BY HANK REICHMAN
Earlier this month the AAUP released an important statement, In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education, prepared by Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. The statement has now been endorsed by these organizations:
American Federation of Teachers
American Historical Association
Association of American Colleges and Universities
American Society of Journalists and Authors
Association of University Presses
Council of University of California Faculty Associations
Faculty Association of California Community Colleges
National Coalition Against Censorship
PEN America
Phi Beta Kappa Society
Woodhull Freedom Foundation
Additional endorsements are expected.
The statement explains that “Expert knowledge is a process of constant exploration, revision, and adjudication. Expert knowledge, and the procedures by which it is produced, are subject to endless reexamination and reevaluation. It is this process of self-questioning that justifies society’s reliance on expert knowledge. Such knowledge may in the end prove accurate or inaccurate, but it is the best we can do at any given time.”
One illustration of this process — and of some of the potential threats to independent investigation — can be found in a recent controversy over studies reporting that eating red meat may not be as closely correlated with coronary heart disease and cancer as previously reported. Here are the opening paragraphs of a recent and lengthy report on the matter in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA):
It’s almost unheard of for medical journals to get blowback for studies before the data are published. But that’s what happened to the Annals of Internal Medicine last fall as editors were about to post several studies showing that the evidence linking red meat consumption with cardiovascular disease and cancer is too weak to recommend that adults eat less of it.
Annals Editor-in-Chief Christine Laine, MD, MPH, saw her inbox flooded with roughly 2000 emails—most bore the same message, apparently generated by a bot—in a half hour. Laine’s inbox had to be shut down, she said. Not only was the volume unprecedented in her decade at the helm of the respected journal, the tone of the emails was particularly caustic.
“We’ve published a lot on firearm injury prevention,” Laine said. “The response from the NRA (National Rifle Association) was less vitriolic than the response from the True Health Initiative.”
The True Health Initiative (THI) is a nonprofit founded and headed by David Katz, MD. The group’s website describes its work as “fighting fake facts and combating false doubts to create a world free of preventable diseases, using the time-honored, evidence-based, fundamentals of lifestyle and medicine.” Walter Willett, MD, DrPH, and Frank Hu, MD, PhD, Harvard nutrition researchers who are among the top names in their field, serve on the THI council of directors.
Katz, Willett, and Hu took the rare step of contacting Laine about retracting the studies prior to their publication, she recalled in an interview with JAMA. Perhaps that’s not surprising. “Some of the researchers have built their careers on nutrition epidemiology,” Laine said. “I can understand it’s upsetting when the limitations of your work are uncovered and discussed in the open.”
Subsequent news coverage criticized the methodology used in the meat papers and raised the specter that some of the authors had financial ties to the beef industry, representing previously undisclosed conflicts of interest.
But what has for the most part been overlooked is that Katz and THI and many of its council members have numerous industry ties themselves. The difference is that their ties are primarily with companies and organizations that stand to profit if people eat less red meat and a more plant-based diet. Unlike the beef industry, these entities are surrounded by an aura of health and wellness, although that isn’t necessarily evidence-based.
The Annals published 5 systematic reviews—4 that included results from randomized clinical trials (RCTs) and observational studies examining the relationship between red meat and health, and a fifth that looked at health-related values and preferences about eating meat. Based on the reviews, the authors produced a guideline that concluded adults needn’t change their meat-eating habits.
In an accompanying editorial, coauthors Aaron Carroll, MD, and Tiffany Doherty, PhD, wrote that the guideline “is sure to be controversial, but it is based on the most comprehensive review of the evidence to date.”
Now, I should probably acknowledge that I have cardiovascular disease, for which I take medication, and I have tried to reduce the amount of meat I consume and shift toward a more plant-based diet. I hope this helps, but I don’t know if it does. (Of course, it is also likely to be far more friendly to our endangered environment, which is a good reason for me to continue.) But I’m hardly qualified to declare that this will improve my longevity. I rely instead on the experts.
That’s why it’s so troubling to learn not that the experts disagree or, that, as one scientist explained in the New York Times, “even researchers of good faith can land on different sides of a debate” owing to “the difficulty in doing research in this area,” but that the process can be so politicized and perhaps corrupted.
According to one Harvard Medical School researcher cited in the JAMA article, “compared with pharmaceutical research, dietary studies are far more challenging in terms of consistency, quality control, confounding, and interpretation, which makes translating those findings into public policy exceedingly difficult.” Yet hours before the Annals article was posted the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM) “went so far as to petition the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ‘to correct false statements regarding consumption of red and processed meat released by the Annals of Internal Medicine.’” PCRM then asked the district attorney for the City of Philadelphia, where the Annals editorial office is located, “to investigate potential reckless endangerment” resulting from the publication of the meat papers and recommendations. Despite its title, however, fewer than 10% of the PCRM’s 175,000 members are actually physicians.
THI’s Katz didn’t comment on the Annals studies and the accompanying guideline via the typical routes of posting comments on the journal’s website or writing a letter to the editor. Instead, he employed his blog and, in a newspaper column, charged the journal with “information terrorism.”
Again, I don’t know who’s right about the science, but the point is that this isn’t the way genuine scientific exchange based on principles of free inquiry should be conducted. According to the JAMA article, Gordon Guyatt of McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, who led development of the concept of evidence-based medicine, called the response to the studies “completely predictable” and “hysterical.”
Tufts University professor Sheldon Krimsky, who studies linkages between science and technology, ethics and values, and public policy, said, “It sounds like a political campaign. . . I’ve seen Monsanto do the same thing on the other side.”
