January 8, 1997
Letters to the Editor
The New Republic
1220 19th St. NW
Washington, DC 20036
Dear Editor:
Your article ("Hazardous to Your Mental Health," Dec. 30) by Stephen Glass about the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and its executive director, Michael F. Jacobson, contained a staggering array of inaccuracies, gross omissions, and unfair attacks. However, the lack of objectivity might have been expected from a writer who weeks earlier wrote "I believe in Big Business" and, when he worked at the pro-business Heritage Foundation, urged that school lunch programs be turned over to companies like Taco Bell and Marriott.
The sheer quantity of errors in the article not only calls into question whether minimum standards of objective journalism were consciously disregarded, but makes an adequate response in limited space impossible. Nevertheless, I take this opportunity to highlight the most egregious inaccuracies.
Glass kicks off with an arguably amusing hearsay account of Jacobson's obnoxiously picky dining habits. No one would eat with him if that fictionalized account were factual, but far more serious are Glass' irresponsible statements and conclusions about CSPI's activities. CSPI is accused of using "science in a misleading and sloppy fashion," as illustrated by two allegedly inaccurate 150-word articles in our Nutrition Action Healthletter. But it is Mr. Glass, not CSPI, whose research skills are defective.
Mr. Glass claims that "CSPI's [restaurant] studies won little respect among scientists." In fact, U.S. Department of Agriculture scientists think so highly of our studies they requested raw data for inclusion in USDA's comprehensive nutritional data base and requested samples of meals we tested so they could measure certain additional nutrients.
CSPI's scientific credibility was underscored in 1996 when FDA Commissioner David Kessler honored Michael Jacobson with the agency's highest award, the Commissioner's Special Citation. The citation reads: "For helping government, industry, and the public understand the relationship between diet and health, and, in doing so, accomplishing one of the great public health advances of the century." In 1992, the Food Marketing Institute, the supermarkets' trade association, honored Jacobson for "his dedicated, steadfast efforts to promote health through high standards of food safety and nutrition." And Jane Brody, The New York Times' health writer, wrote that Nutrition Action is "my personal favorite" nutrition newsletter.
Mr. Glass charges that CSPI's newsletter, once "reasonable and technical," has "gone hysteric" and opted for "media hype" to sell more subscriptions. In fact, most of the tripling in the Nutrition Action's circulation came prior to publicity about CSPI's studies of restaurant meals and theater popcorn. That information was provided to Mr. Glass, but he apparently ignored it because it debunks his thesis.
Furthermore, Nutrition Action's provides more useful information on nutrition and food safety than it used to. In recent months articles -- whose accuracy has not been challenged -- discuss everything from the health effects of caffeine to new analyses of the trans fat content of foods to the nutritional content of several types of restaurant meals. Such articles, not media hype, have led to our wider readership.
Mr. Glass purports to support his claim that CSPI has become more alarmist in the 1990s by saying that Jacobson dressed up as Tony the Tiger (for a Capitol Hill protest) and attached 170 rotted teeth to a petition to the Federal Trade Commission regarding the advertising of sugary food. Wrong. Both of those activities occurred twenty years earlier -- in the 1970s. The kindest explanation is that Glass is a sloppy journalist, but the consistent nasty tone suggests something less benign.
Mr. Glass faults CSPI for wanting to have our studies, petitions, and other activities publicized in the popular media. If that be sinful, we confess -- but do not apologize. Such publicity is an occasional whisper into the public's ear compared to the continuous roar of Procter & Gamble's $2.8 billion annual advertising budget, PepsiCo's $1.2 billion, or McDonald's $880 million. CSPI's work attracts journalistic attention because we provide accurate new information, which experience demonstrates is trustworthy.
The article castigates CSPI's opposition to Procter & Gamble's fat substitute olestra as "a case study in how CSPI advances its puritanical agenda by using shoddy data to inflate claims about a product's dangers." Mr. Glass fails to note that our concerns are shared by many eminent scientists, including Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard School of Public Health, and Dr. D. Mark Hegsted, USDA's former chief of human nutrition. Nor did he note that FDA deputy commissioner William Schultz said that CSPI staff "were the only ones there raising the right questions." In fact, CSPI's concerns about olestra stem from Procter & Gamble's own tests proving that olestra interferes with the absorption of carotenoids and sometimes causes abdominal cramping and other gastrointestinal symptoms. Symptoms are significant enough that the FDA-required label warns: "Olestra may cause abdominal cramping and loose stools." In some cases, the "cramping" is incapacitating and the "loose stools" is diarrhea lasting several days.
Mr. Glass says that "essentially, CSPI claimed P&G's olestra studies were invalid since they pooled [two] heterogeneous smaller studies." That was not "essentially" our argument. Even pooled, the studies proved that a typical serving of olestra (equivalent to 2 ounces of chips) can cause gastrointestinal symptoms. (The FDA evaluated the adverse effects from the two studies separately and pooled.)
Mr. Glass asserts that "temporary diarrhea . . . [is] not a hazardous medical condition." For much of the population that's true. But Mr. Glass should have reported that FDA medical officer Karl Klontz, after reviewing a Procter & Gamble study on olestra, concluded that "the increased water loss in the stools of subjects reporting olestra-associated diarrhea or loose stools is of concern . . . for the elderly and young children."
Mr. Glass says that CSPI has tried to discredit pro-olestra scientists by claiming they were connected to industry. We, indeed, have questioned the credibility of the FDA's olestra-review committee, because so many of its members have ties to industry. That committee voted 17 to 5 to support the approval of olestra. At least nine of the 17 who favored olestra have consulted for or received grants from the food industry, a fact that many readers might have found interesting. For instance, one member is on the nutrition advisory board of Nabisco, a company that might use olestra. Another has been a consultant for the Sugar Association, Nestle, and Ross Laboratories. A second reason that the committee lacked credibility is because the FDA, despite CSPI's plea, did not appoint a single expert on carotenoids or vitamin K, two key olestra concerns.
Mr. Glass, referring to a CSPI press conference announcing an anti-olestra campaign, implies that he discerned a terrible problem. After the press conference Jacobson acknowledged that CSPI had no new statistical evidence to refute P&G's safety claim. That, of course, was not the purpose of the press conference (the purpose was to announce our anti-olestra TV message). In any case, at a press conference several weeks later CSPI released the findings from a telephone on the apparent effects of olestra chips on 506 randomly interviewed consumers in Frito-Lay's three test markets. The survey indicated that roughly 15 percent of consumers of olestra experienced gastrointestinal symptoms, about one out of five reported to be severe (the survey found that less than one percent of people reports from 153 people who apparently suffered gastrointestinal symptoms due to olestra. He says that "there was absolutely no way to statistically control for truthful answers." In fact, those anecdotal reports are not intended to be a statistical sampling, but to indicate the nature of the gastrointestinal problems that olestra may cause. Statistical evidence on the rates of gastrointestinal problems does come instead from Procter & Gamble's clinical studies and CSPI's telephone survey.
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