Misdirection: Food Compass Flaws

Tufts chose not to answer

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I recently read an article by The Daily Bell discussing Tufts’ recently ‘invented’ Food Compass flaws, and reeked of the same industry-influenced issues as the classic, now discredited, ‘Food Pyramid’. It prompted me to investigate, lest people get led astray.

The Food Compass was specifically invented by the "Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy" at Tufts, however for brevity I will refer to them generally as ‘Tufts’.

Journalist integrity requires you assume a neutral stance first. I figured what I would do is assess the ‘algorithm’ by which the Food Compass works, and see how accurate it was compared to evidenced nutrition. I quickly found the algorithm was not public.

All Tufts would mention on their shallow, skeleton-of-a-website was these unhelpful remarks:

Food Compass is a novel nutrient profiling system developed by researchers at Tufts University. By evaluating foods across 9 domains and using a unique algorithm to determine a score, we can assign a Food Compass Score (FCS) between 1 and 100 (with 100 being the most healthful) to nearly any food.

This tells us nothing of how the evaluation is conducted, how the scoring is done. It confirms they have a “unique algorithm”, but they fail to explain what this questionable blackbox is.

Even in their dubious peer review paper, it makes no meaningful explanation of this ‘unique algorithm’, which surely must violate scientific review if a portion of the datasets calculations are hidden from verification.

They attempt to justify the scoring system in the paper, not with real world data and people’s health, but by comparing it to other, hypothetical scoring systems:

[…] discriminant validity was confirmed from comparisons with the NOVA food processing classification, the Health Star Rating and the Nutri-Score.

If the other health scoring systems are good, why is the Food Compass needed? But if the other food scoring systems are bad, why is Tufts using it to validate their own model? For example, NOVA is oversimplified:

NOVA is a food classification system that categorises food items into one of four categories according to the extent and purpose of their processing: minimally processed food (MPF), processed culinary ingredient (PCI), processed food (PF), or ultra-processed food (UPF).

There is more to nutrition than four generic categories. Another peer review paper threw shade on the Food Compass, remarking (emphasis added):

[…] we propose that the chosen algorithm is not well justified and produces results that fail to discriminate for common shortfall nutrients, exaggerate the risks associated with animal-source foods, and underestimate the risks associated with ultra-processed foods.

The study went on to remark that they “caution” against the use of Food Compass, which is polite scientist talk for ‘this is a load of garbage, stay away’.

Tufts Stays Silent

I decided I’d contact Tufts. On their Food Compass page, they pretend that they actually want to be helpful, and claim to have an email for scientific inquiries and general inquiries:

This turned out to be completely untrue. Emailing in an attempt to give the benefit of the doubt, I received a puked automated response where Tufts were doing damage control to try to explain why chicken scored lower than processed, sugar-filled Lucky Charms. Lucky Charms also somehow beat the very substance it is often covered in, milk.

This didn’t answer my question, and none of their FAQs indicated any explanation of the algorithm or how it worked. For example, how do I independently calculate my own score to verify theirs was correct? What if I have a novel food item I’ve made myself and want to compare it? Doesn’t say.

2 weeks passed with no response. I sent a chaser email telling them if they didn’t respond, I would have to assume that their Food Compass algorithm was unscientific and subject to secrecy due to underhandedness. This time, no automated response. And underhanded it was.

Tufts Isn’t Just In Bed With The Food Industry, They Openly Copulate With It

Now, I was expecting this next part to be extremely difficult. Digging out proxy shell companies, naming names, going ‘aha, an obscure filing!’. Alas, no. Tufts are so bad at their criminal collusion and giant conflicts of interest they have a public page admitting to it.

Listed on Tuft’s “The Food & Nutrition Innovation Council” is literally an image of so many food and drinks companies you’d think it’d had been designed by a knowledgeable conspiracy theorist:

Among those include Mars - famous for unhealthy chocolate snacks, Unilever - an oversized Conglomerate with many food products, Pepsico - makers of sugary drinks, KraftHeinz - makers of a wide variety of food products, and Nestle, who along with Mars and Cargill, engage in child slavery, and in Nestle’s case, stealing water from Native people’s lands. Tufts sure knows how to pick ‘em.

But the most damning one - the one that explains why cereal does better than generic chicken - is Kelloggs, and more importantly, General Mills, the maker of Lucky Charms. Oh, is it so surprising Lucky Charms does better than chicken or milk? This obvious collusion is so bad it makes you want to vomit.

The Food Industry Don’t Just “Advise” Tufts, They Pay Them As Well

On the same page, Tufts goes on to list their membership, which is no doubt paying:

PepsiCo, one of the biggest brands (same one who tried to use human cells in flavouring) of junk, sugary drinks, is a platinum member of the Tufts “nutrition” council?

Only in crazy land could we trust this giant conflict of interest with this blackbox algorithm that Tufts refuses to disclose for meaningful independent validation. But it gets worse, Tufts decided to also sell out a Gold and Silver membership as well.

The lists are too long to screenshot, but I will copy them here. I would bold the conflicts of interest, but as you can see from the list, they’re basically all conflicts of interest:

Gold Membership:

• Brightseed

• Conagra Brands

• Grupo Bimbo

• Grupo Navis

• instacart

• Juice Press

• Kellogg’s

• Kraft Heinz

• Motif FoodWorks

• Novo Nordisk

• Simply Good Foods

Silver Membership:

• Azuluna Foods

• Barilla

• Baystate Milling

• Beyond Meat

• Big Idea Ventures

• Bunomose

• Calibrate

• Campbell’s

• ClifBar & Co.