Potential conflicts of interest seem to abound on both sides, which points to one of the main threats both to expert research and academic freedom today: the growing impact of private funding. In The Future of Academic Freedom I quoted journalist David Johnson, who declared,
It would be no exaggeration to say that the world of academic research centers and institutes, especially insofar as they deal with profitable industries such as energy, health care, pharmaceuticals, agriculture, and technology, is thoroughly awash in—indeed, wholly made possible by—corporate cash. The point is not only that this corporate money enables compromised research. . . . There is also the research that this money restricts, and even silences—the studies whose conclusions big-money funders may find disagreeable.
In Defense of Knowledge and Higher Education worried about how “faith that American higher education produces expert knowledge that benefits the entire society has diminished.” Timothy Caulfield, research director of the University of Alberta’s Health Law Institute and a THI council member, was described in a 2018 profile in Toronto’s Globe and Mail as “one of North America’s most high-profile skeptics, taking on the rising tide of pseudoscience and misinformation.” He said, “I understand both the concern about conflict of interest, especially in nutrition research, . . . But there is so much public confusion surrounding diet. I worry about any messaging that might be interpreted as dogmatic.”
We all need to do better.
Dear Hank Reichmann,
I appreciate this article (and your work more generally). I did wonder, however if you have considered the problem of false equivalence or false presentation of two sides of an argument as equal when they are not? My impression is that plant based food companies or groups are likely to be a great deal poorer and smaller than meat companies and organisations. Therefore researchers with “numerous industry ties …primarily with companies and organizations that stand to profit if people eat less red meat and a more plant-based diet” are not likely to be receiving large or equivalent amounts of money to those with links to meat companies. There are also decades of journalists’ research on the poor treatment of workers and animals in the meat industry (Upton Sinclair onwards) and of tactics aiming to conceal or misrepresent such issues from the public.I am not aware of any equivalent research on the plant based food industry Issues around, for example, the cultivation of soy and almonds are important but not equivalent as they have not involved big PR campaigns etc.
This will likely change – more money for researchers and the normal mistreatment of workers will probably arrive as the plant based food industry is normalised and profitst soar. It does still seem likely to me, however that many scientists today with well established link to plant foods research began research in this ‘industry’ because they were committed to animal welfare or contesting traditional and profit based claims about healthy diets not because of the huge financial gains they anticipated. Where this is not true, it is still necessary to avoid establishing a false equivalence between groups. Those supporters of plant based food who can be set alongside scientists supporting big tobacco/food/pharmaceuticals etc are few. Comparisons with Monsanto tactics diminish my respect for Krimsky and the quote from David Johnson mentioning big money industries merely highlights the need to be clear about who has the big money in such conflicts. As that quotation suggests, this is an era when huge amounts of money are being spent on campaigns and long term underhand tactics by corporations are almost the norm.
To get to the specific event, on the email inundation, if the majority of the emails were bot generated then it is probable they came from a very limited number of people and it is highly problematic to use this event as a basis on which to make claims that imply there were two sides lined up against each others. While I understand the frustration and distress felt by the person whose inbox was inundated, it is important that we are aware of the impact of changing technologies and one major defence against bots is correct recognition of the event as not coming from large groups. I would suggest on the emails from individuals that if we get involved in contentious issues, then we must expect some response from those who disagree with us. There is a substantial history of animal rights activism and the editors of the Annals of Medicine are free to decide that the growth in awareness of cruel treatment of farmed animals or any of the other related issues are not important to their conception of evidence on healthy diets (as they say in one line at the end of their editorial) but it is naive to suggest this is not an issue of genuine public concern.
Perhaps the biggest questions I have is about climate change. I don’t think tucking the only comment in your blog post on the impact of meat eating on climate change into brackets is appropriate. Did the literature reviews consider climate change as an issue? I expect it was not raised in many, if any, of the articles available for review and I think it is difficult to consider climate change in relation to healthy diets as we have traditionally concieved of them. The climate is simply outside the frame of the impact of a question conceived of as the impact of red meat on the health of a population of six million individual bodies. This illustrates one of the major problems with the concept of evidence-based medicine. Assessments of the impact of GE are a good example of another instance when this problem made the scientific assessments irrelevant. Claims that food produced using GE seeds were perfectly safe did not answer questions about the impact on small farmers of patented seeds that had to be paid for to Monsanto each year or the about the insecticides that had to be used with those seeds and or even about the creation of plant monocultures.
The editors may believe that half a line on climate change at the end of their editorial fulfils their obligations – but as editors, seriously raising wider questions is precisely the kind of influence they can have. The “most comprehensive review of the evidence to date” may just not be good enough to make a judgement that meat based diets are healthy for populations. Speaking from the Southern hemisphere, it could be said that it is time to wake up and smell the bushfire smoke.
Kind regards,
Hera Cook
My parenthetical remark on the impact of climate change was parenthetical for the simple reason that climate change was not the topic of the post, nor was it an issue in the controversy I discussed. In fact, the post wasn’t even about meat-eating but about the development of expert knowledge, which is why it was framed in the context of the recent AAUP statement.
Your notion that the plant-based food industry is somehow markedly weaker than the meat industry, is hard for this Californian to take seriously. Fruit and vegetable farming has been big business in my state for over a century; its political clout and impact on higher education undeniable (for some examples see https://caes.ucdavis.edu/research/centers). In fact, Upton Sinclair, whose early work The Jungle you obliquely reference, focused much of his 1930s campaign for California governor on fighting that industry. According to the US Dept. of Agriculture, crops, not livestock, account for the largest share of the value of U.S. agricultural production (https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/gallery/chart-detail/?chartId=58328). To be sure, I suspect your concern is as much with the meat processing industry, but, then again, grains, fruit, and vegetables can be processed as well. Think Frosted Flakes or Cap’n Crunch.
Not that this matters, given the actual subject of the post.
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