The Sidebar

In February 2014, David Katz MPH ’93, the director of the Yale School of Medicine’s Prevention Research Center, wrote two glowing online reviews of a science-fiction novel called reVision.

In his biweekly column in The Huffington Post, Katz lauded the book’s “lyrically beautiful writing,” comparing it to the work of a veritable “who’s who” of great writers, including Plato, John Milton and Charles Dickens. “I finished with a sense of illumination from a great source,” he concluded.

...But Katz omitted a crucial detail from both reviews: the subject of his praise was his own self-published passion project, released two months earlier under the pseudonym Samhu Iyyam.

David Katz SPH ’93 — the Yale-affiliated doctor whose over-the-top Huffington Post review of his own self-published novel caused a furor in the nutrition community last year — has once again tested the boundaries of ethical journalism.

In another column for The Huffington Post over the summer, Katz lambasted the Massachusetts-based supermarket chain Big Y, calling its ad campaign for the In-Vince-Ible Pizza, a fatty snack named after NFL star Vince Wilfork, “deeply disturbing.” He described the pizza as symptomatic of the obesity epidemic in America, and questioned the parenting skills of Wilfork, who appears alongside his son in ads for the product.

...But nowhere in the May article, which also appeared in the New Haven Register, did Katz mention another crucial detail: Big Y is not just any supermarket. Just one month before the column was published, Big Y cut ties with a nutritional ratings service, NuVal, that Katz established in 2008 and has passionately championed ever since.

I keep turning up in the Yale Daily News lately...Alas, the coverage is all negative.

They reported that I wrote a blog in the 3rd person about my self-published fantasy/adventure novel (which, by the way, my Mother and I think is very good) when the publisher suggested it. In a bizarre story in The Guardian allegedly about the history of sugar, which the writer got substantially wrong, I was horribly misquoted on a topic that was never on the record in the first place. The Yale Daily News never even asked me if I said what I allegedly said (I did not), but they did repeat it, and built a story around that, too. Most recently, I challenged the propriety of a local grocer’s ads for maximizing meat intake, and linking it to ‘invincible’ health against all evidence. That third item was in the Yale Daily News this week.

...(The YDN’s) negative interest in me began exactly when I took a prominent, public position in support of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee Report; when I campaigned for the inclusion of sustainability in the Dietary Guidelines for Americans; and when I confronted the cabal working to undermine these very things, and peddle more meat.

That’s the common element in this otherwise random coverage: meat.

...That the agents of meat should come after me should surprise no one. When Oprah Winfrey highlighted some of the abuses involved in the mass production of beef in the U.S., they went after her. If Oprah’s platform does not dissuade attack, mine certainly will not.

...The agents of meat, apparently, sift social media daily looking for dirt on me, and have done so for the past two years at least. They don’t find much, because there isn’t much- but they make the most of what they find. And when they can’t make a story of the latest fleck themselves, they peddle it to the Yale Daily News, which is apparently always ready to buy it, few if any questions asked.

In the mid-2000s, a (Griffin Hospital-based) team developed a nutrition scoring algorithm that aimed to improve upon existing nutrition labels displayed on products. In 2008, the hospital parent's for-profit subsidiary, GH Ventures, formed NuVal LLC with Illinois-based Topco Associates to market the system to supermarkets.

Today, NuVal ratings -- displayed on blue octagonal stickers -- can be found in the aisles of Big Y, Price Chopper and a number of other grocery chains.

[New England supermarket chain] Big Y adopted NuVal, a service that assigns numerical scores to food products based on their nutritional value, six years ago as part of an effort to promote healthy eating habits. But last April the chain dropped NuVal because of concerns that its ratings algorithm was out of date.

...Claire D’Amour-Daley, chief communications officer for Big Y, told the News that the chain dropped NuVal because the algorithm is out of date and customers are increasingly able to make savvy nutritional decisions on their own.

This particular pizza, and the marketing campaign in which it figures, are both noteworthy in a variety of deeply disturbing ways for anyone who has heard the rumors about the state of either public health (i.e., epidemic obesity, epidemic diabetes, etc.), or the planet (i.e., climate change, water shortages, habitat destruction, etc.). You see, it is not just any pizza.

The pizza in question is called the In-Vince-Ible pizza, presumably both because it is just too “good” to be beaten by any other pizza, and because it is fronted by Vince Wilfork, a NFL defensive tackle currently with the Houston Texans, but known and loved here in Connecticut for his 11-year-run with the New England Patriots. This pizza is the younger sibling in the franchise, expanding the brand established with the In-Vince-Ible sandwich.

The sandwich features a pound of meat, comprising ham, pepperoni, hard salami, and capicola ham. The pedigree of the meats in question is not provided, but given the prevailing norms, one presumes that both cattle and pigs were harmed in the making of this meal.

...Where the likes of this pizza and sandwich...are introduced, health is devastated, and in short order.

...If our culture tells us it’s fine to market even to children the very products most certain to steal years from their lives and life from their years...

...And all of this says nothing about the environmental costs of that pizza and sandwich.

I confess to even greater concern about Vince’s young son, who also figures in the ad campaign. We look on as Vince encourages his son to eat like a man. Alas, this young boy is learning to eat in a manner that threatens to give his generation a shorter life expectancy than ours...

(Dr. David) Katz was at the Big Y store in Ansonia Friday to help promote the store's implementation of NuVal, an index that ranks food items from 1 to 100, with a higher ranking signifying a healthier food. More than 30 nutrients and nutrition factors are taken into account in the ranking. The system, which Katz helped create a few years ago, takes the guesswork out of healthy eating.

