Author: Steve Milloy

By Steven Milloy
January 27, 2005, FoxNews.com

Harvard University researchers denied this week the charge that they omitted material information from a study they used to scare the public about soft drinks causing diabetes.
Study author Walter Willett told the Washington Post last August, “The message is: Anyone who cares about their health or the health of their family would not consume these beverages. Parents who care about their children’s health should not keep them at home.”

Among the criticisms of the study contained in my FOXNews.com column from last August, I noted that the researchers failed to mention in their write-up the directly relevant, but contradictory, results of an earlier study done by one of the members of the Harvard research team.

Intrigued by the researchers’ omission, Ian Murray and Sam Kazman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute wrote a letter to Journal of the American Medical Association, which was published this Jan. 26 in the journal.

Murray and Kazman wrote, “We were surprised that the [August study] did not discuss or cite the results of an apparently contradictory study [published in Diabetes Care in April 2003] that found that intake of total sugars and different types of sugars [sucrose, fructose, etc.] does not seem to raise the risk of type 2 diabetes (search). This was particularly striking since both articles share a co-author.”

As is its policy, JAMA provided the Harvard researchers the opportunity to respond to CEI’s letter. “[Because the Diabetes Care study] was not directly relevant to our study on soft drinks, we did not consider it an important reference,” responded the Harvard researchers. “The earlier study did not specifically address soda consumption,” they added.
They also wrote that “other studies have suggested” that the human body metabolizes sugar-sweetened beverages differently than sugar-sweetened foods.

With respect to the researchers’ latter point, it may or may not be true that sugar-sweetened beverages are metabolized significantly differently than sugar-sweetened solid foods — that remains to be studied — but that notion is irrelevant in this case because neither the JAMA nor Diabetes Care studies specifically examined the difference, if any, between soft drinks or solid food consumed on an empty stomach.

What is relevant is that the researchers failed to disclose key contradictory data amid their effort to sow panic about soda consumption. The Diabetes Care study did include significant data on soda consumption. The researchers knew it, have now (finally) acknowledged knowing it, and are now trying to downplay its significance by putting out a smokescreen that is not supported by data in either study in question.

The Harvard researchers tried to further distract JAMA (search ) readers by pointing to two other studies they seem to hope bolsters their soda scare: One study supposedly showed that a school-based educational program discouraging the consumption of sweetened soft drinks reduced obesity in children; another study supposedly showed that “consumption of sugars, mainly in the form of sugar-sweetened soft drinks, resulted in an increase in energy intake and weight in overweight men and women.”

First, neither study has anything to do with the focus of the JAMA and Diabetes Care studies — that is, whether sugar or soda consumption increases diabetes risk. So these references are just misdirection, pure and simple.

In the school study, while there appears to have been some reduction in obesity and being overweight among the kids who went through the intervention program, the data do not indicate that consuming fewer sugar-sweetened beverages was the reason. The kids in the intervention group consumed fewer carbonated soft drinks in total, but not fewer sugar sweetened drinks.

In the other study, it’s no wonder the already overweight men and women who drank lots of sugar-sweetened soft drinks gained even more weight than the control subjects in the study — the controls consumed fewer calories because they drank diet sodas instead of sugar-sweetened sodas!

The Harvard researchers have yet to make a credible case that soda consumption increases the risk of type 2 diabetes — but I am becoming quite convinced that they don’t really care about credibility in the first place.

Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRwatch.com, is adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, and is the author of Junk Science Judo: Self-defense Against Health Scares and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001).

By Steve Milloy
January 14, 2005, FoxNews.com

Eating a hamburger a day can increase your risk of colon cancer, according to a new study. Is it time to switch to chicken, fish or tofu ? Or is time to ask your congressman to check into whether the National Cancer Institute is spending its budget wisely? Continue reading No Beef Behind Red-Meat Cancer Scare

By Steven Milloy
August 27, 2004, FoxNews.com

If you doubt that our society’s lifestyle nannies are of dubious integrity, a new highly publicized study supposedly linking regular (non-diet) sodas with weight gain and diabetes should clear up any remaining skepticism.

“The message is: Anyone who cares about their health or the health of their family would not consume these beverages. Parents who care about their children’s health should not keep them at home,” study author Walter Willett of Harvard University told The Washington Post.

In a nutshell, Willett and his co-authors would have us regard Coca-Cola in the same way as they would have us regard Marlboro cigarettes — that is, no level of soda consumption is safe.

The study data collected from 51,603 women reportedly show that the 1,007 women who increased their consumption of regular soft drinks over a period of four years from less than one per week to one or more per day gained an average of 10.3 pounds. Among the approximately 16,600 women who consumed more than one soft drink per day, the researchers reported 83 percent more cases of type 2 diabetes.

The researchers would have us believe their results indicate that soda by itself causes weight gain and diabetes. But this conflicts with existing data and common sense. The National Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Medicine issued a report in 2002 titled “Dietary Reference Intakes on Macronutrients” that stated, “there is no clear and consistent association between increased intake of added sugars and [weight].” A single new study doesn’t change that fact.

Next, since the consumption of one 12-ounce soda per day (150 calories) for four years amounts to 219,000 calories — or a minimum of 62.5 pounds of added bodyweight at 3,500 calories per pound of body fat — it’s obvious that the women’s reported weight gain of 10.3 pounds is somewhat more complex than the simple-minded notion that the soda went straight to their hips and thighs. The real explanation for the reported weight gain more likely lies in the women’s genetics and their overall lifestyles.

Moreover, the study reports that women who consistently drank one or more regular soft drinks per day during those four years actually gained slightly less weight than women who consistently drank less than one soda per week during that same period.

