The Jordan Harbinger Show - 713: Marion Nestle | How Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat

Episode Date: August 18, 2022

Marion Nestle (@marionnestle) is the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, and the author of Food Politics, Soda Politics, and Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat. What We Discuss with Marion Nestle: How food companies pay for research studies that distort science in their favor — at the expense of even the most health-conscious consumers among us. Why it's important to remember that food companies are businesses geared toward making money for their stockholders -- not service agencies operating in the public's best interests. Food companies band together to lobby Congress for laws that allow biased, industry-funded "research" to influence consumer habits with deceptive marketing language. When Marion tracked 168 food company-funded studies, she discovered that 156 concluded with results favorable to the sponsors' interests, and only 12 ended up with unfavorable results. The many ways food marketers mislead consumers and how to protect yourself and your family from this never-ending barrage of deception. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/713 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss the show we did with Dennis Carroll, the former USAID director for pandemic influenza and emerging threats? Catch up with episode 320: Dennis Carroll | Planning an End to the Pandemic Era here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger Show. And for a whole year, every time I had five studies that were funded by industry, I posted them on my website. And at the end of a year, I had 168 studies. And of those 156, had results that were favorable to the sponsor's interest. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills are the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional Fortune 500 CEO, former cult member, war correspondent, or rocket scientist. Each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker.

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Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app and they'll show right up, hopefully, and that'll get you started. Today on the show, you've heard a lot about big pharma. in the news lately, even a little bit on this show. But what about big food? I'm not talking about big agriculture with their fancy designer seeds, but straight up, big food, the stuff you read about and see marketed to you all the time,

the stuff that's packaged on the wall and the rack at the grocery store. Headlines that read like, eating this type of grape skin will add years to your life. This kind of fruit juice lowers the risk of prostate cancer. This cereal makes your heart healthier. All of that seeming pseudoscience nonsense. It sounds like it's grounded in science.

but it's actually rooted purely in marketing. Just, that's pretty much it, plain and simple. That is what we are talking about today with Marion Nessel. That's right, it's Nessel, not Nessley. I know you were thinking that when you read the show title. She's not related to the Nessley Food Company. That would be a super weird coincidence. But it's just a sort of weird coincidence with a different pronunciation.

Today, we'll discuss how science is distorted to suit the food companies that pay for the studies and the marketing and how you can almost never really trust, surprise, surprise, what you read in the news. about food or food products themselves, and also how scientists and researchers are co-opted and guided by food companies, politics, and pretty much everything except for science itself. The good news is the solution to this is a lot simpler than you think. Now, here we go with Marion Nessel. The book starts with a very interesting story about how there's this WikiLeaks email dump

from the Democratic Party and somehow Coca-Cola gets wrapped up in this. What's going on there? That was one of the most amazing things that ever happened to me. I got a couple of emails one morning from people I didn't know saying, Marion, you're in the wiki leaks of the emails that were hacked from Hillary Clinton. I was kind of stunned. I mean, I wasn't involved in the Hillary Clinton campaign. I could not imagine how emails about me or from me or to me could have been caught up in that. It turned out. that these emails referred to a talk that I had given at the University of Sydney right about the time my book Soda Politics came out. That was 2015. Soda Politics was a book about the soda industry and why you shouldn't drink sodas because they're not good for your health. And I was asked to give a talk at the University of Sydney to a nutrition society as I was walking into the talk. Somebody said to me, you know, there's somebody from Coca-Cola. In the audience, do you care? And I said, of course not. There's always somebody from Coca-Cola at any talk I give. I expect them to be there. So I gave my talk, thought nothing about it. And it turned out that these emails were collected from a friend of Hillary Clinton's woman named Capricia Marshall. And while she was working on the Clinton campaign,

She was also consulting for Coca-Cola for $7,000 a month. She had a retainer from Coca-Cola, we learned from the emails. And her emails were collected, and it turned out that the person who was at my talk from Coca-Cola had taken notes on my talk, very good ones, by the way, and then passed those notes up the chain of command until they got to Capricia Marshall, where they were caught up in this WikiLeaks thing. And I thought that was amazing. I couldn't believe that Coca-Cola would care about a talk that I was giving to a nutrition group in Sydney, Australia,

or that this would get this kind of attention. Coca-Cola never missed a trick. When I read The Unsavery Truth, this isn't even specifically about soda, but it definitely exposes some of the, I'm trying not to be hyperbolic here, but it definitely exposes some of the food company tentacles that reach into things that we would probably not like food company tentacles to be in, such as academic research. And it sounds to me and correct me where I'm wrong here, like drug company influence, food company influence pushes recommendations that are not necessarily in the best interest of those who consume the product, aka food, but instead are in the best interest of the company and its shareholders. Well, the way I like

to put it is that food companies are not social service agencies. They're not public health agencies, their businesses. And like any other business in the current business environment, their job is to produce profits for stockholders. That's their first priority. And anything that interferes with that is something they want to put a stop to and they want to promote anything that will promote sales. It's really that simple. And there's not much ethical consideration that goes into it. You know, we're not concerned about morality or, as I said, about public health. They're not public health. They're not health agencies. And the soda companies are the best examples of that, although all food companies do this. But the soda companies are the best example because they produce products that are sugars

and water and nothing else. And there's no redeeming nutritional value anywhere in their products. And so they have a particularly hard time at a time when people are gaining weight and obesity is highly prevalent in society. And everybody is trying to eat less sugar and take in fewer galleries. They're kind of in trouble as a result. These are business imperatives. And so unsavory truth, which is the book that came later, is about food company sponsorship of research and the other ways in which food companies promote their products beyond advertising. So funding of research, attacking of critics, keeping track of critics, that kind of thing. There's something invasive about a food company trying to police what we are actually learning about their product.

