Friday Joy: Not Giving the Academy of Nutrition & Dietetics a Dime Since 2020

Breaking off a toxic relationship with your professional organization is a form of self-care.

I have to admit: I'm kind of cheating here. This isn't my usual Friday Joy post, meditating on something in my life that is keeping me grounded and at peace. This is more a Friday Malicious Glee post, or a Friday OMFG Have You Seen This Trainwreck? post. It's okay. I never claimed to be a saint, and I think this is something we should all be talking about. (Hellooooo #rdsofinstagram…you wanna get in on this?)

This week the British journal Public Health Nutrition published an open-access article¹ that lays out the close and continued ties between ultra-processed food, beverage, pesticide, and pharmaceutical corporations and the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND or "the Academy"), the world's largest organization of dietitians and other nutrition professionals. The Academy is considered an authority in food policy-making, and is influential in the development of dietary guidelines in the US.

The influence of big food companies on AND has been documented and criticized before, because it isn't difficult to see the problem with, for example, Coke's "Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness" sponsoring continuing education credits for dietitians. Who wouldn’t wonder about the motivations behind this truly bizarre article on pigs—from a trip sponsored by the National Pork Board, of course!—from the AND's "Sustainability Series"? The rest of the articles in the Sustainability Series are about why GMOs are great.² WHAT IS EVEN HAPPENING.

And let's not forget that in 2015, the first food product to receive a "Kids Eat Right" label from the Academy was supposed to be Kraft Singles —until the ensuing controversy scrapped that plan. The list goes on.³

(A pause here to note that there is nothing wrong with kids eating Kraft Singles, or any ultra-processed food. What is wrong is food companies being able to use their money and power to gain legitimacy and an aura of healthfulness for their products from an organization that is considered a nutrition authority.)

But the revelations in this most recent paper shocked even Marion Nestle, who has written about AND's problematic ties to food companies for years, and had seemed pretty immune to how willingly the organization's leadership will give up its credibility for that sweet sweet corporate cash. The two biggest shockers for her:

The Academy has invested funds in food and beverage companies that manufacture ultra-processed food, such as PepsiCo, Nestlé and J.M. Smucker’s Company, as well as pharmaceutical companies like Abbott and Pfizer. 

So dietitians are taught that we should be shaming people for drinking soda and eating candy, while the Academy simultaneously profits from the companies making those products?

The second shocker is the extensive list of AND's corporate donors in 2011 and 2013-2017. In that time, they received more than $15 million from corporate and organizational sponsors.

If you read my essay on milk in schools, it won't surprise you to know that the top contributor was the National Dairy Council, which donated $1,496,912. Conagra Inc. and Abbott Nutrition also donated over a million dollars in that time.

Is School Milk Dietary Racism?

The article is based in part on a trove of internal documents and emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act and the Georgia Open Records Act, which clearly demonstrate that while publicly, AND leadership was committed to transparency around the organization's relationships with food, beverage, and pharmaceutical companies, privately they were very concerned about keeping those entities happy.

As a dietitian, I was disturbed by the discussion of the Academy's position paper on vegetarian and vegan diets, which was retracted and later republished, with references to specific animal products removed.⁴ Position papers are meant to be evidence-based resources on complex topics, providing nutrition professionals with scientific guidance, not industry-influenced advice. Were the changes due to corporate influence? Perhaps not, but this 2017 email from AND's CEO indicates some industry groups don’t want to see dietary guidance that might cut into corporate food profits:

Heard an earful yesterday on the phone from Jean as President of Dairy (NDC) about our Vegetarian position paper (six months later?) that has a line in it about dairy and meat. Nothing in the paper says don’t eat dairy or meat or be a vegetarian or vegan but she was saying that Dairy is helping us with funding to elevate the Academy’s science and evidence and it’s so disappointing. I resented the correlation of the sponsorship.

This email was sent after the updated paper was published, so I don't think it had direct influence over the position paper, but it is certainly evidence for how corporate donors viewed their relationship with the Academy (“Well, we are helping you with funding…”), and utilized their direct access to leadership to voice their concerns.

The other rather depressing point from the article is how much of the corporate-donated money is funneled into the pockets of students and early-career professionals, establishing a relationship that on paper is completely ethical, but due to human nature, feels like buying their loyalty.

[O]ur findings suggest that ANDF [AND's nonprofit arm] is a means for corporations to reach out to young students and professionals. From 2009 to 2015, corporate contributions to the Foundation were US$15 million. Of these funds, more than US$6 million were transferred to AND members through the distribution of awards, scholarships, research grants, fellowships and other ANDF-led programmes.

