Dr. Marion Nestle, longtime NYU professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health, with additional faculty roles at UC San Francisco and Cornell, is best known for analyzing the intersections of food, politics, and health, often exposing how government policy, corporate lobbying, and food industry marketing shape what we eat.
Meat industry: the funding effect
Navid Teimouri, who is at the School of Public Health, University of Queensland, sent me his team’s recently published analysis of meat industry sponsored nutrition studies and their outcomes: Is Meat Industry Affiliation Associated With Study Conclusion in Nutrition Research? A Meta-Research Review.
This is a classic study of what the late Sheldon Krimsky called the “funding effect,” the bias toward favorable results caused by industry sponsorship of research.
The authors examined 500 research studies of meat and health outcome.
The results:
Of 500 included studies, 78 (15.6%) reported industry involvement. Studies with industry ties were 16 times more likely to report favorable conclusions regarding meat consumption (odds ratio [OR] = 16.4, 95% CI: 7.5–35.8), and there was a significant association (p < 0.001) between industry involvement and study conclusion.
The conclusion:
Meat industry involvement significantly increases the likelihood of favorable study conclusions in nutrition research. These findings underscore the need for caution when interpreting research funded or associated with the meat industry and emphasize the importance of minimizing conflicts of interest in nutrition research.
Comment
When I wrote my book, Unsavory Truth, I could only find a few funding-effect studies dealing with food or nutrition. This one adds to the collection. It confirms previous findings. Only a small percent of nutrition research is industry funded, but those studies are more likely to find results favoring the sponsor’s commercial interests than those that are not industry funded. Why? Food companies are unlikely to sponsor research that might find their products harmful. Sheldon Krimsky mostly looked at studies funded by the pharmaceutical drug industry. Studies funded by food or nutrition companies share similar biases.
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Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health, Emerita, at New York University, which she chaired from 1988-2003 and from which she officially retired in September 2017. She is also Visiting Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Cornell. She earned a Ph.D. in molecular biology and an M.P.H. in public health nutrition from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been awarded honorary degrees from Transylvania University in Kentucky (2012) and from the City University of New York’s Macaulay Honors College (2016). In 2023, she was awarded The Edinburgh Medal (for science and society).
