After outrage among its member dietician groups, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics will end its partnership with the Kraft Food Groups that allowed the latter to use the former’s logo on slices of its pasteurized cheese.
Under the original deal, Kraft agreed to finance scholarships, research, and public awareness campaigns in exchange for its use of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ Kids Eat Right label and website address on its Kraft Singles products. Representatives of the food company said the labeling was part of a larger effort to educate children and parents about the importance of calcium and Vitamin D.
However, some of the 75,000 registered groups of the dieticians’ coalition didn’t buy into that logic, pointing out that Kraft creates “pasteurized prepared cheese products.” More than 50 percent of the calories from a cheese slice come from fat, causing many to wonder why the academy would endorse this product in the first place.
Plus, Kraft products don’t fall within the legal definition of real cheese, as outlined by the Food and Drug Administration — primarily because each slice contains less than 51 percent of unadulterated cheese. Other ingredients include milk protein concentrate, some fatty portions of milk, calcium phosphate, sodium phosphate, and sodium citrate, a food additive that’s used for flavoring or preservation.
Although the deal is already in motion, and the first of many labeled packages are set to appear on store shelves this week, the academy said that it would impose limits on its shelf life. Andy Bellati, the founder of Dieticians for Professional Integrity, is pleased with the move to end the partnership.
“Hopefully, this is the beginning of much-needed and much-overdue dialogue on the academy’s corporate sponsorships,” Bellatti told the New York Times on Tuesday. “Dietitians need to continue advocating for an organization that represents us with integrity and that we can be proud of, rather than continually have to apologize for.”
The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is hardly the first entity to form a partnership with the food industry. Earlier this month, Coca-Cola launched a public relations blitz, complete with radio segments and op-eds, to rebrand itself as a healthy snack option, despite making no changes to the product. Part of that strategy included colluding with dietary experts and public relations firms to “help bring context to the latest facts and science” around the ingredients in its products. All the glimmer and glitz around the campaign, however, hasn’t done much to take away from the more than 60 percent of fructose corn syrup content in each bottle.
In order to close the funding gaps caused by a drop in government dollars for research, food companies and health organizations have also collaborated to finance research. These alliances have the potential to undermine efforts to spread accurate information among American consumers. For example, a 2007 review of more than 100 studies about sugary beverages showed that in cases when the soda industry funded food research, chances of studies returning a favorable outcome for the industry increased by 800 percent.
But nutrition experts are fighting back. The Dieticians for Professional Integrity has other plans in the works that go beyond issuing complaints. The group, which formed more than a year ago, recently called for more defined boundaries between dieticians and food companies in order to uphold a code of ethics that discourages the “false and misleading” endorsement of products including McDonald’s and Coca-Cola.
Obesity and nutrition expert Robert Lustig, MD counts among its most fervent supporters.
“Doctors were forced to stop accepting kickbacks from the drug industry for recommending their products, but dietitians are not prevented from shilling for food companies,” Lustig told MedPage Today last August. “The dietitians of America are split over the role that food industry money plays in the promulgation of the obesity and diabetes epidemics. That DFPI even exists is a manifestation of that tension.”
In light of the national obesity epidemic, dieticians’ groups have some cause for concern. Research in recent months has shown that more than 40 percent of the salt that American children consume comes from highly processed food like pizza, bread and rolls, cured meats, snacks, and pasta dishes. Poor diet has served as a key cause of high blood pressure among one in six children, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention Deputy Principal Director Ileana Arias told WebMD last September.