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While some of it is genuinely useful, when you blend nutritional science and the world of social media, some essential facts get lost in the mix, like in the wake of this announcement.
wellness influencers, some of them registered dietitians, weighed in. That was a bold move, Hu. None of these studies showed that it was specifically the sweeteners that cause a weight gain. But they love a good clickbait. We go through this every time a new report comes out, and I've gone pretty deep into the science. It's fine to have a diet soda if
To Anahad O'Connor, a health columnist at The Washington Post, the response to the announcement on social media smelled a bit fishy.
And in fact, a report O'Connor released earlier this month with colleagues Caitlin Gilbert and Sasha Chovkin found that dozens of registered dietitians, some of them with more than 2 million followers each, were paid to counter the WHO's announcement.
They were promoting messages that were telling people disregard what the World Health Organization has said about artificial sweeteners and diet beverages, saying that it was relying on low quality evidence, low quality science and telling people it's fine to consume diet soda and artificial sweeteners. Ignore the fear mongering headlines that these things are great for weight loss.
This summer, the World Health Organization classified aspartame as a quote-unquote possibly carcinogenic sweetener, which is a pretty confusing way of discussing an ingredient that people have been consuming since the 80s. The FDA doesn't seem to agree with the WHO on this. So what's going on there? So this summer, the WHO actually issued two reports.
on artificial sweeteners. The first report said that artificial sweeteners are ineffective for weight loss and that they can increase the risk of chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease. And people should generally reduce their intake of artificial sweeteners because it leads to overall sweetening of the diet. They also increase your tolerance for sweet foods. And so this first report said, just don't consume any artificial sweeteners at all. Consume unsweetened
beverages. And then the next report a couple months later concluded that aspartame was possibly carcinogenic. This was a very controversial report. There is a lot of debate about this topic. The FDA, as you pointed out, has said that aspartame is safe. Some other health authorities have said this as well. But there are a lot of health authorities and health experts who have been
encouraging people to cut back on their general intake of artificial sweeteners because we've considered them innocuous for a very long time. And yet there's been a lot of research lately showing that they may have some unintended side effects. They can affect your gut microbiome. They are linked to higher rates of diabetes and heart disease, in some cases, weight gain. There's been a lot of confusing literature. The point of all this is that for the soda industry,
These messages were very concerning. Yeah, this is like threatening to an entire line of their products.
They viewed this as an attack. And so for the American beverage group, you know, whose members include Coke and Pepsi and Dr. Pepper, you know, these companies sell a lot of not just diet sodas, but diet juices and diet beverages of all kind. Aspartame is included in something like 90% of low and no calorie beverages. So this was really a threat to an important product that they sell. And so what we discovered was that they started recruiting credentialed experts, in this case, mostly dietitians. They recruited 12 experts.
health professionals, which included 10 registered dietitians, a doctor, and another health influencer, to post videos on their accounts, 35 videos in all, on TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook.
Aspartame was approved for use by the FDA in 1981, and the FDA has since reaffirmed its safety five more times. In some cases, there were links to a website, safetyofaspartame.com. So for more information, check out safetyofaspartame.com. And as these reports come out, expect to hear a lot more on this topic as the summer goes on from me and many other dieticians and diabetes professionals.
And we went to that website and then scrolled all the way to the bottom. And then we saw the logo for American Beverage, which is the soda trade and lobbying group. American Beverage said that there was adequate disclosure on all these videos. But we found that there was actually varying levels of disclosure. In some cases, dietitians would put paid partnership at the top.
of their posts. When you say paid partnership, this is like an official tag on TikTok or Instagram that is the website allowing you to categorize your own content as paid promotion. Yes. So you could see if you looked at the post, paid partnership on the post on Instagram and
You could do it on TikTok as well. In some cases, they would have hashtag sponsored or hashtag ad in the text. And in 11 out of the 35 videos, the dieticians or health professionals had specifically mentioned American Beverage, either as the partner or as a sponsor, where they included the words American Beverage somewhere in the post or tagged AmeriBev, which is the Instagram page for American Beverage. But we've talked to some experts on influencer marketing,
And they said that a lot of these disclosures were not adequate because the FTC says that influencers who are paid to promote or endorse products need to have, quote unquote, clear and conspicuous disclosures where it should be very visible.
to people watching the videos. They specifically say that if you're making an audible endorsement in your video, then your disclosure should be audible as well. And that's because, I don't know if you spend much time on Instagram or TikTok, but a lot of times you may be watching a video and then you scroll up or down and another video comes up and another video comes up and you're not looking at the caption.
Or it automatically cues something. Exactly, yeah. So if it says hashtag ad in the caption or paid partnership down at the bottom of the caption, you may not see that because you're not reading the caption or the text accompanying the video. You're just looking at the video. And we could see that was the case because in some of these videos, people...
would post comments showing that they were very confused by these labels. Comments like, you know, I looked at the caption and it says paid partnership. What does that mean? Or who is your paid partner? Were you paid by the FDA, by the WHO? And so that was very concerning to us. This kind of marketing tactic isn't exactly new. You've reported on similar tactics being used by the food and beverage industry to try to push their products
for a while now. How have you seen this strategy change over time? Yeah, so back in 2015, some prominent scientists had launched a group called the Global Energy Balance Network, which was this group of scientists. They started a website and they were publishing in journals, and they were promoting this idea of energy balance, telling people that
It's okay to eat junk food as long as you're exercising enough to burn off those calories. And they were pushing this message that the causes of obesity are not really the foods that we're eating, but the fact that we're not exercising enough, that we're being too sedentary. I did some digging and found out that Coca-Cola, which at the time was the world's largest producer of sugary beverages, had put a lot of money behind this group.
