Opinion

Tricking the public to ‘promote’ health

New York City Health Department lawyers were in appeals court this month trying to persuade judges to resurrect Mayor Bloomberg’s big-soda ban, which a lower court nixed. But the department faces a far more basic challenge: hanging on to the public’s trust.

Indeed, the ban itself is a symbol of the type of public-health policy-making that is fueling public skepticism. It’s not just the blatant overreach in efforts like the attack on big soda that’s got folks doubting health officials — but a growing range of deceptive stunts in the name of promoting public health.

This month, for example, the city’s Health Department launched another public-education ad campaign. This one warned New Yorkers about the alleged dangers of beverages containing added sugar, including certain iced teas, juices and sports drinks. The ads — which target children, in particular — raise alarms about the alleged risk of amputated limbs caused by sweetened drinks.

Consumers are wise to be skeptical. Fact is, many drinks targeted by the department actually boast less sugar than juices containing no added sugar at all, including orange juice.

And the threat of amputation brings back memories of another deceptive anti-soda ad orchestrated last year by the mayor’s Health Department. That ad used Photoshop to remove a man’s leg from a picture and insert a crutch and claimed soda caused the man to become diabetic and lose his leg. That was untrue. The public soon learned that the man in the ad was actually an actor with two healthy legs.

In 2010, another Health Department ad claimed drinking one can of soda a day “can make you 10 pounds fatter a year.” Yet internal department e-mails showed that the city’s own chief nutritionist called the ad “absurd.” And a department marketing manager said it “would raise a lot of skepticism within the public.” The ad ran anyway after the mayor’s health commissioner overruled his advisers.

Sneaky public-health messaging appears to be on the upswing across the country, particularly when it comes to soda. In California, a taxpayer-funded group, First 5 California, recently used Photoshop to transform a healthy-weight adolescent girl drinking skim milk into an obese girl drinking from a giant sugar packet.

Similar tactics are becoming common in public-health research. In 2011, the author of a widely reported study linking soda consumption and teen violence later admitted there was no reason to think soft drinks cause teens to be violent. In 2012, a Harvard-affiliated hospital was forced to admit it had promoted a “weak” study tying aspartame, an artificial sweetener used in soda, to cancer.

And just last month, the eminent scientific journal Nature took the extraordinary step of criticizing the chairman of the Harvard School of Public Health, Walter Willett, for referring to a peer-reviewed study on obesity as “a pile of rubbish” because its results run counter to the prevailing public-health orthodoxy. Willett argued, ironically, that the authors’ exhaustive review of data on millions of people “could undermine people’s trust in science” because the results could be used to oppose policies that restrict “soft-drink and food” choices.

The public-health community in America has an important role to play in making our food safer. It helps shape strategies for reducing the transmission of communicable disease between and among people, animals and food.

But trust is an essential element of successful public-health policy-making. And public-health dishonesty breeds public mistrust.

We’ve seen this erosion of trust in other contexts. Fashion magazines like Teen Vogue have rightly drawn criticism from women’s advocates and the public-health community itself for digitally altering images of celebrities and models to make them appear thinner.

Shouldn’t the medical practitioners and academics who make up the public-health community be held to at least the same standards to which society holds the editors of Teen Vogue?

Baylen J. Linnekin is executive director of the Washington nonprofit Keep Food Legal.