Should we welcome food industry funding of public health research?

Yes—Paul Aveyard, Derek Yach

The food industry consists of farmers, manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, distributors, and the catering industry. If it disappeared tomorrow, most people in the developed world would die within months. It is a major employer; more people are employed in the food industry in the UK, for example, than any other manufacturing sector.1 For these reasons, government policies seek to support the industry. From this perspective, it would be absurd for health policy researchers to shun collaborating with the food industry.

Of course, our aims are not always allied. Many elements of the industry promote and sell food that undermines health. When faced with effective public health actions to curtail consumption of unhealthy products it sometimes fights against the cause of public health. Therefore not all cooperation is appropriate. For example, although industry’s views are critical to developing public policy, its presence when such policy is decided is inappropriate.

But working with the food industry inevitably involves accepting its funding, in kind at least. Take the FLICC study,2 in which a supermarket searched its database to find regular consumers of processed food, often high in saturated fat and salt, and asked them to participate in the trial. The trial is testing an intervention to promote the motivation and capacity of shoppers to make better use of front-of-pack “traffic light” nutrient labels and uses loyalty card data to determine the nutritional profile of purchases. The retailer paid the costs of its staff’s time used for discussion with researchers and to collect and process loyalty card data. Would the study be better if the researchers had paid the supermarket for their time and information? …