• Danone

• DSM Nutritional Products, Inc.

• Eat Well Global, Inc

• EatWell Meal Kits

• ekaterra

• Elysium Health

• Food at Google

• Foodshot Global

• General Mills

• Good Measures

• GSK

• Hain Celestial Group

• Incredible Foods

• January, Inc.

• Kaiser Permanente

• Keurig Dr. Pepper

• KIND Snacks

• Kroger

• Mars Edge

• McCormick Science Institute

• Monj

• Mori

• Naring Health

• Nestlé

• Notemeal

• Nourished RX

• Nuritas

• Perfect Day

• PowerPlant Ventures

• Season Health

• SOSV

• sweetgreen

• Tangelo

• The Well

• Tiny Organics

• Traveling Tummies

• Unilever

• WW (Healthy Living Coalition)

Tufts’ Flimsy Covering With NGOs

Any sane person looking at that above list will rightly conclude that Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy is so horribly compromised by the foods and drinks industry that absolutely no-one should trust whatever blackbox “advice” they give out.

Buried at the bottom are ‘non-profits’ which Tufts tries to use as a flimsy covering to make themselves not look like they are blatantly shilling food and drink industry interests, but there are so few, and they aren’t paying members, that Tufts’ financial interest is to simply ignore them:

• AARP Foundation

• About Fresh

• American Cancer Society

• American Heart Association

• American Society for Nutrition

• The Angiogenesis Foundation

• Center for Science in the Public Interest

• Chop Chop Family

• Commonwealth Kitchen

• Community Servings

• The diaTribe Foundation

• Eat REAL

• Food Tank

• Global Liver Institute

• Harvard Center for Health Law & Policy Innovation

• Harvest Plus

• Hunger to Health Collaboratory (Greater Boston Food Bank)

• Mission: Readiness

• Seeding the Future Foundation

• Teens for Food Justice

• WANDA: Women Advancing Nutrition Dietetics and Agriculture

• Wholesome Wave

Do these non-profits know they’re basically associating for what is effectively a proxy arm of the Food and Drinks Industry? It is a repeat of Coke-Cola’s whitewash of “International Life Sciences Institute” which compromised the CDC a while back.

The Corruption Is Throughout

I decided to dig further into Friedman at Tufts, and see if there were any nutritional or medically qualified advisors anywhere, and unsurprisingly, there were so few, as to call Tufts claim to nutrition research into question.

The Friedman ‘Board of Advisors’ largely consist of corporate CEOs or people with what appear to be proxy shell LLC companies. For example, their “Chief Medical Officer” has no medical qualifications:

He’s not a ‘Dr’ nor an ‘MD’, nor a dietician, but he is part of “Thiel Capital LLC”, ah yes, a financial organisation, always a good trait in a medical professional.

Their founder is someone who sells fruit:

Another works for Hasbro Children’s Foundation. You know, the same Hasbro who sell children toys that promote sweets and candy:

And unsurprisingly, two of their members even work for the World Economic Forum:

Because what you really want on a board of nutrition is yet another economist who has no idea what they’re talking about.

There are (assuming I counted correctly) 39 names on the list. Do you know how many could be remotely conceived as having any medical qualifications for this role?

3.

One dietician who is also earmarked as an ‘investor’ (there’s that all important financial conflicts of interest again). One physician. And one retired ‘Assistant Clinical Professor of Medicine’. That’s it.

The rest are either part of companies, investment groups, own weird shell companies, or just have outright conflicts of interest. But it doesn’t stop there. Yes, there’s more.

Entrepreneurship Advisory Isn’t Immune Either

The issue of conflicts of interest have also spread to ‘Friedman School Entrepreneurship Advisors’, where it lists the vice president as someone who works for Dr Pepper, one listed earlier on the Silver membership:

As well as some of the same people from earlier, including someone who works for a Juice Press:

These are, supposedly, the highly qualified, neutral, professional dietician and nutritional experts. Are they? People who run juice presses and sell Dr Pepper the sugary drink to the masses? Then there’s this entry:

How does this qualify them to give advice? Apparently the only requirement to be qualified to give nutritional advice at Tufts is to invent a stupid sounding shell proxy LLC company name, and then throw money at them.

There’s More

Tufts Nutrition Council also have problems. Yes, Tufts keep inventing random nutrition groups and stuffing them with industry interests.

These are just considered ‘friends’ though, rather than formal advisors like the ever qualified, uh… World Economic Forum members. Amazingly, the Nutrition Council actually has some qualified people on it. Too bad they’re not formal advisors. This short exerpt of the list still reads like LLC proxy city though:

Ah yes, “private investor”, always the most qualified person in the room to give nutrition advice. This list seems to largely consist of various firms who sell nutrition advice, as well as a sprinkling of actual medical professionals to give the faux impression of impartiality. They actually have a pediatric dietitian for the children for once!

And yes, Sovos Brands does also sell food:

Shocking. Is it any surprise why the blackbox misdirecting Food Compass invented by food and drinks industry shell ‘Gerald J. and Dorothy R. Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy’ is kept secret from review by independent outside third parties, always pointing South towards cereal brands?

Wonder no more.

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