You know, I understand advertising, okay, I get it. Hashtag capitalism. I don't want fast food restaurants writing nutrition guidelines for kindergartners. I don't mind if they advertise juicy burgers and there's a toy with it and the kids bug their parents to go, fine, you're a good parent. You take your kid to the fast food place once a month. It's not going to kill them. But I don't want them to say, hey, you know what? You're not getting your daily serving of fries. That's where it crosses the line and sort of freaks me out. And undo influence from Big Pharma is well documented. We did an episode with Dr. John Abramson on this, and people can search for that in the show feed, all link in the show notes. But when we get into influence from food companies, it starts to take these little steps over the line,

and then it starts to take these bigger steps over the line, like the psychology of gifts. Can we talk a little bit about that? You mentioned it in the book. Look, if you sponsor a golf tournament, okay, but then it's like the scientists are saying, hey, I'm not influenced by the fact that I spend a week in Cayman Islands sponsored by a food company. And it's like, well, you are. That's how bias works. Yeah, but people don't recognize it. And that's one of the interesting things about it. I mean, let's just talk about the situation with pharmaceutical companies because they've been studied more. And basically what I tried to do in unsavory truth is to do for the food industry what had been done over 50 years for the pharmaceutical industry, which is to demonstrate that gifts

influence physician's prescription practices that the physicians don't realize the influence, they didn't intend the influence, they don't believe their influence, somehow it just happens. And so what I tried to do was to take this enormous amount of evidence from the pharmaceutical company and see if it applied to food companies. And it was quite difficult to do because there's not nearly as much evidence. And the first looks at food industry influence really only took place within the last 20 years, some of the mine, some of them other people's. There's not as much evidence, but as far as I could tell, the game works in exactly the same way. And the food industry bought the pharmaceutical industry's playbook, the cigarette industry's playbook, the chemical

Industries Playbook, they all work the same way. The first thing you do is cast doubt on unfavorable research. You attack critics. You promote your own research to give you the answers that you want to the research questions. That's all public stuff. And then behind the scenes, you lobby, you visit Congress, you make sure that nobody is trying to regulate you in a way that you don't want to be regulated. You know, I picked on Coca-Cola, not because Coca-Cola is any worse than any other company, but Coca-Cola got caught. And it got caught red-handed because the New York Times did an investigative report of

Coca-Cola's funding of a research group of investigators who were claiming that it didn't matter what you ate or drank. obesity was a matter of not enough physical activity. Contrary to a lot of research, take my word for it. There's a lot of research that says that's not true. Physical activity is very important. It's just that it doesn't work very well for weight unless you're an elite athlete. And they got caught because some of these researchers were at public universities

and investigators were able to use the Freedom of Information Act to get their emails. And the emails between these researchers and Coca-Cola were very damning. They showed that Coca-Cola arranged their travel, arranged their research, paid for it, interpreted it, sent them on talks, considered them a member of the Coca-Cola team. Oh, yikes. Called them team members. I mean, they were essentially working for Coca-Cola, and yet if you talk to those investigators, they would swear to you that the Coca-Cola funding had nothing to do with their opinion.

Oh, yes. And they forgot to mention the Coca-Cola funding. It doesn't affect our opinion. And that's why I'm literally not going to ever talk about it or write about it or admit that I'm working with them. Because it doesn't affect my findings. Yeah, and that's what I meant by they got caught because somebody figured it out and informed a reporter. Oh, my gosh. And the rest ended up on the front page of the New York Times, which is not. not where you want to be if you're a food company in that way. But as far as I can tell, every food company does exactly the same thing to the extent it can. They don't all have

as deep pockets or as efficient as staff as Coca-Cola has. But they're all funding research to give them the kind of results that they want. They're all members of the American Beverage Association or some other trade association that's doing their lobbying dirty work. for them. And their purpose is not to make people fat. Their purpose is not to make people unhealthy. Their purpose is to make profits. It's really simple. It is the subtle influence that makes it hard to detect corruptive effect of funding, right? Because it's not like, okay, we're funding this, and it's going to be so blatant that you're going to see all these obviously skewed results. It's people who are doing, in many ways, doing their best, but in complete denial that their golf

trip being funded by Coca-Cola is causing them an issue. It might have been in your book. Trips and funding and gifts from pharmaceutical companies ended up doubling the number of prescriptions that were written from that company. And it's like, well, okay, that is as blatant as it gets. And it's the same thing that's happening. If a rep can go to a doctor and say, hey, here's a nice meal and a prescription pad and a pen. And then the prescriptions double. Well, what happens when there's a nice Florida Miami conference, and they're paying for your flight in your hotel, and it's sponsored by a food company? I mean, it's going to be very similar when it comes to doing your research. The interesting part about that is that investigators have then gone back

to the physicians who change their prescription practices, you know, and say, did you change your prescription practice because, you know, you were getting money or gifts from the prescriber? And they're just floored at the idea that anybody would even think such a thing, or they're surprised that you would even think such a thing. When I give talks on unsavory truth, there's always somebody in the audience who stands up and says, I don't understand why you're suggesting that industry funding would have any effect. You're not commenting on the science. My science is just fine. And in many cases, they're right because there have been investigations of that too. And those investigations show that the main place where the bias shows up is in the way the research question is

framed. And this I understand because I get letters from food companies all the time saying, we're putting out a request for proposals to demonstrate the benefits of our product. You know, just flat out. Right. Not is our product good for you, but how our product is good for you. Well, they're specific about the kinds of research they're looking for. They want to show that the product is good for cognitive functioning, prevents heart disease or cancer, prevents bone problems. They're very clear about that. Well, they're not going to fund anything that risks showing something different. Right. I mean, this sounds subtle, but there's a big difference between that. and saying, we want to know what this product does for health.

