Chances are, if you read about a strange new medical discovery that sounds too good to be true–chances are, it is. Or it’s a paid for advertisement in disguise, designed to deceive the public. You really have to wonder, how do people get the balls to do this?

Nutrition Journal Hid Contributors’ Ties to Food Industry

* Nutrition Journal Hid Contributors’ Ties to Food Industry
Supplement Published in Journal of the American College of Nutrition Pooh-Poohs Salt Intake Recommendations
Center for Science in the Public Interest, OCTOBER 2, 2006
Straight to the Source

PRESS RELEASE

CONTACT: Center for Science in the Public Interest 202.332.9110

Nutrition Journal Hid Contributors’ Ties to Food Industry
Supplement Published in Journal of the American College of Nutrition Pooh-Poohs Salt Intake Recommendations

WASHINGTON – October 2 – A nutrition journal published by the American College of Nutrition failed to tell readers that a special supplement on salt intake was written and edited by consultants to the salt industry. The editors also failed to inform the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which included the abstracts from the supplement in MEDLINE. NLM rules state MEDLINE will not carry abstracts from sponsored supplements unless conflict-of-interest disclosure statements are prominently featured in the supplement.

This blatant failure by the Journal of the American College of Nutrition (JACN) to adhere to its own conflict of interest disclosure policies and federal guidelines was revealed in Integrity in Science Watch, a weekly alert from the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI).

The “guest editor” of a June supplement in JACN that focused on sodium and human health was Dr. Alexander G. Logan, a paid consultant to the salt industry. He also serves as scientific advisor to the sodium committee of the industry-backed International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI), which funded the supplement. The regular editors of JACN also allowed ILSI’s sodium committee, which includes Frito-Lay, Heinz, Kraft, and Proctor & Gamble, to name Logan to edit the special supplement. This fact was not revealed to readers.

No articles in the supplement, most of which downplayed the risk of excessive salt consumption, contained conflict of interest disclosures, even though several were written by past and current consultants to the Salt Institute, which is the industry’s lobbying arm. Moreover, JACN’s managing editor confirmed that supplement articles did not undergo normal peer review.

“The editors of the Journal of the American College of Nutrition should apologize to their readers, publish full conflict-of-interest disclosures and a disclaimer that none of the pseudo-science in the supplement underwent peer review,” said Merrill Goozner, director of the Integrity in Science project at CSPI.

In a letter to JACN editor John Cunningham of the University of Massachusetts, Integrity in Science Project Coordinator Corrie Mauldin wrote, “No respectable journal should be renting out its name to the highest bidder and let industry-funded groups hand pick ‘guest editors.’”

In a separate letter to the National Library of Medicine, CSPI asked that the articles from the supplement be withdrawn from MEDLINE for failing to adhere to the government’s rule requiring full conflict-of-interest disclosure. The rule states:

Supplements or other publications that indicate funding derived from private, for-profit organizations will not be routinely indexed for MEDLINE unless certain conditions are met. A disclosure statement should be included within the text of each article that might be cited for MEDLINE, preferably on the title page of the article, that indicates any financial relationship that each author has with the funding source and with any product discussed or implied in the text of the article.

I didn’t realize that today was Friday the 13th, until uh, just now. If I don’t have a deadline, I do become oblivious to the dates. But except for some nice morning fog, it was a sunny day. The leaves are turning colors and I drove down one of my favorite blocks in Queen Anne–a favorite in the fall because the whole street is lined with identical trees that turn identical spectacular colors. And they were turning. Sometimes the autumn colors just don’t look real.

The pumpkins are all out and this year I am going to make pumpkin pie. In fact, I’m going to Whole Foods tomorrow and buying the pie shells. And then I’m going to bake a spectacular pumpkin pie, with tofu instead of condensed milk. Don’t make a face, it actually tastes pretty good.