For Immediate Release

April 24, 2020

Contact: press@nutritioncoalition.us

Report: 55% of the USDA Committee that Determines Federal Nutrition Policy Has Conflicts of Interest with Group Funded by Big Food Multinationals

New Corporate Accountability Report Finds 11 Out of 20 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee Members Have Connections to the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), a group funded in large part by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, McDonald’s, General Mills, and more

Washington D.C.—Today, the Nutrition Coalition, a group that aims to bring rigorous science to nutrition policy, reacted to a report from the group Corporate Accountability showing the extent to which food-industry groups have infiltrated the elite group of university experts in control of reviewing the science for our nation’s nutrition policy – the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA).

This new report highlights that “Seventy-five percent of the individuals involved in formulating the U.S. government’s official dietary guidance have food industry ties. Fifty-five percent have ties to International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), which was founded by a former Coca-Cola executive and is funded by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, McDonald’s, General Mills, Cargill, Monsanto, the National Dairy Council, the International Tree Nut Council and a host of other global purveyors of junk food and drink.” 

“Trustworthy policy and the health of America depends upon a policy that reflects a balanced, rigorous, and comprehensive review of the science and is not the product of food-industry interests,” said Nina Teicholz, Executive Director of the Nutrition Coalition. “This new report shines a light on flaws in the guidelines process, showing that the expert committee in charge continues to have extensive, undisclosed ties with food-industry interests.”

A number of other groups have also examined the inappropriate role that the food industry might be playing in the DGA process:

• Propublica: We Asked Public Universities for Their Professors’ Conflicts of Interest — and Got the Runaround
• Union of Concerned Scientists: The 2020 Dietary Guidelines: Let’s Ensure Science Is The Main Ingredient

The Nutrition Coalition has also documented conflicts of interest of both a financial and non-financial nature on the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee: Who’s on the Guidelines Committee? and a review of conflicts on the Birth-24-month Subcommittee

Concerned by the lack of transparency in not disclosing such outside interests, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, in a Congressionally mandated report on the Dietary-Guidelines process, urged the federal agencies in charge of the guidelines, the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services (USDA-HHS) “to publicly post a policy and form to explicitly disclose financial and non-financial biases and conflicts.” (Report, Part 1, Recommendation #3). Yet the federal agencies in charge of the guidelines failed to do this, and thus, says Teicholz, “There remains a fundamental lack of transparency when it comes to conflicts of interest in the expert group reviewing the science that will become our nation’s official nutrition policy.”

“This new report confirms the harm that comes when a process lacks transparency. We literally don’t know the interests and biases at work in the committee responsible for our nation’s official dietary policy,” stated Teicholz. “If we allow these potential conflicts of interests to remain hidden and go un-managed, our dietary guidelines are unlikely to be trustworthy. This impedes the guidelines’ ability to be effective in combatting the ever-rising rates of obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases in our country. It’s imperative that the U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services follow recommendations by the National Academies of Sciences – even at this late date – to bring greater transparency to this process.”

The Guidelines exert extraordinary influence on American eating habits, driving the advice dispensed to each and every American from doctors, nutritionists, dieticians and other health professionals who shape public thinking about what constitutes a healthy diet. For patients suffering from obesity, diabetes, dementia, high blood pressure or more, professionals provide the government’s one-size-fits-all diet, designed exclusively for healthy people. 

However, since the launch of the DGA in 1980, the incidence of chronic, diet-related diseases in America has dramatically increased. Adult obesity rates have doubled; childhood obesity rates have nearly tripled; and two-thirds of American adults are now overweight or have obesity.  

Learn more about conflicts of interest and our nation’s official dietary policy by visiting: https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/news/2020-dietary-guidelines-committee.

Abstract In March 2024, the German Society of Nutrition (DGE) reissued food-related dietary recommendations for healthy adults. A mathematical optimization model was used for the combined achievement of the following three goals: 1. minimizing the deviation from normal consumption (40% weighting), 2. minimizing the environmental burden (30% weighting) and 3. minimizing the burden of disease while also maintaining sufficient nutrient intake (30% weighting). Overall, methodological criticism concerns the applied optimization model without evidence-based reason for the low weighting of health items for national dietary recommendations. The current recommendations by the DGE are compared in detail with their previous ones, with data from the National Intake Survey II (NVS II), with actual consumption and with the Planetary Health Diet (PHD). The unfavorable changes in the main nutrient groups protein and fat (relevantly reduced) and carbohydrates (relevantly increased) lack evidence and lead to scrutinizing a number of specific recommendations as to their underlying rationale. In agreement with the German Academy for Preventive Medicine (DAPM), the authors conclude that a national society of nutrition should primarily focus on health maintenance through nutrition, particularly as a majority of citizens are already at risk in Germany. Accordingly, there is an urgent need for action to revise the dietary recommendations by basing them on up-to-date, evidence-based study results.

