Really? No conflicts of interest?

It is becoming the norm in academia to provide lists of conflicts of interest when submitting an article for review at a journal or sometimes even when speaking at conferences.  By and large, I think the move toward transparency is a good one.  

But as one set of authors point out in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, many academics have too narrow a view of what represents an "interest."  Richard Smith and colleagues write:

People who work for public sector institutions regard themselves (and are often regarded) as being neutral, disinterested, and unbiased supporters and defenders of the public interest. There is, however, a large literature by economists and political scientists known as ‘public choice theory’ (that even has its own scholarly journal, Public Choice) that demolishes this pretension.3 Public institutions and the individuals that work for them are found to be self-interested, much like private institutions and their employees. Government bureaucracies seek to maintain and expand their scale and influence, a reality which is captured in arguments against the ideal of impartial civil servants in the Weberian bureaucracy.4–7 United Nations agencies fight over territory and mandates. Individuals working for public institutions with a certain culture (such as the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, where one of us [RF] was the dean) know that their career prospects may be advantaged by being a part of that culture rather than iconoclasts. As others have noted, being a ‘public servant’, or an ‘international public servant’ or the employee of a university does not make one un-self-interested or un-conflicted.8

Academics, especially in applied fields such as global health and medicine, often have numerous relations with not-for-profit organizations – including governments, foundations, non-governmental organizations and United Nations agencies. These relationships typically include some combination of remuneration for advice or assistance, research funding (which may also include salary support for the principal investigator) and travel support. More generally, these relationships are likely to be career enhancing, as when an academic has multiple relations with the World Health Organization (WHO) and is frequently called upon by WHO for services of various kinds. Many of the organizations with which the academic has relations have stated positions on issues affecting public health and indeed many other topics. Surely there is potential here to influence an academic's expression of views – in other words a potential conflict of interest worthy of declaration.

They conclude:

Our message is simple: we must recognize that we are all conflicted and declare accordingly.11 A view of the world that sees employees of private for-profit companies as conflicted and doctors, or employees of public or academic bodies, as not, is naïve, potentially deceptive and likely to distort reader response to new information

Bt resistance

A couple recent studies have raised concern that certain corn rootworms are becoming resistant to the Bt produced by biotech corn.  See for examples this paper in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science by Iowa State University entomologists published last week (some of the same authors seem to have a similar paper published in 2011 in PLOS ONE) and this paper published in Nature Biotechnology this summer.  The most recent study has prompted quite a bit of attention on the web from outlets as varied as Wired and Grist.  

Any pesticide (biotech or not) has the potential to become ineffective over time due to the development of genetic resistance in insect (or weed) populations.  Plant genetic companies, knowing this, tried to implement several strategies to slow the spread of resistance: such as developing several types of Bt that produced different insect-killing proteins (which appears to have had only limited effectiveness) and the planting of refuges.  Refuges refer to the planting of non-Bt corn near Bt-corn, which reduce the selective pressure on rootworms and other pests, and thus potentially increases the length of the effectiveness of the Bt trait.  Originally, corn farmers were supposed to plant a certain percentage of their acreage in non-Bt corn as a refuge, and more recently, we have seen refuge in a bag - the Bt seed is delivered to farmers premixed with non-Bt seed.  

Some sources place the blame on the development of resistance on biotech companies lobbying for lower refuge requirements or on farmers for failing to observe the requirements.  That may be partially true.  Any individual farmer likely faces an incentive to free-ride off their neighbor's refuge (something that can be eliminated with the "refuge in a bag" concept), but it strikes me as incredibly short sighted that biotech companies would willfully advocate for policies that would reduce their long-run profitability (or it may be their interest to allow Bt resistance to develop if they have other products in the pipeline that become more valuable as Bt resistance develops).  

