Sixteen times more likely, if the sponsor sold it

Today’s letter

The 30 seconds that tell you what a food headline is worth

In March 2016, a nutrition professor at New York University finished counting. For a year, Marion Nestle (no relation to the company, and she says so herself) had been collecting studies that food companies had paid for, posting them on her blog five at a time.

There was no experiment behind it. She was keeping score, and at the end of the year the score read 168 studies, 156 of them with results that favored the company paying. Twelve came out the other way.

“So which one am I supposed to believe?”

You have been reading these headlines for thirty years, and you have done the work every time. Eggs were dangerous, then they were fine. Fat was the enemy, then sugar was. Margarine was the safe choice until it was the thing to avoid, and this January the federal guidelines came back around and put red meat and full fat dairy near the top of the new pyramid, which is why every shelf and every feed this fall is telling you to eat more protein.

Every time the advice turned, you turned with it. You cleared the cupboard, bought the new thing, told your family this was the right way now, and four years later you watched it reverse. Somewhere in there you stopped blaming the advice and started blaming yourself: gullible, or careless, or just not sharp enough to follow the science.

Here’s what gets me.

None of that was your fault. You were following the science. Part of the science was paid for by the people selling the food.

Most people take vitamins to protect their health.

But according to Harvard researchers…

👉 One of the most popular vitamins in the world may actually raise your blood sugar and increase your risk of heart disease and even cancer (❗️).

Millions take it every day, believing it’s helping…
When in reality, it could be quietly destroying their health.

Which vitamin do you think it is?

When you have your answer, click here to see if you guessed correctly.

The truth may surprise you — and it could save your life.

Discover the $1 fix that slashes heart attack risk by 43% >>>

Let me show you how I know. Not with my opinion, but with a study that did the counting properly.

A team at the University of Queensland took one food and went through the literature on it. They collected 500 studies on meat and health published between 2014 and 2023, then read the fine print at the end of each one: who wrote it, who paid for it, and what the authors declared.

Seventy-eight of those 500, about one in six, declared some tie to the meat industry, whether that was funding, a declared conflict, or an author who worked for it. Then the researchers looked at what each study concluded and lined the two lists up.

What they found

Meta-research review, 2026. Teimouri et al., Obesity Reviews.

The studies with industry ties (one answer)

16 times more likely to report a conclusion favorable to meat, at an odds ratio of 16.4 (95% confidence interval 7.5 to 35.8). About three quarters were favorable, and exactly one came out unfavorable.

The studies with no industry tie (a spread)

Their conclusions landed across favorable, neutral and unfavorable, which is what a pile of evidence usually looks like when nobody involved sells the product.

500 studies on meat and health, 2014 to 2023. The link between industry involvement and a favorable conclusion held at p less than 0.001.

In other words, if the only thing you knew about one of these studies was who paid for it, you could often guess the conclusion before reading it.

Your confusion was never a reading problem. The two studies that contradicted each other were never standing on the same ground.

So how does a company’s money end up linked to a friendlier conclusion, without anyone telling a lie?

Most of it happens before any result exists. A sponsor often helps shape the question, and the question decides a great deal: what the food gets compared against, how much of it people eat, for how long, and which marker gets measured. Compare a steak against white bread and it looks like one thing; compare it against beans and it looks like another. Studies that come out badly for a funder are also less likely to get written up and published, so the favorable ones are the ones left standing when a reporter goes looking for a headline.

Nestle needed a year and 168 entries before the pattern was plain to her. You have been reading one headline at a time, on a phone, in a checkout line.

That’s the part no one says out loud… the confusion in the aisle is not a failure of your attention. It is what a literature looks like when a sixth of it comes with a sponsor attached.

Try this today

Next time a headline tells you a food is good for you or bad for you, give it 30 seconds before you change anything in your cart. Open the article and click through to the study itself, the link that lands on a journal page. Scroll past the results to the short paragraphs at the end, headed Funding, Acknowledgments, or Declaration of Interests. On a phone, tap the three dots in your browser, choose Find in Page, and type the word funding. If the money came from a company that sells that exact food, you have not caught anyone lying. What you have is a reason to wait: leave the cart alone until a second study, paid for by someone else, says the same thing.

One word in a search box, and the headline stops being the last word.

Promise me you’ll try it today? Saying it out loud is half of what makes it stick.

I’m in. I’ll try it today →

The check works for a plain reason, and it isn’t that industry studies are worthless. Plenty are careful, and twelve of Nestle’s 168 came out against the people who paid for them. None of this tells you whether to eat meat, either. It tells you what one headline about meat is worth on its own.

What the funding line gives you is the weight to put on a single study… and a single study was never meant to change what you eat anyway.

It took a professor a year of counting to see it clearly. You can get most of the way there in half a minute, standing in the cereal aisle with your cart. There’s still time for you.

And if you spent thirty years feeling slow for not keeping up…

It was never your fault.

— Cole

P.S. How many times do you think the advice on eggs has flipped in your lifetime? Just the number. Hit reply with it, and tomorrow I’ll tell you what most people guessed.

Most people take vitamins to protect their health.

Keep Reading

Cutting the trans fat earned the label. The saturated fat paid for it.

The exercise barely moved the scale. Six pounds came back without it.

180 people cut sweetness for six months, and not one lost the craving

Four days by a window, and the blood sugar held steadier

8am and 5pm, same doctor. The orders came out sixteen points apart.

They missed days. Twelve weeks later, it made no difference.