The Many Conflicts of Interest Behind the Meat Studies

The same person paid by Big Sugar to downplay the risks of sugar was paid by Big Meat to downplay the risks of meat.

A series of articles published in the Annals of Internal Medicine recommending people just keep eating their meat was decried by nutrition researchers as “irresponsible and unethical,” a “travesty of science,” an “assault on public health,” and the “most egregious abuse of evidence” that they had ever seen. There were calls for retraction even before it was published from eminent public health leaders, including a former U.S. Surgeon General, a former president of the American College of Cardiology, and the directors of preventive medicine and nutrition institutes from Harvard, Yale, Tufts, and Stanford. In my last blog, I explained the how, the method by which they manipulated the science, but never really got to the why.

As I discuss in my video Conflicts of Interest in the Annals of Internal Medicine Meat Studies, the lead author’s similar attempt to discredit the sugar guidelines was explicitly paid for by an industry front group funded by the likes of Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Mars candy bars, and Pepsi. But if you look at the panelists’ declared conflicts of interest in the meat paper, they all say they didn’t have any, including the lead author, Bradley Johnston. He was involved in the sugar study, whose primary funder wasn’t just representing Big Soda and Big Candy, but the likes of McDonald’s and Cargill, one of the largest meat packers in the world.

Yet, Johnston didn’t disclose that as a potential conflict of interest when he switched from exonerating sugar to exonerating meat. What did he have to say for himself? “That money was from 2015, so it was outside of the [mandatory] three-year period for disclosing competing interests.” Even though the sugar study was published in 2016, he got the money for it in 2015. The meat paper was published in 2019. This is the same guy who said the industry front group had no role in writing their paper until the Associated Press revealed the truth—emails showed the group sent “requested revisions” to the authors—and the journal had to publish a correction.

But Johnston doubled down this time, saying “it is tenuous at best” to suggest that his previous work on sugar influenced how his team made the new meat recommendations. The important thing is, he said, “We have no relationship with the meat industry.” Oh really? A few months later, the truth came out. There was a correction to the so-called NutriRECS panel meat recommendation. Oops—Bradley Johnston failed to indicate he had gotten a grant from Texas A&M AgriLife Research, which gets millions of dollars a year from the meat industry to do things like run Beef Boot Camp, espouse the health benefits of beef brisket, or promote the celebration of National Bacon Day. After all, “Texas A&M AgriLife Extension serves Texas pork producers” to improve “pork producer profitability,” according to its website. This is the group that not only gave Dr. “No-Relationship-with-the-Meat-Industry” Johnston a direct grant for over $75,000, but it officially joined the whole NutriRECS consortium to provide, as Johnston explained, “generous support” that will “impact nutrition-related decision-making and policy in Canada, the U.S. and beyond.”

Yet none of this was disclosed in the paper. Not even any potential conflicts of interest were mentioned, despite the fact that they had formed a partnership with an arm of Texas A&M University partially funded by the beef industry to the tune of millions of dollars a year from the beef industry alone. In fact, one of the authors who claimed to have no conflicts of interest, Patrick Stover, is the director of AgriLife. And a month before the meat paper was published, Johnston was offered a tenured position at Texas A&M AgriLife. He had accepted the job and was already working there when the paper was published—but didn’t think to mention it.

So, when the Annals of Internal Medicine initially sent out a press release, which it later corrected, saying there was “no need to reduce red or processed meat consumption for good health,” it may have been simply “acting as a mouthpiece for meat-industry propaganda.” One commentary concluded that the “misleading recommendations are not intended to convince scientists, who clearly understand the nature of the relationship between meat and health and, for that matter, sugar and health. This pseudoscience is presented solely to create doubt and confusion in the wider population.” Frankly, “[i]ndustry will do what it needs to do to push as much of its product on the world as it can. Industry will do what it needs to do to obfuscate the relationship between its products and human and planetary health; they have done it with tobacco, fossil fuels, [Monsanto’s Roundup], sugar, and now meat.”

Doctor’s Note

There’s a reason The Food Industry Wants the Public Confused About Nutrition.

This is the fifth in an eight-part series on how industries impact dietary and health guidelines. If you missed the first four parts, check out related posts below.

Stay tuned for:

The Meat Papers Contradicted Their Own Data
How Big Meat Distorted the Evidence
How Many Minutes of Life Does a Burger Cost?