Hi Harold!

The Washington Post published a detailed exposé last week.
They found that dietitians, along with a physician influencer and a fitness influencer, had been paid to make social media videos by lobbying groups that included the American Beverage Association (which represents corporations such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo) and the Canadian Sugar Institute.
Why does this matter?A bunch of these paid influencer videos were saying that the World Health Organization’s recent aspartame safety report was overblown. Basically, they were telling viewers that aspartame is safe, ya dummy, and to stop listening to the fearmongers.Alas, most of the influencers didn’t make it clear that they were paid by the American Beverage Association — the very same lobby that’s trying to protect sales of aspartame-containing sodas.To some extent, I get it. Everybody’s got bills to pay. And I’m sure that some of these influencers genuinely thought that aspartame safety concerns were overblown.But the videos were irredeemably flawed: very few to none of these people have the time or expertise to read through the dozens of key aspartame studies to really understand the complex science. So really, most of these influencers were parroting someone else’s view. And that someone else happened to be one of the most powerful political lobbies in the country.Examine doesn’t do parroting. For example, I spent nearly a week reading the full text of aspartame studies for an email we sent you a couple months ago, yet I barely scratched the surface of the safety topic. I still have around a dozen studies left in my reading queue before we can release a part two that digs further into aspartame safety.
What else do the beverage companies influence?Perhaps you’ve seen studies on how these companies and their lobbying groups influence public and academic institutions in the United States, Mexico, and Brazil. They may have even played a major role in shaping dietary guidelines and shifting blame away from sugar and toward fat in the past few decades.Sometimes these companies are nefariously doing whatever’s possible and quasi-legal to attain that sweet, sweet cash (pun intended). Other times, the issues aren’t so cut and dry, and they aren’t really being villainous.For example, a tax on sugary beverages might help reduce consumption in at-risk populations, but it could also just shift purchasing to other sugary foods.Such a tax could also be a slippery slope: what else that’s deemed unhealthy could be taxed? What if the evidence changes concerning what’s healthy? Is it the government’s role to regulate these things? What does agency mean when it comes to adulthood? What is the meaning of life?!Sorry, spun out a bit there. Back on track now.
What’s the takeaway?While Examine is the biggest nutrition research website, our social media following is tiny, numbering in the tens of thousands. Meanwhile, the influencers in the Washington Post article collectively reached millions of followers.Examine relies on word of mouth way more than the websites that surround ours in search results. That’s why our readership tends to be made up of some of the most smart, discerning, and curious people around.But it’s an uphill battle competing against companies a thousand times bigger than us, who churn out surface-level content without any plans to update it, or against influencers who won’t hesitate to do whatever needs to be done to get clicks.I’ve thought about these issues when it comes to myself, as well. A few years ago, my mom mentioned my childhood friend had become a sales and marketing vice president at a massive food conglomerate. His yearly salary is over 20 times higher than mine. Not 20 percent higher, 20 times higher. I can only imagine how many bathrooms his house has. Do the “lesser bathrooms” ever get used?? Anyway, my mom eventually suggested that I switch careers.Usually I just nod and say “yeah, yeah, okay”. She raised us on a waitress salary as a single mom without child support, so I can’t exactly blame her for promoting high income jobs. But this time I actually spoke up.I told her that I don’t begrudge my childhood friend his job, but that job represents everything I stand against. I don’t want to contribute to people buying more mass-produced, hyperpalatable food that a substantial portion will overeat and develop health conditions from. I myself have a tough health condition (Ehlers-Danlos syndrome) and could not knowingly contribute to other people feeling bad, even if it’s technically their choice to buy and eat these foods.So yeah, Examine is small and resource-constrained, and my childhood friend could probably buy the whole company himself. When we put out a couple YouTube videos in the next weeks, they’ll be filmed in my tiny apartment and might not have the highest production quality. We’re releasing new website features much more regularly now, but it could be much quicker if we had more resources.But on the flip side, you won’t ever have to question our motives: Examine is chock full of objective, dogma-free researchers who chose this company because there’s truly no other one like it. And I hope you learn something useful once in a while from us, because that’s what keeps driving us to do good research … even if we’ll never obtain an elite bathroom:bedroom ratio in our homes. 
Sincerely,

Kamal Patel
Co-founder, Examine