Food company sponsorship of nutrition research and professional activities: a conflict of interest?

The potential for conflicts of interest when corporations establish financial relationships with academic researchers, teachers, and practitioners is under increasing scrutiny, mainly focused on sponsorship by cigarette and pharmaceutical companies. Investigators of sponsorship effects have shown that recipients of grants from such companies tend to publish research results, give advice, and write prescriptions in a way that is more strongly favourable to the sponsors' products than might be expected from a more objective review of the evidence. Corporate financial support does not necessarily cause recipients to bias their results, opinions, or actions, but because it raises questions of `guilt by association', some medical commentators have called for an end to corporate sponsorship, or for new policies to help recipients manage the conflicts of interest that inevitably arise from such relationships. Although sponsorship by food companies is ubiquitous among academics and practitioners in the fields of nutrition, food, and agriculture, our community has paid scant attention to the conflicts of interest that might arise from this. Like drug and tobacco companies, food companies often sponsor academic work (and in fact many drug and tobacco companies own food companies). They fund departments, research institutes, and investigators; they support meetings, conferences, journals, and lectures; and they freely distribute products, product samples, and teaching materials. Many individuals and organisations depend on such support, and therefore actively seek it. At issue are the consequences of such activities ± genuine or perceived ± for the credibility of research results and dietary advice. Financial relationships among food companies and nutrition professionals are not a new phenomenon. A survey in the United States in the mid 1970s identified frequent payments by food companies to nutrition and agriculture faculties for consulting services, lectures, membership on advisory boards, and representation at congressional hearings. More recently, a British study reported that 158 out of 246 members of national committees on nutrition and food policy consult for or receive funding from food companies. Such relationships are so pervasive that it is virtually impossible for nutrition academics not to be recipients of food industry largesse in one way or another. As with sponsorship by tobacco or drug companies, such connections cannot help but raise questions about the ability of nutrition experts to provide independent opinions on matters of diet and public health. I often hear nutrition colleagues state that the only way to improve the dietary intake of populations is to engage in partnerships and alliances with companies to produce more nutritious food. Although alliances do not necessarily imply an endorsement of the partner's products, they may well give the appearance of doing so. As shown by research on the practices of the tobacco industry, for example, co-opting academic experts is a deliberate corporate strategy to neutralise criticism and promote the sale of products. Indeed, a classic manual on corporate strategies advises companies who want to work with academics to employ a `modicum of finesse' such that the recruited experts do not recognise their loss of objectivity. The success of this approach is indicated by the outraged reactions of most academics of my acquaintance to any suggestion that food company sponsorship might influence their interpretation of research results or opinions. The possibility that it might do so, however, deserves attention not only by analogy to the documented effects of sponsorship by cigarette and pharmaceutical companies, but also because sponsorship by food corporations is so common among nutrition professionals. In this commentary, I present a few selected examples of situations in the USA in which food company alliances with nutrition academics and practitioners raise questions of conflicts of interest. These examples describe food company support of nutrition journals and conferences, research investigations, and alliances with professional Public Health Nutrition: 4(5), 1015±1022 DOI: 10.1079/PHN2001253