Tufts’ Food Compass…It’s Worse Than You Thought

Written by Nina Teicholz on February 10, 2023. Posted in Current News

A new food rating system that gave high marks to Lucky Charms and Cocoa Puffs while belittling eggs and meat came under fire recently

Fox News taking it to task in several segments (one with me), and Joe Rogan posting that the rankings were “complete, undeniable, indefensible bullshit.”

This sounds harsh, and the lead author, from Tufts University, pushed back, saying his system—called the “Food Compass”—was actually “more holistic” than most such rubrics and had been misrepresented.

So I took another look, and here’s what I found: the Food Compass is even worse than I’d thought. And Tufts is funded by quite a few of the same companies whose ultra-processed foods are awarded top rankings.

I made some new charts from the data. For instance:

First, some history: The Tufts Food Compass, with its 8,032 food items was published by Nature Food in October 2021 and did not get much attention until a group of scholars wrote a critique several months later, complete with a “pyramid” chart that would go viral. (The paper came out as a pre-print and could not find a publisher for nearly a year, but perhaps due to all the recent publicity, it was finally published last week in the Journal of Nutrition.)

A Substack I wrote on the pre-print last July was read by some 70,000 people and was subsequently picked up by start-up maven Justin Mares, who wrote a guest blog on the subject for Piratewires.com. Soon, Fox News called.

Some of the ensuing coverage was incorrect. The chart was not, in fact, the government’s “new food pyramid.” Yes, the study had been funded in part by the National Institutes of Health, but its findings had not been adopted as national policy.

Still, the lead author, Dariush Mozaffarian, Dean of the Tufts’ Friedman School of Nutrition & Policy (currently on leave to do policy work full-time), is clearly close to government. In 2018, he helped set up a “Food As Medicine” group on Capitol Hill led by Congressman Jim McGovern, and the two have since collaborated on Hill events.

Mozaffarian was the lead witness to testify at a 2021 hearing on nutrition led by Cory Booker in the Senate, and he was touted as the mastermind behind the landmark White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition & Health last Fall, which yielded $8 billion in private and public investments in the food space.

Former Senators, USDA Secretaries and other high-level government officials populate multiple task forces Mozaffarian has co-chaired. (In addition, he appears to have been one of the only nutrition scientists to speak at Davos last month and was a co-chair, along with the CEOs of Unilever and PepsiCo, of a 2020 WEF food system summit.) 1

Given Mozaffarian’s scope of influence, it’s worth scrutinizing his work on the Food Compass—especially since Tufts in a press release makes clear its full ambition for this product, to be used for consumer choices, industry reformulations, investor decisions, government policies, programs, and among other things, “marketing to children.”

Further, Mozaffarian argues in this paper that the “time is ripe” for the Food Compass to be used for steering ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) investments in the food sector as a “lever” to “align financial interests with benefits for society and the planet.” 2

I was told that the Food Compass was also seriously considered for promotion by the Rockefeller Foundation, which in the past, has funded many of  Mozaffarian’s  research and policy efforts.

It remains mystifying how the Food Compass, which doesn’t even pass the sniff test for the average person, has been wholly accepted by Mozaffarian’s nutrition colleagues. In terms of pushback, there’s been only that one, aforementioned hard-to-publish paper, authored by mostly non-nutritionists, and one other paper by a researcher who seems mainly interested in defending the superiority of his own, competing nutrient profiling system. 3

Instead of facing criticism for dubbing Cheerios as one of the healthiest foods on the planet, the Food Compass has instead evidently been considered perfectly credible—and has already been tested for use in hospitals by a team of Greek researchers.

As I asked rhetorically in my earlier Substack on this topic: What kind of dystopian world has nutrition “science” entered into whereby a university, a peer-reviewed journal, and one of the field’s most influential leaders legitimize advice telling the public to eat more Lucky Charms and fewer eggs?

In my view, the explanation is that the world of nutrition has become so enmeshed with corporate interests that experts don’t even realize their ‘expert views’ are dangerously close to industry propaganda.

The growing encroachment of corporate influence in the field has been going on since 1941 at least, when General Foods, Quaker Oats, Heinz, the Corn Products Refining Corporation and other then-nascent food processing companies founded the “Nutrition Foundation,” to funnel money into universities for nutrition research. 4

Now, the practice of food and pharmaceutical corporations influencing science, professional organizations, conferences etc. is completely normalized. For instance:

• According to a paper I co-authored, 95 percent of the last advisory committee for America’s top nutrition policy, the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, had at least one tie with a food or pharmaceutical company. More than half the committee had 30 such ties or more, and one member had 151 ties. Is it any wonder the committee decided to ignore the entire scientific literature on weight loss?
• Another paper, in Public Health Nutrition last year, concluded that the Academy of Nutrition & Dietetics, the world’s largest organization of food and nutrition professionals, had become the victim of “corporate capture.” The Academy was found not only to own stock in PepsiCo., Nestle S.A., and Pfizer Inc. but also to take altogether millions from Hershey Co., Coca Cola Co., PepsiCo Inc., Unilever Best Foods, Kellogg USA, General Mills Inc., among others. “I personally like Pepsico and do not have any problems with us owning it….I personally would be OK if we owned Coke stock!!” wrote a longtime Academy leader, in a 2014 email.

