By Elizabeth M. Whelan, Sc.D., M.P.H.
Posted: Thursday, October 1, 1992
LETTER
Publication Date: October 1, 1992
Editor's note: This open letter to Dr. Michael Jacobson, Executive Director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, informs him of the reasons why, despite dozens of mail appeals, we are not joining his organization.
August 14, 1992
Dr. Michael F. Jacobson, Executive Director
Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI)
1875 Connecticut Avenue, N.W. #300
Washington, D.C. 20009
Dear Dr. Jacobson:
Re: Your recent mail appeals encouraging me to join CSPI
In the last four months members of ACSH and I have received several mail appeals from you and Stephen B. Schmidt, editor of Nutrition Action Healthletter, encouraging us to join CSPI and become subscribers to your publications.
Because I am intensely interested in issues related to nutrition and preventive medicine, I always give your solicitations particular attention. After much consideration, however, I have decided not to join CSPI, and I wanted to share with you my reasons for this decision:
1. You state that the purpose of Nutrition Action is to "inform." May I respectfully suggest, however, that the three primary purposes of your publication are: a) to raise anxieties about the safety and healthfulness of the American diet; b) to offer false assurances about the route to long life and good health; and c) to raise funds to support CSPI.
Regarding the first point, you consistently claim that diet is an underlying cause of chronic disease in the United States. The science of epidemiology however, indicates that this is not necessarily true. Concerning the second purpose, your publications carry the tried and untrue "fountain of youth appeal" that has been around for generations. In claiming to help us avoid "life destroying illness" through diet, you are promising more than you can deliver.
2. You and your colleagues think in terms of dichotomies — good foods and bad foods; the 10 "best" foods and the 10 "worst" foods (as documented in your undated mailing about "foods you should never eat"). I believe such dichotomies are misleading and unrealistic. There are no good or bad foods, only good or bad diets.
I am puzzled as to why you would include pie or anything else on your list of "bad" foods. If consumed in moderation by a healthy, active American of reasonable weight, I think pie and the other foods you condemn can be considered "good" foods. As a matter of fact, my 15-year-old daughter at this very moment is enjoying one of your "forbidden foods," Haagen Daz ice cream — and I do not feel a twinge of guilt, only envy that she can tolerate the calories without gaining weight.
3. Speaking of pies and other "nasty" foods, I am puzzled as to why you target certain brand names for your nutritional hit list. Sure, Mrs. Smith's Old Fashioned Apple Pies have a substantial portion of their calories in fat, but that is the nature of pies. Consulting Karen J. Bellerson's The Complete & Up-to-Date Fat Book, I confirmed that all commercial frozen pies have a relatively high fat content.
4. You promise your readers that you will "tell them what they need to know." Rather, it appears to me that you tell them only the news that you deem fit (and fat free) to print. For example, you make it appear that scientists have reached a consensus that high fat diets cause cancer, when indeed this area of epidemiological research is in its infancy. The only proven link of diet and cancer is one of obesity and certain malignancies, including uterine cancer.
5. I was most intrigued by your claim that, "As a nation it is within our grasp to cut the rate of diet-related disease by at least 50 percent before the year 2000." Wow! Have you shared this discovery with the National Institutes of Health? When will your peer-reviewed articles detailing this breakthrough be published?
I tried to make sense of your 50 percent reduction claim using heart disease as an example. We can think of causation in a pie chart (not Mrs. Smith's).
Our pie chart shows that one-third of preventable heart disease is attributable to each of three causes: cigarette smoking; elevated blood cholesterol; and high blood pressure. Presumably your dietary intervention plan would focus not on cigarette smoking, but on hypertension and high serum cholesterol. Dr. Jacobson, you should realize that the primary effective means of reducing the health threats for most persons in these two risk groups is not through dietary manipulation — but by pharmaceutical intervention.
If you were to take all persons with high blood pressure and high blood cholesterol and remove all the fat, cholesterol and salt from their diets, it is unrealistic to expect that you would even approach your goal of "cutting the rate of dietary-related disease" by 50 percent.
