> I guarantee the industrial-food-complex is paying scientists to identify potential benefits of ultra-processed food.
I just don't think that this particular mode of "money corrupts science" is happening much. I mean the kind of thing where a big industry facing an image problem would say: Hey, let's bribe some scientists to do bogus studies, and use the "findings" as ammo in a public relations war.
Maybe that kind of thing was happening when the tobacco industry was lobbying against regulation. But nowadays, I'm having a hard time believing that. Because, nowadays, science is the weakest it's ever been in history (going back, maybe to the middle ages, where it might have been even worse), as a method of actually changing minds. So public relations wars would be fought differently, in a way that didn't involve science much.
Second, I think it doesn't jibe with the personality structures of most scientists, as far as their motivations go. They've already decided for themselves that money is not all that high on their hierarchy of motivations, otherwise they wouldn't be scientists.
What I think is happening instead is that money is an instrument that corrupts science in a direction of confirmation bias.
Essentially you have to ask yourself: What happens if scientist X tells us about their research on YouTube? Would that person be able to build a successful following? -- Even if that scientist despises YouTube, there is a ton of institutional pressure on scientists these days to communicate their work publicly, so to a first approximation, thinking of the "YouTube court of public opinion on science" to decide a scientists' career fate, is an approximation that's not too far off the mark.
"Ultra-processed foods are bad for you" is currently very much the way the wind is blowing. Any scientist who claimed otherwise would be seriously sticking their necks out with regard to the institutional context they're embedded in. Any scientist who goes an YouTube and tells people "my research shows that ultra-processed foods are bad for you and, oh by the way, here is a food product I really recommend" can become world-famous and rich. You do the math.