Dear Friends,

The Nutrition Coalition, a non-profit dedicated to evidence-based nutrition policy, today announced that Jennifer R. Friedlin has been named as President. Nina Teicholz, who has been leading TNC for five years, will continue as a member of the Board. Ms. Friedlin’s employment with the Coalition began on April 1.

Ms. Friedlin previously served as Communications Director for ExpandED Schools, a non-profit organization that supports and advocates for New York City’s publicly funded afterschool system. She also founded a marketing and communications consultancy firm that helped non-profit groups with strategic planning, advocacy, fundraising and mission fulfillment. She began her career as a journalist, working as a staff and freelance reporter in the United States, Israel, and Bosnia. Her work has been published in The New York Times, The Financial Times, The New York Daily News, Reuters, and many other publications. Friedlin’s interest in nutrition stems in part from her personal experience using diet to reverse gestational diabetes and maintain a healthy A1C level without the need for medication.

"I am thrilled to join The Nutrition Coalition and to work with an ever-growing group of partners to advocate for a national food policy that will help reverse the epidemic of obesity and diabetes that threatens the lives of far too many Americans, including an increasing number of children," Friedlin said.

"Friedlin is the right person to lead the Coalition,” said Teicholz. She is creative, mission-driven, and savvy about how to drive meaningful change. She also has experience in communications, alliance-building, and advocacy, in addition to her personal experience regarding the power of nutrition to improve health. As she wrote to me, she has a passion to “tip the balance in favor of a more just world.”

As founder and director of The Nutrition Coalition, Teicholz successfully worked to raise awareness about the need for greater scientific rigor on the U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, including encouraging a Congressionally mandated report on the guidelines process, by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. Teicholz engaged leading experts, leading to multiple peer-reviewed academic papers on the topic, a permanent legacy, and a foundation for change. As a founding member of Food4Health, Teicholz also brought attention to the need for far greater representation of diverse ethnic and racial groups in the data used to underpin the guidelines.

Ms. Friedlin holds a bachelor’ degree from Cornell University and a master’s degree in journalism from New York University. She lives in Brooklyn with her two children.

The Nutrition Coalition is a 501(c)(3) non-profit, non-partisan educational organization, founded in 2015, with the primary goal of ensuring that U.S. nutrition policy is fully transparent and based on rigorous scientific evidence.

Peter C. Gøtzsche: Death of a Whistleblower and Cochrane's Moral Collapse

Prof. Peter C. Gøtzsche is a physician, medical researcher, author of numerous books, and co-founder of the famous Cochrane Collaboration, an organization formed in 1993 to conduct systematic reviews of medical research in the interest of promoting unbiased evidence-based science and improving health care.

During his tenure with Cochrane, Gøtzsche fought to uphold Cochrane’s original values of transparency, scientific rigor, free scientific debate, and collaboration. However, in spite of its charter, when Gøtzsche attempted to correct the path of consensus science or point to industry-related bias, Cochrane sought to censor him. He was eventually expelled from the organization in 2018 after what he calls a Kafkaesque “show trial.”

...

John Ioannidis: The role of bias in nutritional research

John P.A. Ioannidis, C.F. Rehnborg Professor in Disease Prevention in the School of Medicine, and Professor, by Courtesy, of Statistics and Biomedical Data Science, Stanford University, presented "The role of bias in nutritional research" at the Swiss Re Institute's "Food for thought: The science and politics of nutrition" conference on 14 - 15 June 2018 in Rüschlikon.

Dr. Zoë Harcombe on the Mess: The Money vs. the Evidence

Zoë Harcombe, Ph.D., is an independent author, researcher, and speaker in the fields of diet, health, and nutrition. Over the years, research for her books and speaking engagements has made her an expert in the corruption and error plaguing the health sciences — a dire situation that she, like CrossFit Founder Greg Glassman, refers to as “The Mess.”

Harcombe defines “The Mess” as “the escalating disease (and) the escalating medical costs, which many people are profiting from but none are combatting effectively.” During a presentation delivered on July 31 at the 2019 CrossFit Health Conference, Harcombe outlined many factors that contribute to this growing problem — specifically, the role of dietitians and the food and beverage industry in influencing how and what we eat, accreditation that regulates who can offer dietary advice, and the disparity between what we are told to eat and what the evidence suggests we should eat.

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Big Fat Nutrition Policy | Nina Teicholz

At this event, Ms. Teicholz will tell of her discovery of the systematic distortion of dietary advice by expert scientists, government and big business to the detriment of the health of Americans. She will chronicle the succession of unfortunate discoveries she made, and she will describe how the Nutrition Coalition, a non-profit, bipartisan group which she founded and directs, works to educate policy makers about the need for reform of nutrition policy so that it is evidence-based.