Sure. Big difference. I would assume if you run that study and you say, hey, turns out no cognitive benefits whatsoever, that's the last time you get selected for funding from that company forever. Yeah. You know, I kept track for a while, and it was, I have a blog at food politics.com,

and for a whole year, at least once a week, every time I had five studies that were funded by industry, I posted them on my website. And at the end of a year, I had 168 studies. And of those 156 had results that were favorable to the sponsor's interest. That's a large percentage. A very large percentage. Now, this was not a systematically collected study. It was just what I ran across. And the only scientific conclusion I can make is it's easier to find industry-funded studies with favorable results. than it is to find industry studies with unfavorable results. But I thought, you know, that was pretty clear. I can look at the title of a study, and it's almost always with fruits and vegetables. Pomegranates will improve cognitive funding.

I know exactly who paid for that study. Cognitive function, right, is what you meant, not cognitive funding? No, did I say funding? Yeah. Speaking of cognitive function, yeah, that's a funny error. Yeah, I see those ads and didn't, I was going to bring this up later in the show, but I know that Palm Wonderful got sued into oblivion, well, maybe not oblivion because they're still around and still selling, for making ridiculous claims. I could be making this up, but wasn't there a claim about erectile dysfunction or something like that? And it's like, give me a break. Yeah, they were making health claims that have to be approved by the FDA, and the FDA took a dim view of them. And they weren't marketing pomegranate juices. a supplement. If they'd been marketing it as a supplement, the rules for claims on supplements are different. And they could have gotten away with it if it was a supplement, but they had a

nutrition facts label on it. So they had to change the wording of their claims. But people love health claims. Health claims sell products. I can say that one's not true. Once you see the price of that juice, you will absolutely lose any erection you may have had upon purchase. That stuff is super overpriced. Those are the same, and this is just a side note has nothing to do with the actual food. But that company is also owned, I believe, by the wife of another guy who's basically draining all the water out of California to grow almonds that should, they have no business being grown in California. And this is, these two people are charmers. Well, they're also the people who import water from Fiji. Right. These are the top three. It's like water in California, problem.

Water being imported from Fiji, which has a water shortage and being sold in plastic bottles, problem, Palm Wonderful, and it's the same two people who own these companies. Well, they're doing very well. I mean, they're doing well for themselves. They are going to be remembered very poorly by history, no matter how they try to whitewash their reputation. Yeah, but doing well is what all this is about. I know.

I keep coming back to food companies. Even though they produce foods we love, they are not social service agencies and cannot be looked at as social service agencies. It's a mistake to look at them as a public elf force. You know, and it's caused them a lot of problems. I mean, food companies could do anything they wanted until obesity became a problem in the United States. And the statistics now are that three quarters of American adults are overweight or obese. That's a lot of overweight.

And if you're going to do something about that, you've got to encourage people not to choose a lot of those products. That's not good for business. You're listening to the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Marion Nessel. We'll be right back. Hey, if you're wondering how I managed to gather the guests for the show, I am always kind of on the hustle for you, but I've got systems, I've got software, I've got tiny habits that I put in place. I'm actually teaching you how to do that. I know you probably don't have a podcast, but it's not the same thing. It's about business or networking, but in a non-gross, non-shmoozy way.

It's our six-minute networking course. That course is free. Jordan Harbinger.com slash course is where you can find it. I'm teaching you connection skills, but I'm kind of teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty and build relationships before you need them. Again, Jordan Harbinger.com slash course. And most of the guests on our show, they subscribe and they contribute to the course. They're helping out and they're here and there. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, back to Marion Nessel. This is probably an overstatement, but would you say to some degree, if you know who funds it, you can often predict the results of a study? Is that a fair statement?

Absolutely. I can. I can do it all the time. I can look at the title of a study and say, somebody must have paid for this. Because why would anybody do that study? Or I can look at the results and say, somebody must have paid for this. I wonder who it was and can often predict who it was. Tell me about funding and funding front groups, because these were,

you see these with political election things where it's like paid for by Americans for freedom. And you're like, what does that even mean? Nothing. It's like just some sort of candidate group that doesn't want to say which candidate it's for or group of candidates it's for. a pack or a super pack. They have this with food where it's like these, you see like that paid

for by the Cotton Association or paid for by the American corn growers or something like that, but what do these groups really do? And who are they for? I mean, they're obviously for the farmers, I guess, or the food marketing companies, but what is their function? Well, first of all, there are trade associations for food companies. And those trade associations have as their function to promote sales of whatever products they're representing. But front groups are groups that pretend to be independent. I mean, you know that a trade association, if it's the corn refiners, they're going to do everything else, everything they can to promote high fructose corn syrup. If it's the sugar association, they're going to be working for the growers of sugar cane and

sugar beets. But front groups pretend to be something else. They pretend to be independent scientific entities. And I guess the two best examples for food are the International Life Sciences Institute, ILC, and the American Council on Science and Health, which purport to be independent scientific experts and instead, they're paid for by food companies mainly and reflect a very strong pro-food industry position on any issue where public health is in conflict with the food company's interest. And I guess Ilse is the one that's been best studied by this time. It was an organization funded by Coca-Cola originally, a very long time, many, many decades ago now. And within the last few years, there have been any number of investigative reports of how Ilsi influenced

public policy in countries like Singapore or China or, you know, any place that you can think of, where Ilse operates. And as an independent think tank on scientific issues, Ilsee scientists get appointed to important positions in public health agencies and government agencies where they are able to promote food industry influence from within. And there are now many documented examples of how that operates more and more coming out all the time. So much so that Ilse has changed its name and where its foundationist changes its name, and it's trying to drop the name, Ilse, so people won't recognize it for what it's doing. These front groups can what lobby to bury studies they don't like or lobby for things that

have been judged as maybe ineffective or possibly even unsafe? The kind of thing that they are involved in is any public policy that might end up with people buying less of food company products. Again, the purpose of a food company is to sell products. Two things have made this tough on food companies. One is the general understanding that eating less sugar is really better for you. So if you're a soda company and you're making a product that provides half the sugar in American diets, you're in trouble.