As I see it, the real challenge here is Mother Nature herself.  Agriculture is inherently a struggle against nature.  We have become so accustomed to seeing crop yield gain, that sometimes it is easy to forget that one of the biggest challenges is simply trying to keep up with nature's adaptations to the latest varieties.  The natural state of affairs is yield decline - not yield increase.  Seen in this light, science and technology seldom offer a one-time fix.  It is a constant struggle. We find a solution.  Nature responds.  We try to find another solution.  Nature adapts again.  And on and on it goes.  

No doubt there are many who argue that we should step off this technology treadmill.  We probably can find ways to better work with (or at least accept some drain in efficiency from) natural pests, and that may be one of our adaptions.  But, I think it is foolish to think we can ever really step off the treadmill.  There never was or will be some perfect ecosystem equilibrium.  Bacteria, insects, weeds have been and always will be evolving to get the upper hand on their competitors (that's us and our food crops) and we will do the same.  Our best bet is to try to stay one step ahead knowing our natural competitors won't be far behind.       

Natural and Organic Craziness: It's not just food

My wife likes to buy cosmetics products from a company called Paula's Choice.  One of the things she likes about the company is that it reports on the scientific testing it does on its own products and that of its competitors. 

In any event, my wife alerted me to an interview with the company's owner, Paula Begoun, which I found fascinating.  It seems the cosmetics world is grappling with many of the same issues as the food world.

Paula was interviewed on radio by another cosmetic's industry insider: Karen Yong.  Here are some excerpts from the transcript when the discussion turned to "natural" and "organic" cosmetic products:

Paula Begoun:. . . On the other side of the coin one of the things many cosmetic companies have to deal with is the fear mongering around the evilness of cosmetic ingredients which I've written about extensively and I know you have opinions on.

How are the cosmetics companies, the Lauders, the Shiseidos dealing with this fear mongering that the organic natural cosmetic world is putting out there.

Karen Young:It's frightening and it's probably the biggest thing that I'm confronted with right now. I'll try to narrow it down a little bit because as you know it's a huge category.

Paula Begoun:Wait, you're not frightened about the ingredients, you're frightened by the influence…

Karen Young:The press.

and

And the other piece of that as you alluded to is the whole natural organic green-washing thing, which is so confusing that even those of us who are supposed to understand what's going on here, it's really, really difficult.

Paula Begoun:I'm often shocked by the women really do believe – I get asked it all the time. “Should I be scared of what I'm using. Is it killing me? And I'm using this natural product.” And I know what those products contain. That's what we do for a living here at Paula's Choice is we review everybody else's products and look at what the formulas are and what they contain and what they can and can't do for skin.

00:20:36And lots of natural ingredients that show up in natural products are bad for skin. And I'm looking at this woman telling me I'm so scared other products are killing me and I'm going, yeah, I know, but you're breaking out, your skin is red. I know what you're using isn't protecting you from aging, or sun damage, and on and on. And they're frightened of everybody else's ingredients except the company that is dong the fear mongering.

00:21:00Of course, they never tell you what problem ingredients their products contain, but, yeah, it's an insane – so, how are the Lauders and the Shiseidos, I mean, Lauder is not going to give up. They're not going to go all natural. They know that all natural isn't going to fly for skin. And lord knows an elegant product without silicone is almost impossible. And there's nothing wrong with those ingredients. What are they doing about this aside from I know that the industry went away from parabens.

and

Paula Begoun:Actually, you know, it's interesting, because one of the things that happens when you start making “all natural products” is you increase the need for higher levels of preservatives.

Karen Young:Preservatives!

Paula Begoun:And there aren't any so-called natural, although even the natural preservatives when you have to increase it that much, then you're getting irritation. Preservatives kill things. That's what they do.

Karen Young:Absolutely.

00:24:37You're getting irritation and possibly you're making it more difficult to stabilize the formula.

Paula Begoun:You know, we're just reviewing a product line that, you know, we haven't run into this in a long time. A lot of the natural product lines, while the formulas may have issues in terms of irritating ingredients and jar packaging and fragrance, and I'm going to ask you about jar packaging in just a second, but one of the things that we haven't run into in a very long time is a company claiming that it's all natural but it actually isn't, it actually uses synthetic ingredients.

