Dive Brief:
- Fifth Quarter Milk allegedly wanted to time the release of a study that promoted the benefits of its chocolate milk product with the release of Will Smith's movie "Concussion," according to emails obtained by The Associated Press.
- In December, the University of Maryland publicized its study, which claimed the chocolate milk helped high school athletes recover from concussions. However, the study had not yet been published, so results weren't available.
- In a September email exchange, Fifth Quarter owner Richard Doak told University of Maryland researcher Jae Kun Shim that he wanted the press release to come out in December. That would be just before the anticipated holiday release of "Concussion," which was attracting media and consumer attention. Other emails in November showed Shim sending abstracts of the study to Doak and requesting feedback.
Dive Insight:
The chocolate milk saga doesn't bode well for industry-funded food and nutrition research or companies' relationships with academics.
Incidents like the Fifth Quarter study and the debacle with Coca-Cola and the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN), once affiliated with the University of Colorado, could also deter universities from accepting food and beverage industry money for performing research.
In both cases, the universities returned the money the company provided for the research. Whether the reputations of those universities or their researchers are at stake is unclear. But GEBN's director and University of Colorado nutrition researcher James Hill resigned from his position as executive director of the Anschutz Health and Wellness Center after Associated Press uncovered emails and evidence of funding given to him by Coca-Cola.
Without being able to partner with prominent universities, companies could find it more difficult to back the claims they want to make on their product labels with reputable, trusted science.
This week, North American Meat Institute president and CEO Barry Carpenter wrote an open letter to nutrition researchers and journal editors requesting that they publish research findings completely and promptly, despite the study's outcomes. The letter follows last week's publication of 40-year-old study that suggested saturated fat is not related to increased risk for heart disease, as has been commonly thought and propagated for decades.