A Scary Amount of Nutrition Science Has Deep Ties to the Food Industry, Study | Hacker News Reader

A Scary Amount of Nutrition Science Has Deep Ties to the Food Industry, Study

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58 pointsmrfusion15 comments

Original report: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

Key info: "Of articles with food industry involvement, 55.6% reported findings favourable to relevant food industry interests, compared to 9.7% of articles without food industry involvement."

But what is the recommendation? I would expect that the practitioners in industry probably are better situated to perform studies than many others. That they only publish favorable findings could also be that they are looking in the more promising to favorable results.

Or, are we implying that they cover up the other results? Believable, but not the only explanation.

If anything, being beholden to a corporation whose success hinges on favorable research findings is a recipe for corruption. Not that academics are free from that, but at least there is less pressure for bias. Of course, unless they are funded by the food industry...

I don't disagree. But, that isn't a recommendation.

So, what is the recommendation?

Don’t believe any research pushed by a food corporation?

That is back in throwing out the full bath tub, though. I am sympathetic to the thought, but I'm not convinced it is efficient.

Would be interesting to see how often the studies can replicate. Are they worse than studies in other fields?

And, to my other point, is this and different from other fields?

Said another way, a large portion of interested parties to nutrition science are in the food industry.

I imagine that you could replace any science and the closely related industry to it in that claim. Is that not the case?

This is only 13%, so you could retract all of this and the only difference would be less "clinically confirmed" claims in commercials.

Are there no good results this would throw out?

For every paper with an affiliation and a positive result create 4 copies, in the results put harmful or neutral instead of helpful. These are the missing papers according to the deviation between affiliated and unaffiliated.

Now pick randomly from the papers you have.

That assumes you replace. More likely, for every paper you take out, nothing replaces it.

Edit: that is, you are taking a zero sum approach.

I distrust all ‘studies’ when it comes to nutrition and life style choices. I am of the ‘what worked for the grandmas would work for you too’ camp. We are our genes and studying ancestor lifestyle(with tweaks to accommodate modernization, of course) is most logical.

Example: I have never been for the anti-carb lifestyle. I come from an uninterrupted line of long lived rice eaters. I feel worse off when I have wheat..due to the gluten probably. I am primed for rice.

I remember a time when I went to a nutritionist and she said that given my age and weight, I should have no more than 1/4 cup of cooked rice. That’s 4 tbsp, ok? And I told her that my daily rice budget would be spent just tasting the biryani for seasoning while cooking it ..even before I can sit down for lunch. Doh.

A rice diet wouldn’t kill me but that bowl of raw lettuce leaves with no nutritional value and smothered with high fat high sugar dressing probably would.

I'm similar to this but differently. I did go on keto and it helped me tremendously. This has also made me "eat more like grandma". I eat "normal" again but in doing so limit carbs and eat more fat automatically.

Instead of the current everything is sugared into oblivion over-carbed food with fat reduced recipes I like to use grandma style recipes that start the recipe with: take a cup or two of cream and a block of butter (ok not really _that_ much but you get the idea). Tastes way better and needs way less sugar to taste good and I know exactly what's in it as a make it myself.

As long as scientific research is underfunded and needs funding from companies, they get to determine which results you hear about.

It's built into our current system that those with the money make the rules. One way to start breaking that is to implement a stronger progressive tax system and to properly fund scientific research with public funds that do not come with corporate strings attached.

Ideally, abolish all corporate interests' influence on public matters.

A treasure trove of information on food industry research influence can be found on Michael Greger’s website: https://nutritionfacts.org/?s=Food+industry

Pretty scary indeed.

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