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You can of course get plenty of information and advice about food and diet for free. Quite enough to drown in! In these cases you want to ask, ‘Do the people giving me this information really know any better than I do?’ Let’s start with the newspapers and magazines. Some are more reliable than others, but sadly, very few allow their journalists time to research a story properly.⁸ Deadlines are the name of the game. Press releases, for instance, are often picked up and turned into articles without anyone checking the sources or their credentials. Basically, the fact that you ‘read it in the papers’ or ‘saw it on TV’ is no guarantee that it isn’t just a cleverly disguised advertisement. I’m sorry to say that much, if not most, of what passes for ‘news’ on food and health in the media is likely to have come from some company that stands to make money if you’ll only believe what they’re telling you. Remember, virtually all papers and magazines and most TV channels are supported by advertising revenues, either directly or indirectly.

It’s well over 10 years now since my own research first started making headline news, and if it hadn’t been for my own personal experience of the media I really wouldn’t have believed the extent to which what you see or hear through these channels is influenced by companies who will benefit when you believe their stories. The food and drinks industry is a massively powerful force to be reckoned with. Quite apart from the direct advertising that they do—which is powerful enough—they exert a huge degree of less visible control over the information you are given and the choices available to you. The name of the game for big companies is sending out press releases, holding press conferences, wining and dining journalists and hiring the experts they need to back the stories that will benefit them.

‘I was looking at websites which talked about the effects of sugar substitutes, as I’d heard that some of them are bad for you. One site in particular did a very good job of listing everything wrong with artificial sweeteners…but it was only later that I found out that this site was hosted by a sugar company! Now I know why they said nothing at all about avoiding sugar itself.’—Sonia

Worse still, the enormous profits that the big food and drink companies make can allow them to ‘buy’ only the research they want to see done (as also happens with pharmaceutical products, of course). And if they know they aren’t going to like the results, they’re just not going to do the study. Truly independent research looking into how food can affect behaviour really has been extraordinarily limited, because, apart from a few charitable trusts, nobody has been prepared to fund this kind of work. There’s just no profit in it for the companies—and Government agencies and other conventional funding bodies have been either too blind, too conservative, or maybe too much ‘under the influence’ to look into this rather important area. As well as the conventional food industries, we have the ‘diet industry’, the ‘health food industry’ and the ‘food supplement industry’. All of them are in the business of making money, whatever else they may tell you. As long as you keep this in mind, you can actually get a lot of useful information from these sources—but always take care to read around, weigh up the different points of view, and make your own decisions.

Read around, weigh up the different points of view, and make your own decisions.