New data has been released related to a Cambridge University Press publication earlier this year, which found that 95% of the members on the expert committee for the 2020 U.S. Dietary Guidelines had conflicts of interest with the food or pharmaceutical industries. Details on these ties, with individual company names and links for each committee member, are now available.
The public can view a list of each committee member’s conflicts of interest in a spreadsheet and explore them in new network maps. Both are available here.
Conflict of Interests DGAC 2020:
The network of COIs between members of the DGAC 2020 and food, beverage and pharmaceutical corporations.
The April 2022 paper, in Public Health Nutrition (PHN), was the first ever to undertake a systematic search of all conflicts of interest (COI) on any dietary guidelines advisory committee globally. The previously reported findings from that paper are:
A total of more than 700 conflicts of interest (COI) were found on the 2020 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee.
One advisor alone, Sharon Donovan, accounted for 152 of these ties.
More than 50% of committee members were connected to 30 industry actors or more.
The corporations Kellogg, Abbott, Kraft, Mead Johnson, General Mills, and Dannon had the most frequent and durable connections to the committee.
Among trade or front groups, the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI) had the most extensive engagements, followed by the California Walnut Commission, Almond Board of California, and Beef Checkoff.
These potential conflicts of interest are not disclosed by USDA-HHS.
A recent paper, published in PNAS Nexus, found that “The DGA [Dietary Guidelines] is at odds with best practice in relation to transparency and management of potential biases relating to the DGA Advisory Committee.” Authors on this paper include three former Dietary Guidelines committee members.
“The money flowing from food and pharmaceutical interests into the guidelines is pervasive. Companies that fund researchers expect a return on that investment, and it’s reasonable to assume they’re getting it,” said Nina Teicholz, Chair of the Nutrition Coalition and one of the paper’s authors.
Speculating on how these conflicts might have affected the 2020 Guidelines was outside the scope of the PHN paper.
The lack of public disclosure of these COI was noted with concern by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. In a 2017 report, the Academy recommended disclosure of all “financial and nonfinancial biases and conflicts” of the committee nominees and asked the committee to “document how those conflicts of interest were managed” in the expert report. The USDA has not complied with these recommendations, according to the PNAS Nexus paper.
Today, disclosure of potential conflicts is the common practice in scientific journals, and in 2011, the Institute of Medicine issued a standard that “no more than a minority” of an expert group developing clinical practice guidelines should be allowed to have a COI.
The Dietary Guidelines play a pivotal in the health of the nation, by shaping the food and drink Americans eat. They directly influence food policy across federal agencies, state and local government, food manufacture, labelling, food programs within schools, hospitals, as well as recommendations by doctors and dieticians.