New Report Examines Big Food’s Ties to Registered Dietitians

When she talks about nutri­tion pro­fes­sion­als, she doesn’t mean me. I have a PhD (in mol­e­c­u­lar biol­ogy, although long lapsed) and a master’s in Public Health Nutrition. She means AND mem­bers. AND rep­re­sents more than 70,000 indi­vid­u­als who mostly hold cre­den­tials as Registered Dietitians (RDs).

To qual­ify, they had to com­plete a bachelor’s degree that included a spec­i­fied set of courses and a 6-month clin­i­cal intern­ship. I once tried to get cre­den­tialed as an RD after I com­pleted a qual­i­fy­ing intern­ship but I had never had a prac­ti­cal course in food ser­vice man­age­ment. That lack was a deal breaker.

Never mind. Here’s what Simon’s report is about:

And here are a small selec­tion of her obser­va­tions and conclusions:

• AND col­lected $1.85 mil­lion in spon­sor­ship funds in 2011, a rel­a­tively small per­cent­age of its $34 mil­lion income.
• Companies such as Coca-Cola, Kraft, Nestlé, and PepsiCo offer approved con­tin­u­ing edu­ca­tion courses to AND members.
• Two of the mes­sages con­veyed by one of Coca-Cola’s courses: sugar is not harm­ful to chil­dren, and fed­eral nutri­tion stan­dards for school meals are too restrictive.
• More than 20% of speak­ers at AND’s annual meet­ing have finan­cial ties to Big Food com­pa­nies, although most were not disclosed.
• A sur­vey found 80% of mem­bers to believe that spon­sor­ship implies an AND endorse­ment of the sponsor’s products.
• A major­ity of AND mem­bers believe that three cur­rent spon­sors are unac­cept­able: Coca-Cola, Mars, and PepsiCo.

If you want to see how spon­sor­ship plays out in prac­tice, take a look at her pho­tographs of the exhibit hall at the 2012 AND annual meet­ing. She also pro­vides pho­tos taken else­where at the meet­ing. And here’s the New York Times’ take on it.

As a trade asso­ci­a­tion for Registered Dietitians, AND—as I dis­cussed in Food Politics—has as its pri­mary goal to posi­tion RDs as the lead­ing source of nutri­tion infor­ma­tion for patients, clients, and the public.

As you might imag­ine, I’ve always had a bit of trou­ble with that goal.

For one thing, nutri­tion­ists with master’s and doc­toral degrees are likely to know more than RDs about nutri­tion sci­ence and to think more crit­i­cally about it.

For another, that self-interested goal cre­ates an image prob­lem. RDs might be accepted as more cred­i­ble sources if their pri­mary goal was to improve the nutri­tional health of the American people.

Their advice also would be more cred­i­ble if AND were not so heav­ily linked to food and bev­er­age cor­po­ra­tions, espe­cially those whose prod­ucts con­tribute to poor health.

Let’s hope this new report gets AND mem­bers talk­ing about how to change some cur­rent AND policies.

Marion Nestle

Marion Nestle is Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health (the depart­ment she chaired from 1988-2003) and Professor of Sociology at New York University.