And in fact, soda sales, full sugar sodas are weighed down. And if you want to know why supermarkets are filled with these artificially sweetened waters, it's because nobody's buying sugar anymore. So sales are way down. The other thing, and this is newer, that is going to affect food companies, is the understanding that what are now called ultra-processed foods are particularly bad for health. And there is now an astonishing amount of evidence that demonstrates that people who eat a lot of ultra-processed foods gain weight, get type 2 diabetes, have a higher risk for heart disease, higher mortality,

are at greater risk for poor outcome for COVID-19 than people who avoid these products. And the easiest way to define an ultra-processed food is to say that it's something that's so industrially produced that you can't make it in your home kitchen because you don't have access to the equipment or the ingredients. Can you give me an example of something that's common? that is in that category? I'll give you two examples. Corn and ice cream. Okay.

So corn on the cough is unprocessed, canned corn is processed, Doritos are ultra-processed. Got it, okay. Okay. Ice cream. You can at home make a four-ingredient ice cream, milk, cream, vanilla, sugar.

That's not ultra-processed. The ultra-processed ones are the ones that have flavors and texturizers and 20 ingredients that you don't have access to. So you can't make it. There's a big difference in the way the human body responds to these products, and that has been shown in a controlled clinical trial that demonstrated that people who were eating ultra-processed

as compared to foods that were processed and matched for protein, fat, carbohydrate, fiber, palatability, and everything else they could think of, except for the ultra-processing caused people to eat 500 calories more a day. Oh, yeah. I could imagine, look, as a guy who survived on DoorDash while I had COVID, because my wife and kids were out of the house, and I tried to order healthy stuff, and it was still like,

I feel like a bowling ball every time I eat. This is not good. It adds up quick after a week. Yeah, well, this is interesting, too, because the people who were, this was a controlled clinical trial, done in a metabolic warded at NIH. And the people who were in this trial could not tell the difference between the two diets, the relatively unprocessed and the ultra-processed. They thought they were equally palatable. And they were completely unaware that they were eating more calories out of the

ultra-processed diet. And the thing about it that was so shocking to me was the quantity of the caloric difference because usually in dietary studies of calories, you're lucky if you get a 50 calorie difference, hardly enough to measure. But this was 500 calories. Yeah, 500 calories a day. And the people who were eating the ultra-processed diet while they were on it, they gained weight. No surprise. Yeah, no surprise indeed. I weigh all my food and I learned a lot from doing that, such as, well, a lot of depressing things like, oh, this thing that I eat sort of absurd-mindedly that I thought had almost no calories in it is probably an additional three to 400 calories per day that I'm consuming of empty carbohydrates. You know, you start weighing those tortilla chips and you just go, okay, all right,

Saturday night only and only, you know, a handful. Yeah, and there's a reason why they're, why people, I mean, these products were formulated to get people to love them. The journalist Michael Moss, who's written a couple of books about this, says they're addictive. They're deliberately formulated to be addictive again, not because food companies want to make people fat. They just want to sell products. So this is normal course of doing business. I heard you got a cease and assist letter, essentially a letter from a lawyer to stop talking about this because you said soft drinks had sugar in them. What was their argument there? What was going on there? I said this was when my book Food Politics first came out in the early 2000s. I got this letter from

lawyer from the Sugar Association saying that on some radio program, I had said that soft drinks were easy target for the first thing you should do if you want to go on a diet because they contain sugar and water and nothing else. And their lawyer wrote me an outrage letter saying, you of all people should know better. Soft drinks haven't contained sugar for years. They contain high fructose cord syrup. I can't even say it without. laughing because high fructose corn syrup is fructose and glucose separated and sugar is sucrose with fructose and glucose stuck together but not for long basically they're the same and the body deals with them the same way I thought it was hilariously funny and then I started talking to

people about it and they were horrified and said you got to get a lawyer you have to see a lawyer you have to consult a lawyer you need to write a point-by-point rebate because they are preparing a lawsuit against you. And they're going to sue you for defamation. In fact, they said in this letter that I had defamed high fructose corn syrup. That's insane. I didn't know that high fructose corn syrup was so sensitive. I was going to say, it's a very sensitive substance.

That's ridiculous. It's been crying all day after that comment. That's unbelievable. It is believable and yet it's unbelievable. And it's also like, this isn't great reasoning from a legal perspective, but you've got to wonder, people try really hard to hide things when they are guilty. You know, and of course people profess innocence as well when they're innocent. But this is just such a ridiculous argument to make. How scared are you of being labeled sugar, even though you're essentially sugar, that you're willing to sue someone who says this?

Oh, no, no, no, no. It makes perfect sense. These products are represented by two different trade associations. So the sugar association represents the growers of sugar cane and sugar beets. The corn refiners association represents the makers of high fructose corn syrup. So there are business issues involved in this. This has nothing to do with biochemistry or anything else. It has to do with which sweetener is making the most money.

I love this term you've maybe invented the Nutrafluff. Neutral fluff. It sort of encompasses these. stupid headlines like chocolate can temporarily improve your IQ. And it's, you know, what do we look for in terms of food claims with obviously self-serving results or nonsense results? You know, like, is it just obviously nonsense where they make a claim based on one food or are there guidelines we can look for? I think you have to use common sense, except it's no fun to use common sense. No.

It's much more fun to think that if I have pomegranate juice or almonds, I'm going to be healthy forever. You know, I don't think pomegranate juice is bad. It's got a lot of sugar in it, but it's not bad. And almonds are great. And, you know, I'm in favor of that. But I wish that they weren't trying to, I mean, again, this is about competition for sales. Even if you're overweight, you can only eat so much. Even if you're overeating. Another sort of point about the American diet is that there are 4,000 calories available per day for every man, woman, and tiny baby in the country, which is roughly twice the average need of the population. That's crazy.

