It was a startling scientific finding: Children who eat candy tend to weigh less than those who don’t. Less startling was how it came about, The Associated Press reports.
The paper, it turns out, was funded by a trade association representing the makers of Butterfingers, Hershey and Skittles. And its findings were touted by the group even though one of its authors didn’t seem to think much of it.
“We’re hoping they can do something with it—it’s thin and clearly padded,” Carol O’Neil, a professor of nutrition at LSU, wrote to her co-author in early 2011, with an abstract for the paper attached.
The paper nevertheless served the interests of the candy industry—and that’s not unusual. The comment was found among thousands of pages of emails obtained by The AP through records requests with public universities as part of an investigation into how food companies influence thinking about healthy eating.
One of the industry’s most powerful tactics is the funding of nutrition research. It carries the weight of academic authority, becomes a part of scientific literature and generates headlines. Food companies say they follow guidelines to ensure scientific integrity, and that academics have the right to publish no matter what they find. Many in the research world also see industry funding as critical for advancing science as competition for government funding has intensified. Critics say the worry is that they’re hijacking science for marketing purposes, and that they cherry-pick or hype findings.
The thinner-children-ate-candy research is an example. It was drawn from a government database of surveys that asks people to recall what they ate in the past 24 hours. The data “may not reflect usual intake” and “cause and effect associations cannot be drawn,” the candy paper authors wrote in a section about the study’s limitations.
O’Neil, the LSU professor who made the “thin and clearly padded” remark, told The AP through a university representative that data can be “publishable” even if it’s thin. A week later, O’Neil told the news agency she did not recall why she made the remark, but that it was a reference to the abstract she had attached for her co-author to provide feedback on. She said she believed the full paper was “robust.”
The flood of industry money in nutrition science partly reflects the field’s challenges. Isolating the effect of any single food on a person’s health can be difficult, as evidenced by the sea of conflicting findings. The ambiguity and confusion has left the door open for marketers.
