US dietitians & their monopoly on dietary advice

Introduction

When you receive this, I will be on the plane on the way back from Madison, Wisconsin. I was delighted to be invited to speak at the CrossFit Health conference on Wednesday 31st July (along with Peter Goetze, Gary Taubes, David Diamond, Uffe Ravnskov and Dominic D'Agostino) and then to attend the legendary CrossFit games, which took place from Thursday 1st until Sunday 4th August. I was at the games strictly as an observer – just watching the competitors is exhausting!

CrossFit Health was created by CrossFit founder, Greg Glassman, as an exploration of "The Mess" we currently find ourselves in. My brief for the presentation was to read an article that describes “The Mess” and to see where my areas of expertise and interest could complement this theme (Ref 1). I highly recommend that you read the article – it will only take a couple of minutes.

The article inspired me to explore “The Mess” by building on some research that I did for my 2010 obesity book: The Obesity Epidemic: What caused it? How can we stop it? Chapter 15 in that book examined conflicts of interest in the public health arena. In particular, I researched and reported on conflicts between big food and organisations disseminating official dietary advice. Nowhere is this more powerfully demonstrated than in America…

The opening to my presentation:

Imagine that…

You are a multi-billion dollar ‘food’ company…

Advice that supports your products would be really helpful…

Public health advisors who promote your products would be even more helpful…

Those public health advisors having a monopoly in giving dietary advice…

Now that would be really helpful…

That is exactly what has been established in the US.