Thus, in promising longer life and good health and virtual freedom from chronic disease — by means of dietary changes — you are "transmogrifying" (a word you taught me eight years ago when you accused me in your publication Voodoo Science of transmogrifying scientific data to please ACSH supporters) the existing data to meet your funding needs.
6. I am astonished that a person with a doctoral degree from MIT in microbiology could still believe that trace human exposures to laboratory animal carcinogens pose a health threat. Yet in one of your mailings describing "Food We Should Never Eat," you tell us that there are "still artificial sweeteners on the market that cause cancer." I must tell you that the recent scientific literature dismisses the rodent-to-man extrapolation as predictive of human cancer risk. Regarding saccharin, ACSH would be delighted to share with you our summaries of the toxicological and epidemiological literature on this sweetener — and the fact that it poses no hazard to human health. You must have missed a recent paper by Dr. Sam Cohen of the University of Nebraska Medical Center. The paper reports that saccharin, the long popular but much maligned artificial sweetener that was declared a "cancer-causing agent" by the FDA more than a decade ago, is not a "real" carcinogen, because it only causes cancer in rats, not other animals. In other words, it was not even possible to extrapolate from one rodent species to another, no less to humans.
We stand by to assist you in correcting this error when you do another printing of your appeal.
7. While we are correcting errors and omissions, we have a few more to add to our growing list. You state in your promotional material for chemical cuisine that BHA is a very dangerous food additive. You do not say why, but I think you have rodents on the brain again. Dr. Jacobson, you should be aware that BHA and other antioxidants are now credited with protecting us from stomach cancer. (In conjunction with the introduction of widespread refrigeration, the use of preservatives and antioxidants like BHA and BHT are now believed to be responsible for our country's low and rapidly declining rate of stomach cancer.)
8. In revising your material, we hope that in the future you will abandon your tendency to tell only part of the story. For example, in your promotional literature for Nutrition Action you refer to health dangers from poultry. Yes, indeed, there are microbiological threats associated with improper handling, cooking and storage of chicken. Happily there is a wonderful, inexpensive, effective solution to this problem: food irradiation. Why did you not tell us about that solution? Indeed, why are you opposing this innovation, and claimingit is a health hazard when, indeed, it provides a health benefit?
9. I believe your publications would benefit considerably from a healthy helping of common sense and reality, which are now missing from your appeals. For example, in another mailing regarding "10 Foods You Should Never Eat," you complain that Prego "made with mushroom" tomato sauce has only three mushrooms in a jar. So what? Do you really think that people think they are getting their daily allowance of mushrooms or any other vegetable from spaghetti sauce?
Even more basic, do you ever consider the reality that people eat for reasons beyond nutrition? Everything we eat does not need to be bursting with nutrients. Once we have met our nutritional requirements, there is room for foods that just taste good. Reading your material leaves one with the unpleasant aftertaste of "food as medicine" rather than "food to be enjoyed."
10. I am not taking you up on your special offer for the "chemical cuisine" because, unlike you, I am not "chemophobic." Your chart seems to make the assumptions that: a) chemicals are bad; b) if you can't pronounce it, it is particularly evil; and c) "natural" is better. Perhaps, to keep things in perspective, the Center for Science in the Public Interest would also like to offer the ACSH Holiday Menu which details the toxins and animal carcinogens in natural foods. But don't panic. We explain in the end that the food is really very safe. Bulk orders are available from ACSH at discount rates.
In summary, I am not joining the Center for Science in the Public Interest because your appeals convince me that your efforts are based on premises that are unfounded, namely that:
* government agencies have failed to protect us from dangers in our food supply.
* food corporations are out to kill us. (I guess by not joining I will never get the answer to the burning question you raised: "What secrets do the food companies want to keep from you?")
* CSPI is the answer to protect us from evil big business and incompetent government.
That's all for now, Dr. Jacobson. Should you take my advice and shape up your organization to bring your statements closer to peer-reviewed mainstream science, I will be pleased to reconsider my decision about joining CSPI.
Sincerely,
Elizabeth M. Whelan, Sc.D., M.P.H.
President
(From Priorities Vol. 4, No. 4, 1992)