The researchers’ contention that soda intake is linked with type 2 diabetes is also not borne out by their data or anyone else’s. The media-spotlighted claim of an 83 percent increase in diabetes among consumers of more than one soda per day — itself an inherently weak association from a statistical perspective — is misleading.

When the researchers statistically adjusted their results for bodyweight (a risk factor for diabetes) and for caloric intake (a proxy measure for consumption of sweetened foods other than soda), the 83 percent increase dropped to an even more statistically dubious (and soft-pedaled) 32 percent increase. That result is of the same magnitude as the study’s reported 21 percent increase in diabetes among consumers of more than one diet soft drink per day. Diet drinks, of course, do not contain any sugar at all.

I also discovered what I consider to be a flagrant and inexcusable omission on the part of the researchers. A recent study of 39,876 women entitled “A Prospective Study of Sugar Intake and Risk of Type 2 Diabetes in Women” (Diabetes Care, April 2003) concluded that sugar intake was not associated with the risk of type 2 diabetes and that “these data support the recent American Diabetes Association’s guideline that a moderate amount of sugar can be incorporated into a healthy diet.”

Certainly Willett and his co-authors could claim it was mere oversight on their part to not even mention this major conflicting study in the write-up of their study, but that assertion would be on thin ice given that Harvard Medical School’s JoAnn Manson was a co-author of both studies!

When I asked Manson how she reconciled the conflicting results, she reached for her media-training skills and tried deflecting me with congratulations for discovering the April 2003 study and for being the first media person to ask her that “great” question. She then told me that what really made the new study compelling was that it measured the health impact of a change in soft drink consumption. That still did not answer my question.

Her new study only presented data concerning a potential association between increasing soft drink consumption and weight gain. It presented no data on increasing soft drink consumption and diabetes. The omission of even a mention of her own extremely relevant and contradictory April 2003 study in the new study’s write-up — let alone an effort to reconcile the differences between the studies — is in my opinion an egregious one on the part of Manson and her co-authors.

Given that both studies were funded with taxpayer dollars (grants from the National Institutes of Health), I’d like to see an investigation by the federal Office of Research Integrity.

Researchers should be accountable for misusing taxpayer dollars to irresponsibly portray half-truths as scientific gospel, especially when such misconduct scares the public and harms legitimate businesses.

Steven Milloy publishes JunKScience.com.

By Steve Milloy
June 25, 2004, FoxNews.com

Let’s “grab a Coke and a smile” this week as Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (search) demanded proof that vending machines lead to childhood obesity before permitting the state to restrict the machines in schools.

Amid the hysteria about overweight adolescents, the Arkansas Board of Education is looking for ways to reduce children’s calorie intake, including targeting school vending machines.
“There are no studies that I know that clearly say if a kid has access to a soda machine that he’s going to be fatter than one who doesn’t have access,” Huckabee said, according to an Associate Press report.

State officials who support restricting vending machines allege that Huckabee is being ingenuous.

“I think it’s really pretty much a basic that candy bars and sugar colas are not conducive to good health,” said state representative Jay Bradford, D-White Hall, to the AP. “And I don’t think it takes a lot of research to realize that adds great amount of weight to certain individuals,” added Bradford.

So which makes more sense — Gov. Huckabee’s call for proof of harm, or Rep. Bradford’s reliance on “conventional wisdom?”

Consider the results of a survey conducted by the National Family Opinion WorldGroup Share of Intake Panel (search) (NFO SIP), as reported by Dr. Michael Ginevan in the April 2004 issue of The Journal of Pediatrics.

The NFO SIP surveys 12,000 persons per year. Participants keep two-week diaries of all beverages consumed, excluding tap water, and the location of where these were consumed.

In a survey conducted during the 2001-2002 school year, a demographically balanced sample of 2,716 students ages 12 to 18 years maintained beverage consumption diaries from September through May. The study reported that the average per capita consumption of non-diet carbonated soft drinks from school vending machines was 2.5 ounces per week — about 31 calories per week. Assuming for the sake of argument that those 31 calories were never burned as energy and were automatically turned into fat, it would take more than two years of such consumption at that rate to produce one pound of fat.

Given that children generally have rapid metabolisms (search) and are constantly growing and developing, the notion that we should worry about children consuming 31 calories per week from school vending machines seems to be absurd. The NFO SIP survey reported that only 20 percent of students actually drank beverages from vending machines. Only 9 percent drank non-diet beverages. Among the 20 percent who drank vending machine beverages, the average consumption was 12.5 ounces per week — about one can or 150 calories per week for consumers of non-diet beverages. One can of soda per week isn’t going to cause weight or health problems even among the most minimally active healthy children.

The NFO SIP survey was conducted with an unrestricted grant from the National Soft Drink Association (search), so some will undoubtedly view these results with some degree of skepticism.
That doesn’t really matter, though.

The ultimate validity of the NFO SIP survey isn’t the issue — more research versus factually unsupported demonization of school vending machines is. Vending machines in schools provide benefits to businesses and schools (jobs and revenue) and to students (on-campus convenience and a variety of beverages, including juices and juice drinks, milk-based drinks, water, diet and regular soft drinks, and sports drinks). The NFO SIP survey seems to indicate that school vending machines do not pose a threat to children’s health.

If there is evidence to the contrary, let’s see it and debate it before jumping to rash and truly harmful conclusions.

Steven Milloy is the publisher of JunkScience.com, an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and the author of Junk Science Judo: Self-Defense Against Health Scares and Scams (Cato Institute, 2001).