00:25:15This is one of the first times in a while I would say in the past, I don't know, three, four years that we actually ran into a company that is lying through their teeth. Their products are about as natural as polyester. Do you see that – do you run into that in your research?

Karen Young:Yes.

Paula Begoun:Yeah, you see that, too.

Karen Young:Because as you know there is no definition for natural. It's completely arbitrary. You can use the word anyway you like. And consumers, as you mentioned earlier, consumers are incredibly confused about what does natural mean and what does organic mean. I mean, that theoretically is defined by the FDA and consumers really don't understand that either.

Real-world effect of soda taxes

A new study in the journal Health Economics by Jason Fletcher and coauthors examines whether variation in soda tax policies across states leads to differences in weight and obesity.  

First, the authors note previous work on the issue:

studies using data on individual-level consumption and within-state variation in actual tax rates have found no net measureable effects on population weight. For example, Fletcher et al. (2010a) find that increases in soft drink tax rates decrease soda consumption among children, but do not influence total caloric intake, as children increase their consumption of other high-calorie beverages. This finding is consistent with a similar lack of effects for adults (Fletcher et al., 2010b). Other research taking this approach finds mixed results, demonstrating that average weight in some high risk populations may be more susceptible to soda taxes (Sturm et al., 2010).

Then, they point out a potential problem with this line of research: the variation in tax rates across locations isn't large enough to tell us what will happen if a state passed a "large" soda tax - or whether there are "non-linear" effects:

one concern with the ability of the results from some previous studies to predict the consumption response to large taxes, such as the 18% tax proposed in New York in 2008, and a potential reason for the differences in the results from the various strands of literature is that the existing soda tax rates are too low to be meaningful to most consumers because the average tax rate in 2006 was approximately 5% (Sturm et al., 2010; Todd and Zhen, 2010). Implicit in this argument is that substitution effects would also exhibit a threshold effect, where at high enough soda tax rates, individuals would substitute towards no beverages or low-calorie alternatives (e.g., water).

What did they find?

First, we examine whether there is any evidence of non-linear effects of current soda tax rates, with the idea that if very large taxes could have relatively larger effects, then we should see evidence consistent with this hypothesis based on the larger tax rates in our data, which reach 12%. However, using a variety of specifications, we find no evidence of effects on use or weight for a nationally representative sample of adults.

Our second approach uses a new comparative case-study method that leverages the sudden and large tax increase found in Ohio in the early 1990s. This method creates a ‘synthetic Ohio’ based on a weighted average of states that are most similar to Ohio’s population BMI before the tax was raised. Outside of simulation methods, this is the most informative approach to understanding the potential impact of recently proposed taxes, and it suggests very little evidence that the large tax imposed in Ohio had any detectable effect on population weight. Together, our results cast serious doubt on the assumptions that proponents of large soda taxes make on its likely impacts on population weight.

March 2014 Food Demand Survey (FooDS)

The March 2014 release of FooDS is now out.

A few highlights:

• Willingness-to-pay for chicken (particularly chicken wings) was down and willingness-to-pay for pork was up in March relative to February.
• Consumers anticipate buying less beef, pork, and chicken in March than was the case in February.
• For the first time in the nearly year long period we've been running FooDS, GMOs became the issue consumers reported hearing the most about in the news.  Still, consumers were more concerned about issue like Salmonella, E. Coli, and growth hormones than GMOs.  

In March, we asked several questions related to consumers' price knowledge. Results reveal significant dispersion in the prices ($/lb) consumers report expecting to see charged for ground beef, chicken breasts, and pork chops.  

Only 13% of consumers reported shopping for groceries in only one store during the past month, suggesting some degree of cross-store price comparisons; however, almost 50% reporting using loyalty cards most of the time when grocery shopping.