If The Science Was For Sale Why Did The Meat and Dairy Industries Get Rolled?

Marion Nestle had a piece earlier this week on how the American Society for Nutrition (ASN), (the organization that publishes the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition (AJCN) and the Journal of Nutrition) should deal with conflicts of interest, especially in the journals that they publish. Her points are sound and I don’t have much to add except that I’ve never understood how the sugar industry has been able to warp the conventional wisdom via sponsorships of organizations, research and research departments but the meat and dairy industries got rolled on fat and cholesterol.

The evidence against the evils of saturated fat and dietary cholesterol was always thin, and yet these supposedly powerful industries got pummeled by the nutrition community for decades.

The dairy industry I can understand, because they actually benefited from the low-fat milk nonsense. The admonishment to eat low fat dairy functions more like punctuation than actual advice in standard nutritionspeak. You’d think this would drive the dairy industry crazy until you look at the price of milk in the grocery store. A gallon of full fat, 2% and skim are all the same price. They got to sell people crappy reduced fat milk for the same price as the good stuff and sell the fat as butter, cream and half & half without skim milk as a by product. (Health conscious humans trying to watch their weight are willing to pay more for skim milk than hog farmers looking to fatten their hogs [pdf].)

But it’s seems weird that if the science was for sale, why didn’t the meat and egg people buy it? It should have come cheap as the evidence was mostly on their side when it came to fat and cholesterol.

Notes
Conflicts of interest in nutrition societies: American Society of Nutrition
Marion Nestle | Food Politics | November 20, 2013
Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies
Gary Taubes and Cristen Kearns Couzens | Mother Jones | November 2012
A Big Fat Debate
Kristen Wartman | Civil Eats | March 4, 2011
What’s Cholesterol Got to Do With It?
Gary Taubes | The New York Times | January 27, 2008
New Review Paper by Yours Truly: High-Fat Dairy, Obesity, Metabolic Health and Cardiovascular Disease
Stephan Guyenet | Whole Health Source | July 22, 2012
How to Fatten Hogs for Market [pdf]
Oregon State Agricultural College | 1930