications she was taking and the change in diet crashed her system, badly. She's now back on a mixed/balanced meat/vegetable diet, and her condition is once again stable. Ok, regard this as an edge case example if you like, but it illustrates that supposed medical dietary experts blindly following their own notions, even with the best of intentions, can get it horribly wrong when it comes to this subject, and, sorry to say, this is still all ongoing, as a certain school of thought can't get it into their head that they were wrong..
Looking into this, being the one responsible for preparing my sister's meals and feeling partiallly guilty for not questioning the new diet, I spent a number of nights trawling the internet and downloading various books on my sister's condition. It might come as no surprise that I managed to find books and websites which happily stated that things like meat and plants of the solanaceae family were both good and bad for her condition...in fact, after book six or seven, you name the foodstuff, it was both good and bad for her condition (sometimes even in the same book, on different pages)
Discovering this was bad enough, but then trying to find the initial source of this crap information...man, I've not seen so many examples of the use of circular references since the good old days of the UFOnut books of the 60's-70's...in those fine tomes, I expected them, in mass market books on the subject of my sister's condition I expect them up to a point, but not on medical sites, or in medical books and papers (an asides on papers, in the course of trawling for information, I discovered a paper reporting on the results of a clinical study of the long term use of one of my sister's medications, from reading this paper I found that the 'might cause symptom X' on the contra-indications leaflet supplied with the medication actually translates to 'between 5-20% of patients using this drug develop symptom X depending on their age', this lead me to several other studies and associated papers reporting more or less the same findings..and my sister is in the age group where its 20%)
Take any dietary advice, industry or professional, with a needed pinch of salt...sorry, forgot, salt is both bad and good for you as well, depending on what you read...let's see...a pinch of titanium dioxide should be inert enough..