Unsavory Truth by Marion Nestle

Author:Marion Nestle
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2018-10-29T16:00:00+00:00

Nonfinancial Bias: A Non–Conflict of Interest

I wish that Goldberg had included an additional statement in his COI Bingo card, the one I hear most frequently in connection with funding from the food industry: “Nonfinancial interests are just as biasing.” The most forceful exposition of this rationale appears in a commentary by M. B. Cope and David Allison. Both disclose multiple financial connections to food companies but argue that intellectual and ideological beliefs and the desire for career advancement are even more biasing than funding source. Personal beliefs, they say, “fueled by feelings of righteous zeal, indignation toward certain aspects of industry or other factors” constitute what they call “white hat bias,” a term they define as “the distortion of information in the service of righteous ends.”35

Sandro Galea, dean of the school of public health at Boston University, describes a typology of nonfinancial conflicts that includes career goals and ideological beliefs but also “network-based” biases resulting from commitments to particular methods of investigation. He cites nutritional epidemiology as an example. Scientists in this field, he says, “can advance their career through publishing articles that promote the interests of nutritional epidemiology… with researchers having an incentive to design, conduct, and publish work that reinforces what is network normative and being less likely to publish work that does not do so.”36

The Stanford statistician John Ioannidis charges that nonfinancial interests raise concerns about scientific integrity and that scientists’ beliefs in particular theories or in their own research results—and their need for grants or career advancement—bias their research agendas.37 With respect to nutrition research, Ioannidis goes even further. Observational research in nutrition, he says, is so subject to ideological biases that nutrition scientists who write about such matters ought to be disclosing their beliefs in the benefits of “a vegan diet, the Atkins diet, a gluten-free diet, a high animal protein diet, specific brands of supplements, and so forth.”38 In other words, Ioannidis wants dietary disclosures in addition to financial disclosures. Here is mine. As anyone who knows me can tell you, I love food, am an omnivore, and practice what I preach: a largely but not exclusively plant-based diet that occasionally includes junk foods and often includes sweets—in moderation, of course.

Perhaps in response to such pressures, Nature journals announced that beginning in February 2018, they would expect authors to disclose nonfinancial as well as financial competing interests. These, it said, could include “a range of personal and/or professional relationships with organizations and individuals, including membership of governmental, non-governmental, advocacy or lobbying organizations, or serving as an expert witness.” Their rationale for this requirement? “Transparent disclosures that allow readers to form their own conclusions about the published work are the best way to maintain public trust.”39 I occasionally do peer reviews for Public Health Nutrition. This journal now asks its peer reviewers to disclose nonfinancial as well as financial interests, which it specifies as personal relationships, academic competition, political, ideological, religious, or scientific preconceptions, and organizational or institutional affiliations.

These kinds of nonfinancial disclosures make no sense to me.

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