This Week's Nutrition & Health News
"Agenda-driven Science" at the UN Food Summit; Harvard Resorts to Lone Polish MD to Legitimize Anti-Keto Drumbeat; Can an Animal Rights Group Do an Unbiased Test of a Vegan Diet?
This is “Agenda-Driven Science,” says participant at UN Food Summit
Highly-organized and well-funded groups are working closely with the United Nations to drastically reduce—or even eliminate—human consumption of meat and dairy. Since disrupting the world’s food supply at this magnitude would almost certainly cause mass starvation and malnutrition, we’d love for this to be nothing more than a conspiracy theory. Unfortunately, this agenda is very much alive, as part of the UN’s “Sustainable Development Goals” to fight climate change.
Over the past five years, events unfolding under the UN’s “Decade of Action” to create more sustainable food systems by the year 2030 have seemed surreal. Most notably, the creation and widespread dissemination of the “planetary health diet,” by the EAT-Lancet Commission in 2019, recommending that everyone – sick and healthy, young and old – get 37% of their calories from grains and sugar1 with no more than ½ ounce of red meat a day. (The diet is incapable of sustaining human life without extensive supplementation, since it is deficient in multiple essential nutrients, including potassium, calcium, iron, and vitamins D, A, and B-12.) Now, a food industry analyst with a front seat to this policy process has written a first-hand account, with granular detail, about what he sees as agenda-driven actors undermining basic scientific integrity.
The author, Peer Ederer, is the founding director of Zurich-based GOAL Sciences, a company that provides policy-oriented research for the food industry, particularly the livestock sector. Ederer favors sustainably raised livestock, a bias to account for when reading his recent article in Animal Production Science. Ederer has a PhD in economics and the focus of his piece is the declining quality of animal-related science—among sciences in general. He also presents case studies, of which the UN Food Systems Summit is one.
In 2019, UN Secretary General Anthony Gutierrez announced the summit and selected the Davos-based business group, the World Economic Forum (WEF), for its launch a year later. Billionaire Gunhild Stordalen, chair of the EAT Initiative which had produced the EAT-Lancet diet, was placed at the helm of “Action Track 2” (AT2) and tasked with creating a plan to shift to “more sustainable” food systems. Ederer writes that the entire AT2 leadership was composed of “persons closely associated with the EAT Initiative,” aligned with Stordalen’s goal of “significantly reduc[ing] the amount of meat consumption, accompanied by a corresponding reduction of livestock.”
I paid to join the WEF—the only way this online summit could be attended —and can attest to the fact that virtually all the speakers were promoting a quasi-vegan diet. Although Stordalen allowed herself to be photographed hugging baby lambs, the summit she led seemed designed to steamroll through a radical view of future food systems largely depopulated of livestock.
As Ederer tells it, other “stakeholders,” including farmers, nutritionists and citizen groups, refused to approve this goal and, in mid-2021, the summit had arrived at a “major impasse.” This is when Ederer was invited, in his capacity as a (non-remunerated) member of the World Farmers Organization, along with other previously excluded groups to the summit. The goal was to help “unblock the situation.”
The solution involving bringing in groups from the multiple food action tracks to focus exclusively on livestock, resulting in a two-page document, approved by all 70 stakeholder groups. “Its tenor,” writes Ederer, “could be paraphrased with ‘Much improvement is necessary, but livestock is part of the solution, not part of the problem.’”
Stordalen’s alliance, not surprisingly, disagreed and successfully held up the Summit to give “additional input.” (The alliance included representatives from Chatham House, Wellcome Trust, Oxford University, New York University, the Good Food Fund, 50by40, the Good Food Institute, Compassion in World Farming and FAIRR.2)
Feedback from the alliance, in widely-shared emails that Ederer quotes, included the following: “‘It is absurd to proposition a growth in the livestock as a solution’, ‘It is irrelevant that livestock farming has provided food, clothing, power, manure and income and acted as assets, collateral and status. Fossil fuel has done many of the same things.’”
It was a hot-tempered summer of 2021. Further disagreements led to more two-pager solutions, and in the end, there were three, including one by the plant-based group, with “every stakeholder group satisfied that its position was somehow represented,” at the summit, which was held in Rome in late July. How all these different views will somehow be reconciled, Ederer doesn’t say.
Ederer and his colleagues did decide to check the references of each of these 2-pager documents, hoping to establish their evidence. In two of the papers, including the one he had helped write, they found three incorrect references in each, representing 5 to 7% of the total. By contrast, the plant-based position paper had 17 incorrect references– 32% of the total. We didn’t check Ederer’s assessment, but if these numbers are anywhere close to the reality, they are compelling evidence that the argument to eradicate animal agriculture is “agenda-driven,” not evidence-based.
