Letters to the Editor
Does anyone still remember the Lancet’s Ultra-Processed Food series? At the time, it caused some minor media attention – and the authors dismissed most of the criticism. As one of the authors – Professor van Tulleken – said on BBC Radio 4 Today (transcript from the BBC):
“I should say these comments that are coming in, there were about 15 comments submitted through the Science Media Centre, itself a food industry-funded press office, of those, we did an analysis of these yesterday when we had an author’s meeting, about a quarter of them were strongly negative. Of the strongly negative comments, every single person, every single scientist had an institutional or individual conflict of interest with an ultra-processed food company. 75% of good comments were from independent scientists. As you say, it’s in The Lancet, it’s been peer reviewed, this is sanctioned by WHO and UNICEF.“
That is of course one approach to deal with factual criticism (which can be found here). Unfortunately, there was not enough time for the presenters to challenge this statement – even though there are many reasons why reducing scientific debates to actual or perceived conflicts is misleading.
Read the full post on Substack →
Originally published on Substack.