So there's a lot of food around. And if there's a lot of food around, it makes the food industry very, very competitive. They have to get you either to buy their food instead of somebody else's or to get you to eat more in general. And I think they got pretty good at getting people to eat more in general. through larger portions, if nothing else. So again, this is a business environment, and for an individual to try to maintain a healthy weight

in this environment is very difficult because you're fighting a food environment in which food companies are doing everything they can to get you to eat more, not less. And it's hard if you've got something delicious in front of you, not to eat it. I find it difficult. I assume that everybody else does.

Yeah, yeah, of course. And so the idea that somebody who works in an office all day and doesn't really hit the gym or anything is eating 4,000 calories per day, or at least being marketed to so that they eat that much or more is really, really unhealthy. Well, the Department of Agriculture says that about a third of that is wasted. So maybe that's a help. But there's a lot of food around. There's a lot of food around and a lot of marketing behind that food. And some of the marketing you see in advertising, in T-shirts, in, you know, positions of foods in supermarkets because companies pay to have foods in supermarkets in places where you're likely to see them. And in other ways that are obvious than there are ways that they're marketing these foods that are not so obvious. A lot of

marketing is online and on social media now and very, very difficult for people to sort out. It's hard to be a critical thinker about this when the... entire purpose of advertising, as it was explained to me once, is to slip below the radar of critical thinking. You're not supposed to be paying any attention to it. You're just supposed to feel it. That's interesting. There's that subtle persuasion as well. And I noted in your book, a lot of studies use insane quantities to get a benefit. So you'd need like 3,000 calories per day of pure dark chocolate to get this sort of minor benefit that they say it offers. Or that just create an insane headline to turn heads and get clicks. Like chocolate milk helps heal concussions.

And it's like, what are you talking about? That was a nasty one. Yeah. Is it real? I'm not making these up, right? Yeah. Fortunately, they got into trouble over that one. I think, again, it's just very easy to understand this is marketing to try to sell products. The job of a food company, particularly a publicly traded one, is to satisfy the demands of stockholds. for immediate returns on investment and growth in profits over time. And they can all grow. There's a limited amount of food that people can eat. And so there's intense competition to try to sell food products.

And they're quite good at it. They pay really smart people to market their products. And, you know, if you're a mere consumer and you're not paying attention and most people don't, why would you? you're just not going to notice how you're being marketed to. So bottom line, health claims sell and health claims for foods are about marketing, not about science. Absolutely.

What about terms like superfoods? You know, is that a nonsense marketing buzzword? Because it sure sounds like one. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if you think about it, every fruit and vegetable has vitamins, minerals, fiber, and phyto, and plant nutrients in it, you know, antioxidants and those kinds of things. Therefore, every fruit and vegetable is a superfood.

But the ones that are marketing it as particularly as some, I mean, the Palm Wonderful people were fabulous at that. And the main blueberry people kind of invented the whole thing. They were having a lot of trouble getting those ground-level blueberries sold until they figured out that they had a lot of antioxidants in them and to market it that way. But, you know, there is no such thing as a superfood. You want a healthy diet. It's really easy to do that.

It's so simple that Michael Pollan can do it in seven words, eat food not too much, mostly plants. That really takes care of it. By food, he means everything but ultra-processed foods. And that's really all there is to it. But that doesn't sell food products. Yeah. And if you're in the food business, your job is saying this over and over again. I'm sorry, your job is to sell food products.

This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Marion Nessel. We'll be right right back. Thank you so much for listening to the show. Conversations like this, they keep me going, man, I'm telling you. I love doing them, I love listening to them, I love having them, I love doing the research for them. I basically just love making this show for you and for me. The sponsors, however, do keep the lights on, pay for all the bandwidth. You know, those downloads don't grow on trees.

Visit Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals if you want to support the show. All the codes and the discount URLs, all that stuff is that. there, Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Now for the rest of my conversation with Marion Nessel. I definitely need to eat more plants, I'll tell you. It's hard. The way I grew up did not include a lot of plants.

And so for me right now, they just seem less convenient to eat and buy and assemble and arrange. It's like it's easier to get tacos than a salad many times, but I need to change my routines. I have to say the food industry has made it much, much. easier to eat fruits and vegetables now because they're chopped and put into bags and cut up for you. And I mean, they really have tried to make it as easy as possible. I'm in favor of starting a garden and growing your own. It gives you an entirely different view of what vegetables taste like. That's true.

If you're growing them yourself, you know, even if it's just a pot on the windowsill, it's really worth doing. I got eggplant and tomatoes back there. I've eaten a lot of those, that's for sure. There you go. So health claims about most foods, they just seem to be nonsense. You know, like mangoes, nuts, fruits, milk. It seems like any sort of health claim, I guess I just sort of said this and you did too.

It's just it's pure marketing. It's not necessarily about actual science. Oh, there might be science behind it. There might be science behind it that the company paid for. Right, right. Or that the trade association paid for. So you're back into the business of industry funding. science coming out with results that can be used in marketing. That's why they're paying for it.