And so I dug into that group. I wrote a big article about it. And Coca-Cola was pretty embarrassed by this. And one of the things they did was they released a lot of data showing which scientists they had funded and which health groups they had funded. And one of the groups they were funding, it turns out, was the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which is the group that oversees
dieticians in the United States, this report found that the Academy had accepted millions of dollars over the years from a variety of food companies, including Coke and Pepsi and Nestle and Hershey and ConAgra and American Beverage and sugar companies. And not only that, but the Academy had actually invested some of its own money into food company stocks, like the stock of Nestle and PepsiCo, for example. The Academy has been criticized over the years for
for allowing food companies to sponsor it, and for even allowing food companies to provide continuing education courses to its dietitians. And the dietitians get like academic credits for attending. Absolutely. With TikTok in particular, you can go viral, but you're not-
going to make very much money from a viral video, nothing compared to, say, YouTube. And so it's not all that surprising that a dietitian who builds an audience would be open to working with these companies, particularly given, as your piece notes, that the median annual salary for an American dietitian in 2022 was, I believe, $66,450. So why not supplement it with a little bit of AmBev marketing?
Absolutely, yeah. And they wouldn't tell us exactly how much money they're being paid by groups like American Beverage. Also American Beverage, we asked them, they wouldn't disclose how much they would pay these influencers. But there was this one revealing video that we found on TikTok that a pretty influential dietician posted where she was complaining because she said she was getting offers to promote what she called quote unquote greens powders, which we've all seen advertising for online. They're dietary supplements companies
Companies that sell these, they say that they contain powders containing vegetables, fruits, plants, herbs, and they have all these vitamins and minerals, and they're like a sort of meal replacement. There's a pretty big marketing push behind these.
And this particular dietician was saying that she had ethical concerns about promoting them because in some cases, these companies will say that they use proprietary blends and they won't reveal exactly what ingredients are in their products or what proportions the ingredients are in their products.
And she said, you know, with the money that she was offered to promote these products, she could buy, you know, a bunch of Saint Laurent handbags. I could afford with the money offered to me from Greens Powders, not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, not seven, eight handbags.
of these little bags I've been wanting if I took those deals. I could get 20 pairs of these Apple AirPod Maxes. I could be like Oprah with my friends. One for you, one for you, one for you. And she was almost lamenting the fact that she had a dietician's license because she said she had this code of ethics to follow and she didn't want to promote these products.
But this is just me showing you there is money behind those greens powders that are being marketed to you. And I will say that when we did this analysis, we found that there are a lot of influential dietitians on TikTok and Instagram and Facebook who are promoting healthy, nutritious foods. You know, we found dietitians posting paid ads for like trail mix or in some cases, fruits, you know, in other cases, cheeses or eggs. But, you know, I think there are some critics who say it can be a slippery slope. So this sounds like a media literacy problem.
and an influencer marketing problem. And I don't really see this going away, especially as Gen Z and younger people are increasingly getting their information less from traditional news sources and more from social media. So, I mean, what are the potential solutions?
You know, the FTC has some pretty clear guidelines and they have tried to crack down on influencer marketing and they have fined companies for paying influencers to post videos that were not clearly disingenuous.
disclosed. One of the people that got in trouble was the rapper Cardi B when she was promoting, I think it was weight loss supplements that the FTC said weren't clearly disclosed as advertising. But this is a really big marketplace. It's like the Wild West. If you go on TikTok or Instagram, you can see that there are millions of videos posted every day. We spoke to one former official at the FTC, David Vladek, who's now at Georgetown University. And he said that
The FTC is doing its best, but it doesn't have the resources to really police this cottage industry properly. So I think viewers, consumers have to be just somewhat aware of the fact that if you are on TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook, and someone is posting a video where they appear to be endorsing a product or a service, you may have to look closely to see, is this someone who just likes this product or service, or is this someone who is being paid
When it comes to spreading the word that some dietitians may have these less than clear relationships with industry groups, how do you as journalists help teach viewers about this without suggesting that all dietitians are being paid off or perhaps overselling the problem and undermining public trust in public health?
Yeah, so that is a really important question, and I'm glad you asked it because it is important to point out that there are tens of thousands of dietitians in the United States who, in many cases, are doing fantastic life-changing and even life-saving work advising people on their diet and nutrition. And the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which oversees dietitians in this country, has had this very close relationship with
with the food industry taking millions of dollars from food companies over the years. But a lot of actual dietitians have been some of the biggest critics of the Academy because they say, we work very hard to build up our reputations and to give people good, objective dietary advice. And when the Academy is partnering with companies that sell junk food and sugary beverages, they say it makes us look bad. And so there was even a group
called Dietitians for Professional Integrity that was founded by individual dietitians, which had pressured the Academy for years to try to sever its food industry ties. And at one point, this group had circulated a petition urging the Academy
to Severance Food Industry Ties, and I think they had something like maybe 23 or 24,000 signatures from dieticians. So some of the biggest critics of the Academy's food industry ties have been dieticians themselves. And we interviewed a lot of dieticians for this story who told us that and said that they see it as a problem that there are dieticians out there on social media who are taking money from big food companies to deliver their messaging.
Anahad, thank you so much. Thank you. Anahad O'Connor is a health columnist at The Washington Post. Thanks for tuning into this week's Midweek Podcast. On this week's big show, Brooke speaks to Amy Westervelt about the groups who are out to slime climate activists. It's out on Friday around dinnertime. I'm Michael Onger.