NuVal is a collaboration between Griffin Hospital in Derby and Topco Associates, an Illinois-based food industry cooperative whose members include Big Y.

On Sept. 9, Massachusetts-based Big Y became the latest chain to adopt the system.

The program fits in perfectly with the chain's nutrition program "Living Well Eating Smart," said Big Y dietician Carrie Taylor during a Friday press conference at the Ansonia store.

...Most people don't have time to thoroughly examine the nutritional labels on every item they buy and assess which choices are the healthiest, Katz said. Thus, they're susceptible to misleading packaging that touts a product as "reduced fat" or "low sugar." "If you try to improve health one nutrient at a time, you're probably going to get duped by Madison Avenue," Katz said.

When you go public with your opinions, you are apt at times to ruffle some feathers, intentionally or otherwise...They are likely to assault you...with a fairly standard two-step method. Step 1 is the deft and veiled conversion of what should be a content-based exchange into an ad hominem attack. Step 2, in the service of step 1, is indictment by innuendo.

Since her book (The Big Fat Surprise) was published, in 2014, Teicholz has become an advocate for better dietary guidelines.

...(On September 23) last year she wrote an article for the BMJ (formerly the British Medical Journal), which makes the case for the inadequacy of the scientific advice that underpins the Dietary Guidelines. The response of the nutrition establishment was ferocious: 173 scientists...signed a letter to the BMJ, demanding it retract the piece.

...Reticent as they were to discuss the substance of the piece, the scientists were noticeably keener to comment on its author. I was frequently and insistently reminded that Teicholz is a journalist, and not a scientist, and that she had a book to sell, as if this settled the argument. (David Katz, of Yale) told me that Teicholz’s work “reeks of conflict of interest” without specifying what those conflicts were. (Dr Katz is the author of four diet books.)

...(Dr Katz) returned again and again to the subject of Teicholz’s character. “Nina is shockingly unprofessional…I have been in rooms filled with the who’s who of nutrition and I have never seen such unanimous revulsion as when Miss Teicholz’s name comes up. She is an animal unlike anything I’ve ever seen before.” Despite requests, he cited no examples of her unprofessional behaviour.

I am writing to you to express my shock and disappointment on the recently published comments of one of your most prominent faculty members, Dr David Katz MD.

...This highly personal, sexist, and vitriolic attack on the character of Miss Teicholz, without any discussion or consideration of the scientific rigour underpinning her ideas, reflects very poorly on the professionalism of Dr Katz.

Scientific progress relies on debate and seeking the truth, even when it may not fit With current dogma. Miss Teicholz's work may have caused consternation within the highly polarised nutrition field, however this challenge to the orthodoxy should be welcomed in the spirit of scientific enquiry.

Bullying in any circumstances should be abhorred, and in line with your 'Standards of Faculty conduct', and I hope you will be taking this matter further.

A column entitled "The Questionable Link Between Saturated Fat and Heart Disease" appeared in the Wall Street Journal on Saturday, May 3. The article starts off very dubiously when the author, Nina Teicholz, tells us that a now somewhat infamous study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine in March concluded, quote, that “saturated fat does not cause heart disease.”

...The plot then quickly thickens, and goes on to curdle, for we learn at the end of the Wall Street Journal piece that Ms. Teicholz has a book due out next week, entitled The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet. So whatever else the recent Annals paper is or isn’t, it was clearly a nice marketing opportunity for Ms. Teicholz and her publisher.

...Ms. Teicholz seems inclined to play the iconoclast card. It’s getting old, frankly, but it generally does work to sell books. So she may well wind up rolling her eyes at this column on the way to cash her royalty checks.

Defending public health IS my day job, and I do that with all the gusto I can muster. I trust, and hope, that devotion is evident in the hundreds, and indeed thousands, of blogs and columns I have written across many platforms - almost all, as a free public service.

In the course of that duty, I had cause to call out the misrepresentations of an author [Nina Teicholz -- click the link] opposing the evidence-based and consensus-based recommendations of actual nutrition experts, and promoting her book into the bargain. I did not know this person - and still do not - and had no interest in confrontations about personhood or character.

...What I have learned since is something well known to those who care about diet, health, and related nutrition policy. The writer in question [Teicholz] is apparently backed by billionaires with ties to such enterprises as Enron, and the beef industry. 

...This group is clearly very good at what it does. They have seemingly had a hand in persuading Congress to expunge sustainability from the Dietary Guidelines already.

...And that’s where the dots finally all connect.

...In the current case [his Huffington Post columns hyping reVision], it is now clear that the aspersions directed at me were of the “keep throwing dirt until something sticks” variety.

...Of course, glaciers are still melting; California is still running out of water. Storms are getting larger, temperatures rising, and biodiversity falling. There are ever more Homo sapiens, ever less of everything else that matters. And rabid ideologues, who have somehow perverted purposeless hatred into a religion, are wreaking the havoc of terrorism around the globe, and pose a threat to us all. And while on such happy topics, yes, national nutrition policy is imperiled by those who derive profits elsewhere, and yes - Congress has decided we may just go ahead and eat our children’s food.

(Science) is about the incremental additions of each new study to what we knew before...But between us and that opportunity are the parasites of science who have no apparent interest in the weight of evidence, and instead feed selectively on studies depending on whether they endorse the opinion they’ve already decided is true.