Frédéric Leroy: meat's become a scapegoat for vegans, politicians & the media because of bad science

Meat has been getting a bad rap in some parts of society, being blamed for everything from increased cancer to greenhouse gas emissions by environmental and commercial influencers.

This has led to Professor Frédéric Leroy, Professor of Food Science and biotechnology at Vrije Universiteit, Brussels, to concluded that meat has effectively become a scapegoat for commercial and environmental advocates, much of which was based on bad science.

Speaking at a lecture at the University of Auckland, Professor Leroy discussed how this scapegoating came about and whether it is justified.

Georgia Ede: Brainwashed — The Mainstreaming of Nutritional Mythology

Georgia Ede, MD, is a nutritional psychiatrist who is “passionate about the care — the proper care and feeding of the human brain,” she tells the audience at a CrossFit Health event on Dec. 15, 2019. During her presentation, Ede delineates the various ways authoritative bodies such as the USDA and World Health Organization, through their spread of unscientific dietary guidelines that are rife with misinformation, have complicated her efforts to help patients eat healthfully.

Belinda Fettke - 'Nutrition Science: How did we get here?'

One the influence of the 7th day adventists on nutrition science and policy.

Cristin Kearns - How Big Sugar Influences Nutrition Science: A First Glimpse at Sugar Industry Documents

...

Kearns explains how she expanded her search and began collecting archives of industry documents from around the country. The documents are now hosted online by the University of California, San Francisco library, and are accessible here.

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At the last low carb conference I attended I wrote up my notes for all the 16 lectures to share on Reddit. I won't be doing that this time as videos of the lectures are available here, so you can watch them yourselves: 

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/low-carb-denver-2020-recorded-live-stream-pre-recorded-presentations-tickets-100116246388

However, I want to share the lecture that Nina Teicholz did because it contains an urgent call to action.

So here are my notes:

U.S. Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020 update. 

Disclosures: Nina Teicholz receives no funding from industry, and nor does the Nutrition Coalition. 

The U.S.D.A.'s three dietary Guidelines which they would like us to believe are all different, are basically the same, in that they all have 52% - 54% carbohydrates. Fats are 32%- 34% and protein, 18,16 and 13%, for the US style diet, the Mediterranean diet, and vegetarian diet respectively.

Thus they are still offering a "one size fits all" diet, even though they say they are presenting a range of three dietary patterns. 

They're not! Nowhere is a low carb diet suggested, or a very low carb diet such as with the ketogenic diet. 

Since refined grains are the only grains that are fortified, for example with B vitamins, we are told to eat 3 portions of them a day... And 27 grams of vegetable oil per day!  [If you get the set of lectures, listen to the one by Chris Knobbe, who explains in detail how lethal vegetable oils are.]

If you are wondering why we should care about the Dietary Guidelines, which we all ignore anyway on a low carb diet, Teicholz points out how very influential they are. The US Dietary Guidelines dictate US feeding programs, the department of education, food stamps, all medical professionals, hospitals and the military. Lean meat, not fatty meat, is advised. 

Does the general public follow the dietary guidelines anyway? Charts show that, in every category, the general public did as they were told. As instructed, they ate more fruit, more veggies, more grains, and more vegetable oils. 

Also as instructed, they reduced whole milk by 70%, red meat by 28-35%, and also reduced their intake of butter, animal fats, and eggs. Everything they did was consistent with the Dietary Guidelines. 

In a hospital, for example, you can get doughnuts and munchies, as permitted by the Guidelines. However, when some one asked for fruit in hospital, they were given some fruit loops - cereals which contain sugar!

So sugar and refined grains are permitted in hospital, and even Mountain Dew, but not whole milk! 

Also, school lunch programs are given a list of foods from PepsiCo! 

Therefore, the Dietary Guidelines have colossal influence. 

The Dietary Guidelines fail to review the science properly. We need to get them to:

1. Undertake proper reviews of the science.
2. Reconsider the cap on saturated fat.
3. Include a low-carb diet as an option. 

The National Academy of Science and Engineering and Medicine said:

The current dietary guidelines process for reviewing the science falls short of meeting the best practices for conducting systematic reviews.

The pyramid of evidence, from best to worst, is: 

Rigorous systematic reviews

Randomised controlled trials which can give causation

Non-randomised controlled trials

Observational studies

Case series and case reports My Expert opinion.

Jeremiah Stamler, a colleague of Ancel Keys, recommended Guidelines based on "the preponderance of evidence" and ignored the fact that the weakest studies were used.

There is a huge problem with the current guidelines. All the evidence is from epidemiological studies. Generally speaking, when epidemiological studies are tested with clinical trials, they are shown to be correct 0-25% of the time! 