Otherwise, why would a company pay for an expensive research study? They're doing it because they can use the results for marketing and they do all the time. And I have many, many, many examples in the book of companies that have gotten studies that they paid for and then there's an immediate headline. Right. That's the chocolate temporarily raises your IQ type of nonsense. Yeah. What was really scary, aside from all of the things we just discussed, what was even more scary, I should say, as industry representatives ending up on state or government advisory boards? I mean, like this is the most banana republic, not the clothing store thing that I've heard ever, right? It just reeks of corruption. How does this happen? Why is this allowed? I do not want somebody from the sugar industry on the board that, like I said earlier, that writes guidelines from my kid in the food groups and stuff. That just seems insane. Well, let's go back to the pharmaceutical industry, which set the standard for this. You know, I mean, the argument for people who have drug industry connections to be on federal advisory committees is that they have the expertise. Sure. And besides, the funding doesn't affect their opinion. Despite all the evidence to the

contrary. The situation on federal dietary guidelines is just like that. Everybody is supposed to disclose whatever potential conflicts of interest they have. And I think I was an outside reviewer on dietary guidelines. I don't know, a couple of dietary guidelines ago. And I had to fill out an elaborate conflict of interest form that covered the last three years. Who paid my travel? Who paid my hotel who paid for all of the ways in which food companies could have paid expenses or anything else. And that was just to be a reviewer. So the people on these committees have to do that. But then the agencies waive any kind of food industry connections because they argue that anybody who is a leading nutritionist is going to have food industry connections. You can't avoid them.

You know, I go to meetings that are sponsored by food companies. The organizations that I belong to are funded by food companies. I have a personal conflict of interest policy that I've developed over time that forces me to think about what my relationship is with anybody who's asked me to come and speak. But even I find it difficult. And I'm, you know, sort of aware of these issues and write about it. them, it's difficult to avoid having connections with food companies. And they're such nice people. Yeah. You know, there's that too. So you don't want to be implied. But what happens then is that these federal advisory committees end up with, I think the paper just came out that said that 95% of the members of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee in 2020 had relationships either with food companies, their trade associations, or their front groups. It seems like since the people on these agencies might in some way be beholden to or influenced by at the very least food companies and industries, we almost have to just disregard their

guidelines. Like how can we possibly rely on candidates funded by industry-backed groups and placed on committees or agencies? It just seems so ridiculous. Am I misunderstanding this or is this as horrible as it sounds? I just don't see how this can be impartial. I think it's a huge problem. but most people don't. And the arguments are, we're not influenced, even though there's tons of evidence that they are influenced. You just don't recognize it. And that, you know, I can make sensible comments about this. I suppose the hope is that the people who are on these committees represent enough different kinds of companies so they'll cancel out each other's biases.

But nobody thinks that they're biased. Nobody does. And it's just human names. nature to think that you're independent in this way and to notice, I mean, you have to work hard to think that this is something that might bias me. And what am I going to do to take steps to make sure that my opinion is independent in this? I think that's very hard to do. The agencies claim they can't find people who are qualified who don't have these connections. I'm starting to believe that because if everybody is on the take from the frickin company, then maybe there aren't that many people that aren't. I mean, look, I know science updates and changes recommendations over the years.

I get it. You know, one year it's eggs are bad. My mom loves to complain about this. She'll say, eggs are bad for you, and now they're good for you, and now they're bad for you again. And now it's bad if you eat too many and now you can eat as many as you want. And now you've got to take the yolks out. Whatever.

I understand this. But what you're saying now, it almost makes me think that a lot of the so-called new science is just new marketing designed to make me throw out perfectly legitimate health concerns so that I eat more of a product manufactured or grown by an industry that funded the study. Yeah, let me say one more thing. And then that is I'm considered biased. Okay. I have not been appointed to a federal advisory committee since my book Food Politics came out in 2002.

Surprise, surprise. You know, I've been nominated for Dieter Guidelines advisory committees. I've been told by people at the agencies that I'm far too biased and controversial to be appointed to these because I think that food industry connections are not good for nutritionists to have. Sure. If you do think that a food industry connection is acceptable and you have food industry connections, that's considered okay. That's so upside down, seeming.

There's a lot of lobbying for changing guidelines to make the guidelines. more confusing. The example you gave in your book, and I'm paraphrasing here, but it was like 1980 guideline, limit your intake of sugar, right? Pretty simple. 1990 guideline, hey, try not to get more than 10% of your calories from sugar. 2010 guideline, select beverages in foods that will allow you to moderate your consumption of sugar or sugarized beverages that contain sugar. This confuses me, right? Are they doing this on purpose so we don't have an obvious statement just showing us that sugar is unhealthy? Or is this the lawyer in me reading in to this too much? Well, I think what happened over, first of all, the guidelines have gotten much

more complicated. They used to be this little pamphlet, and now there are 150, 60 pages of, you know, you go online and you're on the web forever to go through them. It's a trend in nutrition to make it more complicated, more obfuscating. And part of that comes about because government agencies cannot say eat less meat, eat less sugar, don't eat snack foods because they've got too much salt in it. They can't do that because the makers of those foods go right to Congress and say, hey, we're going to lose jobs. Right. You know, it's going to close down our business. This is bad for business. We're going to lose jobs. The jobs are going to be lost in your state. Not good. Yeah. And so the government agencies have sort of, and the people who go on these

committees have sort of internalized euphemisms. And so the idea is if you say eat less salt, sugar, and saturated fat, everybody knows or is supposed to know that the main sources of salt are snack foods and fast foods, the main sources of sugar or sugary drinks, and the main source of saturated fat is beef. So it's euphemisms and nutrients. And I've always said that When the Dietary Guidelines talk about what you're supposed to eat more of, they talk about fruits, vegetables, grains, foods. When they talk about what you're supposed to eat less of, they switch to nutrients. Yeah, interesting.

That's interesting. Because it's politically less fraught. I'll paraphrase here just in case I misunderstood, but we eat foods, not nutrients, right? So it's not only fat or only sugar or only trans fat that's causing problems. it's the amount of what we're eating, the type of food we're eating, ultra-processed, whatever it might be, but it's easy for food companies to say, hey, it's this nutrient that's a problem, not the fact that the beef that I'm telling you to buy right now is loaded with it. Yeah, we'll take a gram of sugar out and put it in some artificial sweetener,

and we can advertise it as low-calorie, low-sugar. You mentioned in the book, and this was a little scary, how food companies and other companies use FOIA, so Freedom of Information Act, requests, where you can basically get documents from the government because they're all public record. Companies are using this to harass scientists who report harm from their products. How do these industries use this government process to silence people? I'm only aware of a few instances of that, although there may be more, They simply make these requests that are almost impossible to respond to.