I don't know about you, but if someone gave me a large chunk of money with no strings attached, I would have a hard time being publicly critical of them.

You can read the Academy's official response to the matter, which mainly focuses on the lack of "scientific rigor" in the article.

But what's my joy in all this? It is that in June 2020, my membership to AND was up for renewal and I said no thanks. I had been required to keep it up through my schooling and the dietetic internship, but at that point, I had my credential and a job that didn't require me to be a member. I was disgusted by the Academy's unwillingness to say anything regarding racial justice, after years of being frustrated with how little the organization reflected my values.⁵

So I said to myself, "You know what? I'm going to keep my money and see if they do anything to win me back. If they do, I'll rejoin." In the meantime, I took every DEI survey they sent out, and was even chosen for a small focus group conducted by an outside organization for the Academy, to collect opinions on what they needed to change. Somewhere in their files are my exact thoughts on what they could be doing to make the field more diverse, inclusive, equitable, and relevant for a future in which white people will no longer be the majority.

More than two years later, not a thing has changed. 

AND is like that disappointing person you're dating who you keep hoping will change, and quietly, you tell yourself, "Okay, if they can just do XY and Z, we will stay together," and they just can't do it. They are incapable of doing it. And it feels so good when you finally cut ties.

So that's my joy: watching my ex in the news, getting in trouble for all that stuff I knew they were doing when we were together. Yes, it's petty, but you know how breakups are.

---

What I’m Into This Week

Reading

Shmutz by Felicia Berliner. Oh my. This novel about a young Hasidic Jewish woman in Brooklyn who becomes fascinated by online pornography rides (pun intended) the line between deeply innocent and real dirty. Raizl is an incredibly smart 18-year-old who is given a laptop when she enrolls in college, but when she secretly gets online, she develops some habits she can't break—which she fears will get in the way of her path to marriage. I love being inside the narrator's sweet, curious, and prurient head, and the book is worth it just for all the dirty words in Yiddish: tuchus, shmundie, shtup, loch…!

jewishbookcouncil

A post shared by Jewish Book Council (@jewishbookcouncil)

Relying On

Bear Focus Timer app. This is just one of the many apps for the Pomodoro Technique, a productivity practice where you set a timer for 25 minutes and work without stopping until the timer goes off. You take a five-minute break and then repeat. After four work sessions, you get a longer, 20-minute break. My ability to focus while working from home was slowly eroded over the course of the pandemic, so I downloaded this in desperation a few months ago—and it is really working for me. I put on some music through my Bluetooth speaker, start the timer, and write write write until time is up and the music shuts off. The sudden silence also helps me to actually take time to stand up and move during breaks, rather than just scrolling through social media for five minutes. The timer is customizable, easy to use, and cute, too.

Thinking About

Their America Is Vanishing. Like Trump, They Insist They Were Cheated by Michael H. Keller and David D. Kirkpatrick. This article really spoke to me, because the phenomenon described—rapidly changing racial and cultural demographics in once-majority-white towns where economic opportunity for white residents has declined—is what happened in my hometown, a suburb of L.A., and the conflict peaked when I was in high school. An influx of immigrants from Asia, particularly China and Taiwan, moved in, and some of the older white residents of the town felt deeply threatened, meeting in diners to talk about the "problem" of Taiwanese-owned wedding shops along the main street, which they claimed were fronts for prostitution. I am grateful this happened decades before "Stop the Steal," Infowars, and the many other threats to democracy that are now at our doorstep.

This is a good time to remind you: if you are in the U.S., please make your plan to vote in November!!

1. Here’s the press release of the article, if you want the highlights.

2. Some side tea about the author of the GMO article, Neva Cochran: Coke is Running for President of the National Academy of Nutrition & Dietetics. And side note that I am against GMOs, not for reasons of health, but because they undermine food sovereignty. An essay for another time!

3. This 2013 report comprehensively covers a lot of the problematic sponsorships with food and beverage corporations, which were much more public at that point. Its release sparked a brief pushback from dietitians, and the creation of a group called Dietitians for Professional Integrity, but the group has not been active since 2018.

4. The vegetarian position paper is no longer on the Academy’s site, but I found archived copies of the original version and the amended version. Who wants to do a Highlights Magazine-style Can You Spot the Differences?

5. I am, however, a proud member of the American Public Health Association, which has a Food and Nutrition section.