Mozaffarian is clearly no stranger to working closely with Big Food. From 2021-2022, he was the keynote speaker for a series of “Food As Medicine” conferences rolled out nation-wide, alongside executives from PepsiCo, Nestle, Unilever, and Danone, four of the largest food companies in the world.

He served for several years on Unilever’s Scientific Advisory Board and chaired the Tufts’ “FORCE” consortium, which produces papers favorable to seed oils, with “an unrestricted grant” from Unilever, a major producer of those oils for years.

At Tufts, Mozaffarian has evidently welcomed partnerships with food companies, such as a project with General Mills to “develop strategies to communicate more effectively with millennials.”

And he has a list of companies with whom he reports having personal ties, including Bunge, Tiny Organics, Beren Therapeutics, Brightseed, Calibrate, Elysium Health, Filtricine, Foodome, HumanCo, January Inc., Perfect Day, Season, and Barilla Pasta.

Could so much familiarity with food industry actors have influenced the Food Compass? A tip from a reader (thank you, Coley Hudgins) pointed me to the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition’s Food & Nutrition Innovation Institute, which receives funds from some 60 companies, including quite a few of those whose products get top ranks in the Compass.

This includes Kellogg’s, a Tufts Institute “Gold Member,” which had 40 of its products included in the Food Compass (see chart, above).

In addition to Kellogg’s, there’s (3 more pyramid charts in this post):

• PepsiCo, a “Platinum Member,” with the following brands in the Compass:
  • Quaker, a PepsiCo brand, listed 17 times
  • Muscle Milk, a PepsiCo partner, listed 2 times
  • Fritos, listed twice, and Doritos, listed 3 times.
• General Mills, a “Silver Member,” with 53 of its brand cereals listed
• Clif Bars, a “Silver Member,” with 2 of its bars included

I have a copy of a “Gold Member” contract which stipulates a cost of $75,000 per year, but I don’t know if this amount is standard or what the charge for other levels of membership might be.

Also, the contract says “no activities of the Food and Innovation Council shall allow or facilitate any influence over Tufts’ research results….” This clearly forbids any pay-for-play scenario, and indeed, there’s no evidence that these companies paid to be included.

Still, regardless of how these items got into the Food Compass, it was the responsibility of the authors (and the peer reviewers) to recognize something was seriously amiss.

In Mozaffarian’s defense, his Compass does score most fresh fruits and vegetables at 100. Kale, dandelions, collards, cress, and something called charmenul are all supremely healthy, according to these rankings.

Yet, there’s a strange preference for processed foods over real, with, for instance, frozen OJ (with calcium added) scoring 11 points higher than fresh-squeezed. Also, most fruit juices are “to be encouraged,” even though these are now widely seen as sure routes to fast-spiking blood sugars.

A preference for ultra-processed foods can be seen throughout the Compass rankings. For instance, a lightly salted, “reconstituted” potato chips ranks nearly as high as a regular potato.

This is, again, an industry viewpoint, since a central truth of Big Food is that the profit comes from processing. Whereas the margin on a plain potato is next-to-nothing, if you peel, slice, fry, salt, reconstitute and package that potato as a chip in a fancy bag, the profit margins rise. A lot.

Mozaffarian himself seemed to recognize the problem of over-valuing ultra-processed foods in his Food Compass. In response to the recent criticism, he said, “We’re looking at ways to see if we can scientifically improve the scoring. We do account for processing, but maybe we should account for it even more.”

Still, there’s been no talk of correction or retraction of the Food Compass, and Mozaffarian’s back paddling comes after his team had “validated” the Compass in a paper last fall. More Chocolate Covered Almonds equals better health, they confirmed.

Indeed, chocolate almond milk (unsweetened) is said by Tufts to be the Number One, healthiest dairy product you can buy.

You can see the Compass values fake cheese over real cheese. Soy milk over real milk. Meatless chicken, even breaded and fried, over real chicken. And so on.

The blame is still being shifted to fat (saturated) and cholesterol, which explains why, in the Food Compass, no item in the meat, poultry or eggs categories scored higher than 73, according to this analysis—meaning that none of these foods is “to be encouraged.”

The vilification of animal foods is not unique to Tufts experts, but since they claim their Compass is based on “cutting-edge science,” why doesn’t it include the last decade of scientific findings, including the abandonment of caps on cholesterol, by both the American Heart Association and the U.S. Dietary Guidelines, and more than 20 review papers concluding that saturated fats have no effect on coronary or total mortality?

All this is documented in a paper I co-authored, in a a journal of the National Academies of Sciences. Still, the Food Compass does not recognize this recent science or even the existence of a scientific dispute on these topics. As a result, it “exaggerate[s] the risks associated with animal-sourced foods,” says the Journal of Nutrition paper.

The ultimate loser in the Food Compass is clearly beef. According to the Food Compass, you’d be better off—hilariously—eating ostrich, beaver, opossum or even bear than a steak.

Coincidentally, Beyond Meat and PlantPower Ventures are both Tufts’ Silver Members, and in 2021, the school received a $10 million grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to develop “cultivated meat.”

Tufts also has a venture-capitalist funded entrepreneur fellowship program whose aim is to “remove animals from the global food system.”

See more here substack.com

Bold emphasis added

Header image: sites.tufts.edu

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