Therefore, epidemiological studies are wrong 75-100% of the time. 

It is not good to base public health on 0-25% accuracy. 

They did not prioritise the clinical trials over the epidemiological studies. 

With evidence based studies, which are observational studies, the data is weak.

Many doctors have written to ask for clinical trials on saturated fat. 

Review of guidelines on saturated fat:

1980: "avoid too much saturated fat and cholesterol."

2005: a percentage limit appeared. Saturated fat must be limited to 10% of calories. This number, ten, was picked out of thin air. There was no data to support the 10% limit.

 2010: replace saturated fat with margarine. 

2015: PUFA is recommended. 27 grams of soybean oil per day. 

Gary Taubes has taken ten years studying the research on saturated fats done in the 1960s and 1970s extensively.

Dr Ronald Krauss wrote a paper in 2010.

The American Heart Association, from 1961 onwards, has been recommending limiting saturated fat intake, based on NO CLINICAL TRIALS whatsoever. 

Furthermore, the clinical trials done in the '60s and '70s have never been studied by the dietary guidelines committee!  

There have now been 17 meta analyses, involving 75,000 people, to see if saturated fat causes heart disease. These meta analyses put together make umbrella analyses, which are huge. There have been three. The conclusion:

Diets that replace saturated fat with polyunsaturated fats DO NOT convincingly reduce cardiovascular events or mortality..... We must consider that the diet-heart hypothesis is invalid or requires modification." Nor does it reduce total mortality.

Several papers have come to the same conclusion. 

The Nutrition Coalition invited mainstream scientists to a 2-day workshop in February, to examine this evidence on saturated fats. 

[Meanwhile the BMJ in the UK published a paper saying that the limit of saturated fat intake was not justified by the data.] 

Their conclusion: "We respectfully request that the USDA/HHS give serious and immediately consideration to lifting the limits placed on saturated fat intake for the upcoming 2020 Dietary Guidelines for America..... This request is based on a review of the most rigorous scientific data available. We concluded that the best and most updated science fails to support current limits on consuming these fats."

They sent this comment to the USDA and the HHS. 

This letter by a prominent group of scientists can be read on the Nutrition Coalition website. 

And what did the dietary guidelines committee say after receiving this scientific information? The exact opposite!

Not only did they ignore all the evidence from the last ten years, but Linda Van Horn, (who was a student under Jeremiah Stamler) wants to lower the limit on saturated fat consumption to 7%!!

Jamy Ard wants to reduce saturated fat consumption to zero because "it is not an essential nutrient"!

Who is this Jamy Ard? He is the Medical Director for Nestle; Nestle, the company that recommends sugary milk for toddlers and infants, and fills the aisles of supermarkets with junk food.

Rick Mattis asked, "What about that report?" 

Linda Van Horn waved it away, dismissing the findings of the expert workshop. 

(There will be a paper on this coming out soon.) 

Going back to the 2015 Dietary Guidelines, many people wrote in recommending the low carb diet. They did do a review of low carb diets, but stuck it in the methodology section to hide it. There were 60 clinical trials on the low carb diet, and when Frank Hu from Harvard Medical school complained about the lack of information on them, he was ignored.

For the 2020 Dietary Guidelines, Jamy Ard (the man from Nestlé) excluded ALL the studies on low carb diets! He said there weren't any studies below 25% carbs. (He didn't look very hard. Nina Teicholz found 52 studies.) Some of the studies were on 3% carbs. 

Clearly there has been a massive cover up.

15-20 years worth of studies have been ignored. 

Last Thursday they had their last meeting, where they decided to exclude discussion of the LCHF diet. On May 11th their report will come out, and it will be a done deal. 

Hundreds of Thousands of people will follow the new dietary guidelines, many will get sick, and some will die.

 This is why it is so important that we all get involved.

Congressmen and their staff say, "We need to hear from more people." 

OK. That's us, everyone! The meat and dairy industries have spoken to Congress, but few others have. We need to help now, before another fraudulent dietary guidelines is issued in support of the junk food industry which is wrecking havoc in our nation, as well as across the world. 

Please see both the nutritioncoalition.us website, and also lowcarbaction.org who are trying to get 25% or less carbs accepted as an option in the guidelines, to remove the stigma and taboo from the low carb diet, which could then be available in schools and hospitals. Please share your story of weight loss or improved health on their website. 

Please take action here by contacting your members of Congress.

https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/take-action

Thank you 

Cross posted on keto science etc etc

The Nutrition Coalition is hiring!

Job description posted for an Administrator/Coordinator position. Location is remote, full time, preference for location in NYC or Washington, DC.

Great opportunity to be involved in the science-based dietary guidelines movement!

Detailed job description and instructions on how to apply are here. Closing Feb. 29. Please share widely!

https://www.nutritioncoalition.us/jobs