Ederer also discusses the many flaws in widely-cited papers by the vegan activist Marco Springmann, in the World Health Organization’s 2015 ruling that red and processed meat cause colorectal cancer, and in the Gates-backed Global Burden of Disease study that overstated the negative health effects of red meat by 36-fold yet did not correct or retract the paper. (Unsettled Science covered this study here.)
Ederer’s ties to the livestock industry may be a reason for many to dismiss his paper out of hand. We think his observations are eye-opening and worth checking. (NT)
Vegan Diet for Type 1 Diabetes? Maybe…
In an ideal world, a successful diet trial will answer two questions. 1. Does the diet help with the condition or disorder for which it's being tested? 2. If so, what exactly about the diet makes it effective?
Last month, researchers from the Physicians Committee of Responsible Medicine (PCRM) published the results of a trial testing a low-fat vegan diet for type 1 diabetes. Fifty-eight participants with type 1 were randomized to eat either the vegan diet with only 15% of calories as fat,or a portion-controlled version of the moderate-fat, omnivore diet recommended by the American Diabetes Association (ADA). The PCRM researchers report that after 12 weeks, the vegan diet was the more effective of the two: It improved insulin sensitivity, required lower doses of insulin to control blood sugar, and, not surprisingly, reduced LDL cholesterol. The conclusion: patients with type 1 diabetes can eat a low-fat vegan diet (for at least 12 weeks) and expect to be healthier than they might be following the ADA advice.
What the trial didn’t tell us is why the diet was effective. Was the absence of animal products responsible for the comparative benefits or the very low-fat nature of the diet? Both? How about neither? Another possibility (my bias) is that the participants on the vegan diet had better outcomes because they did a better job of improving the quality of the carbohydrates they consumed. They ate legumes, fruits, and vegetables rather than starchy and processed carbs like white rice, bread, and bagels, and maybe they even did a better job of avoiding sugar, sugary beverages, and sweets.
This possibility is linked to one of the many ways that randomized, controlled trials can be biased. In this case, PCRM is an animal-rights organization, “dedicated to saving and improving human and animal lives through plant-based diets and ethical and effective scientific research.” The goal is honorable, but it depends on the assumption that plant-based diets improve human health, compared to diets that include animal products. (Nina has discussed this problem with Christopher Gardner’s work at Stanford.) A challenge to an activist organization like PCRM is to avoid having its preconceived beliefs about the nature of a healthy diet bias its research. Randomization and blinding will help solve those problems, but they’re particularly sticky issues for this kind of activist research.
PCRM, for instance, recruits participants, at least in part, from its social network, which is composed of people who favor plant-based eating for a host of reasons. As a result, we can too easily imagine that the participants randomized to eat the vegan diet were more committed to the trial than those who were counseled only to follow a portion-controlled version of a conventional ADA plan.
Among the warning bells in the study (see the supplemental material): the participants randomized to the vegan diet group, on average, were 9 years younger than the portion-control group, twice as physically active, and weighed 25 pounds less. It’s hard to understand such considerable differences in this kind of randomized trial, but they can happen.
Moreover, the participants assigned randomly to the portion-control group nonetheless entered the trial consuming an average of 350 calories a day more than those randomized to the vegan diet, a 20% difference in total calories consumed. The portion-control group was then counseled to reduce intake by 500 to 1000 calories a day. Despite providing considerable counseling to both groups, the PCRM team reports that “no significant change in energy intake” was observed in either. At the end of the trial, vegan and portion-control dieters were eating the same amount of calories, but the vegan dieters nonetheless lost 11 pounds, on average; the portion-controllers, nothing. It’s possible that the weight loss on the vegan diet was due to reductions in insulin dosage. But the lack of weight loss among the portion-controllers suggests they may have been less dedicated to following instructions. In short, they fared less well, because they felt less of an obligation to try.
These issues do not mean that a well-formulated vegan diet – absent sugar, sugary beverages, sweets and processed carbs, and supplemented by vitamin B12 – can’t be healthy for type 1 diabetes, or perhaps even healthier than the ADA recommendations. The PCRM study is evidence in support. But it tells us little more. As @DLFfitness, a vegan health coach, commented in response to a recent PCRM video on “healthy vs unhealthy” vegan diets, “Once you cut the crap out of your diet, you can feel the harm it causes when you eat it.” The question is, what is the crap, exactly, that needs to be cut out? A trial like this, perhaps biased by an activist agenda, does not tell us. (GT)
Harvard Medical School Digs Deep: How Dogmas Perpetuate Themselves
We get it. Internists and cardiologists have been schooled in the notion that ketogenic diets are bad for the heart and hard to sustain. That was the push-back against the Atkins diet when it went viral in the early 1970s, and that’s what medical students have mostly been taught ever since. The fact that there have now been almost 200 clinical trials published on these diets since the turn of this century, consistently finding significant health benefits (and another few hundred are in the works) often has little influence on what these physicians believe once they were taught otherwise.
