Ladies and Gentlemen, Your 2020 Dietary Guideline Committee Members and the Companies That Paid Them
There are no words for this kind of behavior anymore. I didn’t know about it until a friend recently posted it. Here is the abstract:
Public Health Nutr 2022 Mar 21;27(1):e69.
doi: 10.1017/S1368980022000672.
Conflicts of interest for members of the US 2020 dietary guidelines advisory committee
Mélissa Mialon 1, Paulo Matos Serodio 2, Eric Crosbie 3 4, Nina Teicholz 5, Ashka Naik 6, Angela Carriedo 7 8
Abstract
Objectives: To measure incidence of conflicts of interest (COI) with food and pharmaceutical industry actors on the advisory committee for the 2020-2025 US Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) and assess the adequacy of current mechanisms to disclose and manage COI among the committee’s members.
Design: We compiled longitudinal data from archival sources on connections between members of the DGA’s advisory committee and actors. We hypothesised that these committee members, who oversee the science for the most influential dietary policy in the USA, might have significant COI that would be relevant to their decision making. Disclosure of COI on this committee was recommended in 2017 by the National Academies of Sciences in order to increase transparency and manage bias, but public disclosure of the committee’s COI does not appear to have taken place.
Setting: The committee was composed of twenty experts.
Participants: None.
Results: Our analysis found that 95 % of the committee members had COI with the food and/or pharmaceutical industries and that particular actors, including Kellogg, Abbott, Kraft, Mead Johnson, General Mills, Dannon and the International Life Sciences, had connections with multiple members. Research funding and membership of an advisory/executive board jointly accounted for more than 60 % of the total number of COI documented.
Conclusions: Trustworthy dietary guidelines result from a transparent, objective and science-based, process. Our analysis has shown that the significant and widespread COI on the committee prevent the DGA from achieving the recommended standard for transparency without mechanisms in place to make this information publicly available.
That 95%!
Are we too far gone as a country to make science unbiased? Look what they did when a pandemic hit. There was no ability to truly look at the source, the prevention, or the treatment. It was all shut down by our tyrannical government. Then you see something like this and how can you trust anything they recommend, especially with a diabetes and obesity epidemic?
I am truly disgusted.
Amen, exactly! Where can med students or physicians go for any assurance of unbiased information? The last 4 years thoroughly exposed every level of the health supply chain to be acting in bad faith, and medical schools are piling on with idiotic, unscientific indoctrination designed only to push an ideology. I have heard colleagues recently express dismay at even BP or glucose goals, never mind the forever fantasy of eliminating all cholesterol. Never has there been such need for independent, always skeptical physicians.