Candice Choi of the Associated Press has come out with another terrific piece on industry-funded research; this time on the tricky (and often biased) science behind breakfast and weight loss.
Highlights:
- “Cereal makers have happily encouraged the belief that eating breakfast can help keep us thin and bring other benefits, partly by paying for studies that seem to support the idea.”
- “So, does that mean breakfast is bad for you? Not that either. What it does show is how difficult it can be to sort the hype from reliable dietary advice when studies are funded by the makers of Froot Loops, nutrition science is often inconclusive, and gray areas can be spun for marketing.”
- “To investigate the long-held idea that breakfast can prevent weight gain, researchers in 2013 reviewed dozens of studies examining the premise. Their conclusion: Popular opinion outweighed the scientific evidence.”
- “When citing past studies, scientists also tended to mischaracterize inconclusive results in favor of breakfast. Brown chalked that up to “white hat” bias, since people are constantly told breakfast is “the most important meal of the day.”
- “Disclosures about who paid for the research became the norm only in recent years, so it’s unclear how much of the literature on breakfast and weight from past decades was funded by breakfast food makers. The 1992 study featured on Special K boxes, for example, doesn’t list a funding source. Co-author David Schlundt told the AP that Kellogg paid for it.”
- “Even when funding is disclosed, people may not realize that not all studies are that meaningful. “The paper is not good, not good = There are major structural problems with it that cannot be fixed,” Carol O’Neil, a professor at Louisiana State University, wrote to her co-author in 2011 about a Kellogg-funded study, according to emails obtained through a records request.”
- “O’Neil and her co-author wanted to withdraw the paper from submission, but felt they couldn’t because Kellogg expected it to be published. When the paper kept coming back with notes, O’Neil said she didn’t see a way around the problems. “But let me look at the comments again and see if there is some sort of clever verbiage we can present,” she wrote.”
- “Those studies can help shape policy. In its 2010 guidelines, the U.S. government cited breakfast as a way to manage weight. Of the 15 studies involving children mentioned to support the recommendation, five listed funding from General Mills or Kellogg, with three looking specifically at cereal. With its 2015 update, though, the government decided to look instead at “the combination of what you eat and drink over time,” according to the Health and Human Services Department. As a result, it no longer recommends breakfast for weight loss.”
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