Harvard Medical School (HMS), our nation’s most prestigious, has now given us yet another case study on how these medical dogmas perpetuate themselves, and how hard it is to get physicians to change course in their thinking.
Just a month ago, an HMS website posted an article asking “Should you try the keto diet?” The author was a Harvard internist who serves as “chief medical editor for Harvard Health Publishing.” With neither links nor references to studies supporting his opinion, he described keto as “a medical diet that comes with serious risks,” while ultimately dismissing it on the basis that it’s “difficult to sustain,” and: “Once you resume a normal diet, the weight will come back.” (We wouldn’t argue with this last point as it is true with every weight loss diet.)
Now, a month later, HMS returns to the subject with a more declarative statement. Maybe they got push-back on the original article and wanted to establish that they knew of what they spoke. “Keto diet is not healthy and may harm the heart” claims the new headline. This one is authored by the executive editor of the Harvard Heart Letter and was “reviewed” by the website’s editor-in-chief.
The article is pegged to a review in the March 2024 issue of a journal called Current Problems in Cardiology questioning the benefits of keto largely because its high fat content clashes with the disease-prevention guidelines of the European Society of Cardiology. The diet is unhealthy, according to the HMS post, “because it raises LDL cholesterol,” and while it “may dramatically reduce fat mass and weight over the short term, there is scarce evidence for any long-term benefit.” (This latter point is also true of every weight loss diet, due to the nature of the clinical trials required to test these diets perhaps more so than the nature of the diets themselves.)
What we find a little suspicious is the failure in this HMS post to include a link to the review itself. Why not? Perhaps if readers had the opportunity to click on a link, they’d learn that the supposedly authoritative paper being cited is the work of a single physician/dietitian, Joanna Popiolek-Kalisz, working in Lublin, Poland. (Not that she might not know what she’s talking about, but the fact that she’s publishing in the 48th most influential journal in the sub-discipline of cardiac and cardiovascular systems, suggests she may have had trouble getting the article published elsewhere. That Popiolek-Kalisz has only been publishing since 2020, according to PubMed, also suggests that she’s new to this kind of work.)
So why would HMS feature such an article? The likely explanation is that it reinforces what these HMS physicians were taught to believe, and they’d like to convince the rest of us that they were right all along. We can understand the urge, but we’re still hoping for more open-minded handling of these vitally important issues in the future. (GT)
120 calories from sugar + 811 calories from grains/ 2503 total calories for an adult male = 37%
Further information on some these groups:
50By40 is a coalition of organizations dedicated to reducing consumption of animal products by 50% by the year 2040. Its alliance includes groups focusing on animal rights, the environment, and protein-alternative businesses, among others;
Wellcome Trust is one of the UK’s largest charities and is a major backer of many of the groups involved in AT2, including the EAT Foundation:
Good Food Institute is a non-profit dedicated to supporting vegan business ventures particularly alternative proteins;
Compassion in World Farming: a non-profit dedicated to ending factory farming:
FAIRR: an investor network focused on ESG in the food sector. Investments prioritize alternative proteins.
Type one diabetic here who has had completely normal blood sugars (a1c 4.6) and reversed her complications after switching to a very low carb, high protein diet 6 years ago. Isn't the issue with the PCRM vegan study the outcomes they picked? Reducing the amount of insulin required for the same food is better, sure, but what were their a1cs? Their standard deviations? There's no way they ate a vegan diet and didn't soar into the 200s+ multiple times per day (even if fast-acting insulin and significant hypoglycemia averages those highs out to a mid-5 a1c).
How can anyone today when one billion are starving read anything about WHAT to eat without specifying HOW MUCH. The food in the USA is tasteless and thus lacking in nutrition but no one cares since everyone glorifies vegetables and fruits. Most of the glorification would be undone if a taster couldn't identify the item blindfolded. The USA produces easily 50% more food and beverages than our stomach-- pre-stretched versions-- should be capable of consuming. Obviously, nutrition and health are just covers for consumerism. Any playing with nutrients makes money. As a starving child in Ghana if it is unhealthy to eat a chocolate bar.