Conflicts of Interest: The Nutrition Debate’s Red Herring
Sir Humphrey’s guide on how to discredit a report:
Stage four: Discredit the man who produced the report… Say that he’s harbouring a grudge against the Government or, better still, that he used to be a consultant to a multi-national company.In science, facts should matter—not personalities. But facts can be inconvenient. They require effort to understand and discuss. Dismissing inconvenient facts is far easier if you discredit the person presenting them.
This approach is especially popular in nutrition and food science, where everyone seems to consider themselves an expert. Disagreeing with public sentiment often leads to accusations of nefarious motives. For example the British Medical Journal, a respected scientific journal after all, dedicated two articles to alleged conflicts of interests among nutritionists, including me.
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Originally published on Substack.