Nina Teicholz: Tufts Food Compass... It's Worse Than You Thought

re: Nina Teicholz
re: follow the money

This is what you get when Big Food funds health studies: processed food with lots of sugar is great stuff!

Nina Teicholz: Tufts' Food Compass...It's Worse Than You Thought

2023-02-06. Emphasis added.

A new food rating system that gave high marks to Lucky Charms and Cocoa Puffs while belittling eggs came under fire recently, with Fox News taking it to task in several segments (one with me), and Joe Rogan posting that the rankings were “complete, undeniable, indefensible bullshit.”

This sounds harsh, and the lead author, from Tufts University, pushed back, saying his system—called the “Food Compass”—was actually “more holistic” than most such rubrics and had been misrepresented. So I took another look, and here’s what I found: the Food Compass is even worse than I’d thought. And Tufts is funded by quite a few of the same companies whose ultra-processed foods are awarded top rankings. 

I made some new charts from the data. For instance: 

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Given Mozaffarian’s scope of influence, it’s worth scrutinizing his work on the Food Compass—especially since Tufts in a press release makes clear its full ambition for this product, to be used for consumer choices, industry reformulations, investor decisions, government policies, programs, and among other things, “marketing to children.” 

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WIND: don’t let your six-year-old get ahold of this! Or your doctor.

Garbage like this is how the Big Food industry profits from harming hundreds of millions of people here in the USA, and makes them grist for the millstones of Big Medicine and Big Pharma—it’s a beautifully efficient albeit evil system.