And, you know, people are required to drop whatever research or teaching they're doing and spend weeks collecting these materials and responding. But the companies would say, you know, this is what the reporters who are investigating industry malfeasance are doing to us as they're requesting things that are really impossible. to get to. And so I don't know. I'm in favor of the Freedom of Information Act. I think it's very important to have it. I wish that government agencies were more responsive to these requests, but I also understand that for the recipients of these requests, it's very difficult. I worked for private university and was very happy not to be subject to FOIA. Oh, yeah. It's actually,

I mean, look, I'm all for FOIA. I'm just not for sort of weaponizing things like this in an unethical way just to punish somebody who exposed something that I'm doing that's unethical, right? It's kind of like saying, oh, okay, you want to say that football causes concussions? Now I'm going to bury you in paperwork, so you're not going to do a productive thing for the next eight months. And this should teach you a lesson about outing us. I don't know if there's a solution to that.

I just thought it was kind of despicable as a practice. Look, in conclusion, are the goals of food companies and nutrition educators inherently incompatible? Is it possible to do industry-funded research and maintain academic or scientific integrity? Oh, I think it is. I think it is. But you have to build in controls and get the ground rules set well in advance. First of all, the research needs to be investigator-initiated.

You've got to get somebody to pay for research that you want to do. not the other way around. And the money has to be given with absolutely no strings attached. And when I say no strings, I mean the funder is not involved in the development of the research question has nothing to do with the way the research is conducted, has nothing to do with the publication of the research, and receives a copy of the publication when it comes out. And if those guidelines are set in advance and the investigators are aware of the possibility for bias and are taking steps to make sure that they're not being unduly influenced at every step of the way, then sure. And under those circumstances, the research results could come out either way or they have a better chance of coming out either way. And certainly it's possible to do it. But I was surprised at how rare negative results were.

How can we engage on this as citizens to make sure that our research and science environment is a bit more trustworthy and useful for our own needs as citizens versus the needs of companies and their shareholders? Is there anything that we can do? Yeah, we can try to get the government to pay for research or government or private agencies to pay for research and lobby for. for research in areas where we need more information. I think individuals can look to try to figure out who paid for the studies that they're so excited about and to pay attention to who owns which product and where the vested interests are and just to be a little bit skeptical without taking all the enjoyment of it away. I find industry-funded research to be enormously entertaining.

I just really get a kick out of it looking through the titles of research articles and saying, oh, let's see who paid for this. Sure. Yeah. It can't be that hard when it's chocolate can improve your IQ or pomegranate juice increases erections or whatever it is. I mean, that's like the white belt level predicting who paid for this study, right? There's not a whole lot of challenge. It's level one.

But like many problems in society, the answer seems to lay in education. and that's what we're trying to do here on this podcast as well. And I want to thank you for helping us further that mission. This is a really interesting conversation. Oh, glad to be here. This was fun. I've got some thoughts on this episode. But before I get into that,

here's a sample of my interview with an emerging infectious disease expert that's taking a proactive approach to identify, prepare for, and stop viral threats before they become pandemics. Here's a quick look inside. A new influence of virus that, is transmissible and is deadly. That is what will then sweep around the world as a pandemic.

The 1918 flu at the end of World War I, we had 50 to 100 million deaths. That was 50 to 100 million deaths when the world's population was 1.8 billion. So think about it today. Even if it took us 300,000 years to hit the billion mark, we've been able to add 6 billion in just 10 decades. And 6 billion people. Yeah. And by the time we get to the end of this century, we're going to be. right on the age of 12 billion.

Oh, my God. The speed with which an influenza virus can move is staggering. Were a virus to emerge today, within one year, a year later, two billion people would likely be infected. And if it were as lethal as the 1918, which had a mortality rate of 3%. You're talking about hundreds of millions of people. Oh, my God. The fact of the matter is time marches on.

The societies we live in today, that we take for granted will be a footnote in history 500 years from now. The architecture that we surround ourselves with, they will be ruins or forgotten. It's not a question of if there will be epidemics, there will be pandemics. It is a question of when. For more, including why a future influenza epidemic is not a matter of if but when, and why vaccine hesitancy is one of the top 10 health threats in the entire world, check out episode 320 of the Jordan Harbinger Show with Dennis Carroll.

This stuff got a lot more interesting than I thought. You know, food science was not something I thought I'm going to be super rabidly interested in this. How can we tell if reports of new science, especially news reports of new science, are legit or not? Here are some guidelines. Does it rely on a news release? If so, it's marketing. It's not science. Basically, does the article that you're reading point to some press release from a juice company that says it makes

your dong bigger or whatever. I don't know. That's not science. That's a press release. If the claim is, I probably shouldn't use that example, I apologize to anybody who is offended by that. If the claim is that one ingredient or food helps mitigate risk from heart attack or diabetes, obesity, et cetera, that's a huge red flag. There aren't single ingredients that reduce risk of things like heart attack, diabetes, obesity. It is, as Marion has said, it's a sort of comprehensive whole diet, whole lifestyle thing. Watch out for words like miracle or breakthrough. Science just about never works that way.

First of all, miracle is something that is taken way out of context, but breakthrough, maybe if you're talking semiconductor or something, something, but even then, usually science is kind of brick by brick. So breakthrough, we've just discovered this thing and honey does this? Nah, pretty much no. And whenever you see the words may or might, you should also realize that means may not or might not. And chances are, it's actually that is what it probably means. It's may not or might not.

