The Moral Hazard of Demonizing the Food Industry

The global food industry is huge – so big that people have a hard time putting firm numbers on it. But roughly, it’s worth about ten trillion dollars. It’s also very diverse. The top ten multinational food and beverage companies add up to only half a trillion dollars of those sales. Nonetheless in public health literature, advocates write a great deal that depicts this industry as a monolith standing in firm opposition to important public health goals. We have to ask, though, does this impulse for demonizing the food industry serve public health well?

Or instead, should we insist upon participants in the food industry living up to a responsibility for nourishing people and promoting good health?

Two New Papers: Don’t Trust the Food Industry

The gist of two new papers in this vein is quite simple. Do not accept what the food industry says about the business of producing and promoting food.

The first of these papers appears in PLOS Medicine. Kathrin Lauber and colleagues analyze business input into the formulation of restrictions on advertising unhealthy foods on London transport systems. They found that companies in food, food service, and advertising businesses opposed these regulations. But “they offered little evidence in support of their own claims.” The authors concluded that policy makers should be skeptical of arguments that these policies won’t work or will have unintended negative consequences.

The second paper appears in BMJ Global Health, also by Lauber and colleagues. It is an analysis of food industry input into global public health policy. Her conclusion is quite simple:

“Ultra-processed food industry respondents made far-reaching claims which were rarely supported by high-quality, independent evidence. This indicates that there may be few, if any, benefits from consulting actors with such a clear conflict of interest.”

In other words, don’t listen to those people.

The Bias to Deny One’s Own Biases

Psychologist Adam Grant offers a word of caution:

“People generally assume that they are less biased than others. This is my favorite bias. ‘I am not biased. Everybody else is biased. I am objective. I see things with perfect neutrality.’

“The higher your intelligence, the more likely you are to fall victim to that bias.”

He has a point. Given the sorry record of public health efforts to reverse trends of rising obesity, a little humility would be wise. We spent decades fighting high fat foods as a prime cause of obesity. Low-fat foods proliferated. Obesity rates climbed. We’ve now spent two decades telling folks to cut back on sugar. Sugar consumption has fallen, but obesity prevalence continues to rise.

Now Lauber writes with certitude about “unequivocal“ evidence that advertising for foods high in fat, sugar, and salt harms children and contributes to obesity.

The Moral Hazard of Certitude

Brandishing such certitude and demonizing the food industry could be hazardous. Because the truth is that we do not yet know what it will take to reverse rising obesity trends. Everyone in this discussion has a bias. The food industry has a bias to sell more food. Health advocates have the bias conferred by a righteous cause. It is the bias of believing oneself to be perfectly objective and correct.

Everyone in this debate needs to grow more curious. The food industry needs to get curious about ways to grow their businesses without overfeeding people. Food policy advocates need to get curious about alternatives to the very tired good food versus bad food dichotomy.

Chasing demons is a waste of time.

Click here and here for the papers by Lauber et al. For more on the bias of believing oneself to be unbiased, click here and here.

Head of Demon with Mountains, painting by Mikhail Vrubel / WikiArt

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September 5, 2021