Good Calories, Bad Calories

Scientists were believed to be free of conflicts if their only source of funding was a federal agency, but all nutritionists knew that if their research failed to support the government position on a particular subject, the funding would go instead to someone whose research did. “To be a dissenter was to be unfunded because the peer-review system rewards conformity and excludes criticism,” George Mann had written in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1977. The NIH expert panels that decide funding represent the orthodoxy and will tend to perceive research interpreted in a contrarian manner as unworthy of funding. David Kritchevsky, a member of the Food and Nutrition Board when it released Toward Healthful Diets, put it this way: “The U.S. government is as big a pusher as industry. If you say what the government says, then it’s okay. If you say something that isn’t what the government says, or that may be parallel to what industry says, that makes you suspect.”

Conflict of interest is an accusation invariably wielded to discredit those viewpoints with which one disagrees. Michael Jacobson’s Center for Science in the Public Interest had publicly exposed the industry connections of Fred Stare, founder and chair of the department of nutrition at Harvard, primarily because Stare had spent much of his career defending industry on food additives, sugar, and other issues. “In the three years after Stare told a Congressional hearing on the nutritional value of cereals that ‘breakfast cereals are good foods,’” Jacobson had written, “the Harvard School of Public Health received about $200,000 from Kellogg, Nabisco, and their related corporate foundations.” Stare defended his industry funding with an aphorism he repeated often: “The important question is not who funds us but does the funding influence the support of truth.” This was reasonable, but it is always left to your critics to decide whether or not your pursuit of truth has indeed been compromised. Jeremiah Stamler and the CSPI held the same opinions on what was healthy and what was not, and Stamler consulted for CSPI, so Stamler’s alliance with industry—funding from corn-oil manufacturers—was not considered unholy. (By the same token, advocacy groups such as Jacobson’s CSPI are rarely if ever accused of conflicts of interest, even though their entire reason for existence is to argue one side of a controversy as though it were indisputable. Should that viewpoint turn out to be incorrect, it would negate any justification for the existence of the advocacy group and, with it, the paychecks of its employees.)

When I interviewed Mark Hegsted in 1999, he defended the Food and Nutrition Board, although he hadn’t done so in 1979, when he was defending his own report and his own job to Congress. In 1981, when the Reagan administration closed down Hegsted’s Human Nutrition Center at the USDA and found no further use for his services, Hegsted returned to Harvard, where the research he conducted until his retirement was funded by Frito-Lay. By that time, the controversy over the Food and Nutrition Board’s conflicts of interest had successfully discredited Toward Healthful Diets, and Hegsted’s Dietary Guidelines for America had become the official government statement on the dangers of fat and cholesterol in our diet.

Once politics, the public, and the press had decided on the benefits of low-fat diets, science was left to catch up. In the early 1970s, when NIH administrators opted to forgo a $1 billion National Diet-Heart Study that might possibly be definitive and to concentrate instead on a half-dozen studies, at a third of the cost, they believed the results of these smaller studies would be sufficiently persuasive to conclude publicly that low-fat diets would prolong lives. The results of these studies were published between 1980 and 1984.