It is becoming clearer that the Academy
of Nutrition and Dietetics (AND) is increasingly complicit in the
epidemic in the United States of diabetes and obesity.
With about 70 million people in the
United States either with or undiagnosed with type 2 diabetes, it is
undeniable that they have great influence in the dietary guidelines
published every five years by the Department of Agriculture and the
Department of Health and Human Services.
The number of times staff and officers of AND
have been discovered promoting junk food is surprising.
Recently, the AND organization has
stopped showing who they receive funds from on their website. They
list a few sponsors, but leave most off the list. Now they want us
to believe they are not shills for Big Food.
The other problem AND has created is a
problem for diabetes education when a person has two titles –
Certified Diabetes Educator (CDE) and Registered Dietitian (RD).
When they are supposed to be teaching diabetes education, the RD is
instead instructed to teach nutrition as the education and then they
attempt to double bill insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid for both.
All dietitian advice is brought to you
by their sponsors and has been for a very long time. Now that it’s
becoming more blatant, maybe the public will finally figure out that
being a dietitian is akin to being a corporate big food
representative. During the months of February and March, 2015, AND
started promoting Kraft Singles, the
individually wrapped slices of “cheese product” popular in school
lunches. This is the first product to boast the AND’s new “Kids
Eat Right” label. Kraft Singles are not cheese, but a combination
of chemicals that represents fake cheese.
Then the Associated Press recently
broke a story showing how dietitians were promoting
small cans of Coca-Cola as a snack. Ben
Sheidler, a Coca-Cola spokesman, compared the February, 2015, posts to
product placement deals a company might have with TV shows. "We
have a network of dietitians we work with," said Sheidler, who
declined to say how much the company pays experts. "Every big
brand works with bloggers or has paid talent."
With the current
atmosphere within AND, I don't see much success
coming from a group called Dietitians for Professional Integrity.
The group has called for sharper lines to be drawn between dietitians
and companies. Andy Bellatti, one of its founders, said companies
court dietitians because they help validate corporate messages. And
without corporate money, AND will continue to function as it will
have complete control in the messages it allows and the dissenting
group will be banned from AND.
Other companies including Kellogg and
General Mills have used strategies like providing continuing
education classes for dietitians, funding studies that burnish the
nutritional images of their products and offering newsletters for
health experts. PepsiCo Inc. has also worked with dietitians who
suggest its Frito-Lay and Tostito chips in local TV segments on
healthy eating. Others use nutrition experts in sponsored content,
the American Pistachio Growers has quoted a dietitian for the New
England Patriots in a piece on healthy snacks and recipes and Nestle
has quoted its own executive in a post about infant nutrition.
If you are looking for safe nutrition
advice, do not look to the members of AND or the Academy for safe
nutritional information. They are a tool of big food and have been
for many years, even before the name change. Maybe they are becoming
too self-confident and will continue to throw any good reputation
they may have out the window.
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