So they just use the inverse of that or the converse of that. And it gets you all excited, but it really doesn't mean anything. It means, like, I might sprout wings and fly. It's never happened in the history of the world, but the probability is not technically zero. So Jordan may technically sprout wings and fly after this episode airs. Guess we'll see, folks. Write an article about it, put it in Forbes or Business Insider or whatever, and here we go. Paid for by Hawaiian Punch.

Also, watch out for studies by food companies that have a strong presumption of bias. If they're not going to come up with the results the company wants, they're not going to get funded. Surprise, surprise, right? So we almost end up with some sort of bullshit industrial complex here. You're going to find the results if you're a food scientist that your funding says, they want, even if they don't tell you what they want. Yeah, I'll know what they want. So how does bias affect a study? Well, they can fail to publish results that are unfavorable to the funder. Not that

they're covering it up. They just kind of saying, well, they're not really interested in that. Maybe we'll leave that out of the publication. Or the article will just skip the unfavorable part and only focus on the part that serves their interests. They could focus on a minor benefit and ignore major drawbacks. Like, yes, this drug increases the risk of heart attack times 300%, but it improves your mood by 5%, you know, that kind of thing is not totally ridiculous. It happens all the time. They might inflate the importance of some minor benefit. Like, ooh, this does something which could do this other thing, which could do this other thing, which could do this other thing, which might make you live a little bit longer. I don't know, 18 months on average, if we average in the entire population

of the Western world. Yeah. And they just say, this makes you live longer, maybe. They can also just downplay negative results. Instead of omitting the negative results, they say, oh, well, this is just a small sample of people that had the negative results. Well, okay, maybe the small sample of people also had the positive results. But they don't really want to harp on that. They want to give you the positive results and make you think they've got a miracle breakthrough thing. Also, Marion said that whenever you see a specific health claim for a specific food, you want to see three things. Those three things are, whether the result is biologically possible. Pomegranate juice not going to make you taller. Sorry, that's just not a thing that can happen. Who sponsored the study?

We just kind of discussed why that's important. And did the study control for other factors like diet and physical activity and lifestyle factors like environment? Because yeah, maybe if you cut down on this or you drink more of that or you eat more of this, you do live longer. But also, you're exercising three times a week and you're eating far less fat or whatever it is or cooked meat and you're eating a lot more plants and you moved and changed jobs and did a different thing.

I mean, they ignore all of this stuff and they'll focus just on the thing that you were eating. and that is a big problem. Science rarely works where there's one ingredient that does one thing. That's what Marion was very careful to mention here on the show. And as for how those goofy headlines that we mentioned at the top are created, lots of studies will find a bunch of statistically insignificant findings, and they will spin them into something positive for the food that they want to promote. For example, they will find that, I don't know, pecanes or almonds or whatever raise good cholesterol. And they'll say that even though they really don't do it,

anything of the kind. They've just spun a big nothing burger into something they can use for marketing, right? It might be like this tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny increase in good cholesterol. How do they get away with this? Well, it's like this. If you only eat almonds straight for a month and water maybe, you'd raise your good cholesterol by 0.1%. And that's not going to do anything for your health. But then they will grab that straw and hold on for dear life and say, eating almonds every day raises your good cholesterol and it promotes heart health. And it's like, you're supposed to be reading here, lowers the risk of heart attack. Well, okay, if you just inject pure almond milk into your bloodstream to the point at which you are nearly dead and can't move or function, maybe it does lower your

cholesterol. You know what else to do that? Drinking water and going for a freaking walk. You know, they will just take that straw and hold on for dear life. Marion also said that debates on nutritional guidelines are far more about politics than they are about science. I don't think that surprises anyone. I think, of course, nutrition. I mean, the government had to force nutrition labels on products in the first place. We weren't even supposed to be able to know what the heck was in everything what we eat. And now, nutritional guidelines, the food pyramid or the, when I was a kid, it was four food groups and grains were one of the big ones. Eggs were in the dairy section. I don't even understand why that could be a thing. You would think that if anybody would recognize that cash and

funding has influence on you, even if you think it doesn't, and even if you're trying to mitigate it in your own head, if you're a scientist, you think, oh, the funding doesn't affect me, you would think the people that would know how bias works would be scientists that create studies and control for bias in the study. Jeez, come on, cognitive bias. If anybody's going to be well-versed in this, it's got to be scientists. It's not just that funding can corrupt the person who receives it, but it can actually influence the design of the study in the first place or the data, the person uses in the study. All of this can even happen subconsciously. So people think they're not being affected by who's funding it. And they obviously are. It's affecting what we eat and how long

we live. This is bad, folks. So scientists need to disclose funding, but that still doesn't solve the problem, right? Because recognizing a conflict of interest doesn't solve a conflict of interest. Recognizing a bias doesn't solve for the bias. Man, like I said, when I was a kid, we were supposed to eat a bunch of grains. That was one of the four food groups. Then it was the bottom of food pyramid. I don't even know what we use now. But I guess the best advice really is that of former show guest Michael Pollan, who said, eat food. You know, and he meant like actual food, not too much, mostly plants. Big thanks to Marion Nessel for coming on the show. Links to all things Marian Nessel. We'll be in the show notes on the website at Jordan Harbinger.com. Books always at Jordan Harbinger.com

slash books. Use those website links if you buy the book, even if you're in another country, even if it's an audio book that does help support the show. Transcripts are in the show. videos are up on YouTube. All the deals and discount codes for all of our advertisers are at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please do consider supporting those who support this show because they are the ones that make it possible. So yeah, I'll chill a mattress. I'll show I'll show some green juice. God knows what's in there. But the science says that it's good. But go ahead. Here's one thing I can guarantee. They do support the show when you use those codes. That much is science. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and

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