Talk:British Nutrition Foundation

Untitled

This reads like a promotional piece for this organisation.

There is no mention of the sugar/bottled water/chocolate manufacturers that fund them.

Also, should maybe mention that legally anyone can call themselves a nutritionist in the UK so the term has no real meaning.

Spin

Bias would be putting it incredibly mildly. Until now, this entire article has been a piece of advertising for the BNF. Sadly, all that had been 'improved' up till now was the quality of the spin language (most impressive it was, too!). I have overhauled the entire article, re-organising it to match a more standard Wikipedia format, removing large chunks of text that were nothing but spin, and carefully editing the language to approach a more objective tone.

I also added the 'Criticism' section, which was entirely absent previously, and which certainly seems noteworthy.

Let's hope the BNF don't get too upset at losing the free advertising they've had from Wikipedia over the past few years! Will be watching this one...

Richardsg213 (talk) 18:02, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

Update:

The BNF clearly went to a bit of effort to add a long piece on all of the wonderful things they do. However, I took issue with the following:

1) Repetitive. It kept hammering home the same lines over and over, which made it sound suspiciously like advertising.

2) Biased tone. It was written as though it is completely plain and obvious to all right-thinking persons that the BNF are lovely and benevolent and everything they do is perfectly wonderful and they are impugnable champions of pure science and reason. In short, it read like an advertising piece. It was not written in an appropriate fashion for an encyclopedia article.

3) References. There were none. Not a one. And it had even done away with the references that were in places in the previous version.

Richardsg213 (talk) 13:36, 13 April 2013 (UTC)

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Article revision

The current version of the BNF article has broken links, incomplete references and is not particularly informative. Rather than make separate comments or individual edits, it is perhaps simpler to do a full redraft, as follows:

British Nutrition Foundation

Abbreviation	BNF
Formation	1967
Legal status	Registered charity; Company limited by guarantee
Purpose	Provision of information on nutrition science
Location	New Derwent House, 69-73 Theobalds Road, London
Region served	UK
CEO	Elaine Hindal
Main organ	BNF Council
Website	www.nutrition.org.uk

The British Nutrition Foundation is a British registered charity and company limited by guarantee that works to share scientific knowledge and advice on diet, physical activity and health.

Activities

The BNF aims to give the general public, educators and organisations access to reliable information on nutrition. Its website provides details on healthy, sustainable diets, on nutrition at different life stages, on diet in relation to health issues and on putting advice on diet and nutrition into practice. Training is provided through online courses and webinars, with past webinars available on the website, together with videos of previous annual conferences. The organisation runs an annual “Healthy Eating Week” each June.

The BNF manages the educational programme Food – a fact of life (FFL). This is designed to support teachers by providing accessible information on diet and health for children and young people progressively through the ages 3 years to 16+ years. It was originally launched in 1991 in a partnership with MAFF that continued until 1997. The BNF continued to develop the educational resources and from 2018 the FFL programme has been a partnership between the BNF and the Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board.

The official journal of the BNF, Nutrition Bulletin, is an international, peer-reviewed journal published quarterly by Wiley. Its coverage has included review articles and news items on nutrition, but since acquisition of an impact factor and MEDLINE coverage an increasing number of papers reporting original research have been included; many articles are open-access.

Governance

Under its Memorandum and Articles of Association, the Board may comprise no more than 12 Trustees. Trustees are appointed by the Board and serve for a term of three years, with each Trustee able to serve for a maximum of nine years; membership of the Board is weighted towards the scientific academic community. As a charity largely funded by corporate donations from food industry organisations, the BNF maintains its independence through advisory and scientific committees, an Editorial Advisory Board, educational working groups and a register of interests for Board members and senior managers.

Finances

In 2021-22, the charity had an income of £1.35million, with an expenditure of £1.33million.

Criticism of food industry links

A 1985 World in Action documentary interviewed Derek Shrimpton, a previous director general at BNF, who said: "In the period I was there the foundation was solely taken up with defence actions for the industry." He also said that BNF worked to frustrate government committees working on policies to reduce sugar, salt, and fat consumption.

In 2005, 26 UK MPs signed an Early Day Motion in Parliament concerning the BNF advising the government on food nutrition while receiving funds from the food industry.

Further concerns about the BNF's relationship with the food industry were raised in a 2010 British Medical Journal article, also published in a shortened form in The Independent, which criticized the way in which the BNF was treated as a source of impartial nutritional information by the media, usually without describing the industry ties, with funding members including, for example, Cadbury, Kellogg and McDonalds. It also criticized the UK government for paying the BNF to develop educational materials on nutrition, and quoted Tim Lobstein, a director at the International Association for the Study of Obesity-International Obesity Task Force (now the World Obesity Federation), saying that some BNF educational materials seem to support industry messages.

External links

• Nutrition Bulletin journal homepage

This revision has been prepared without the knowledge of BNF, although I intend to advise them of it. To allow a little time for comments, I plan to replace the existing article text on 15 September. Douglian30 (talk) 10:05, 5 September 2023 (UTC)

I have no voluntary relation to the BNF and no COI with respect to this article. The UK government has funded the BNF, and I've used services supported by that goverment, like mandated UK food labelling, that have been influenced by the BNF. I have not knowingly received any benefits from the BNF, directly or indirectly, since I cannot count using services influenced by its lobbying as a benefit.

Thank you for your clean-up, Douglian30. I really don't think you have any obligation to inform the article subject, and if they have any comments, they should make them here, in public. The conntent was a mess largely because single-purpose accounts have regularly removed critical information from this page, and inserted PR content, including copyvio. See:

• user Bbenelam updates address and removes and softens crit
• information on COIs removed from lede
• ...and replaced with talk of "charity mission"
• a user called "British Nutrition Foundation" removes all the critical content and replaces it with PR -like content; two months later, Mean as custard reverted "to less blatantly promotional version".

Can we have a consensus for the following points?

1. WP:ABOUTSELF applies; information about the BNF can be cited to the BNF only if it is boring, uncontested, objective, apolitical stuff, like their address. Stuff about their purpose and vision can't.
2. fundamental criticism of the BNF is in itself notable, and should be mentioned in the lede
   1. the BNF is a food industry lobby group, taking funding primarily from the food industry, to promote policies that favour the industry, and not a neutral, unbiassed body or an independent or reliable source of public health information. It is consistently described as a food-industry group by genuine third parties from Briish Parliamentarians to the British Medical Journal. It should be described as such in the lede, with details in the body.
   2. reliable sources also describe the BNF as attempting to hide its links to industry (e.g. the BNF article summary, in toto: "The British Nutrition Foundation promotes itself as a source of impartial information, but as Phil Chamberlain reports, it does not always make its links with industry clear"). This information should also be in the lede, with details in the body.
   • per WP:CRITS, we should avoid sectioning off the criticism in its own section.

I would like a consensus on these changes so that they don't get reverted again. I will also tag this article as having COI editors.

All contributors to this discussion should begin by stating any conflicts of interest they have, such as any connection to the BNF or its industry funders. Current or past employment to do PR for them is a COI. Anyone who has received a salary, contract, payments etc. from the BNF or any of the industry groups we are discussing is required by Wikipedia policy to declare them, before editing the article. Please declare here and on your user page; read Wikipedia:Conflict of interest for details. HLHJ (talk) 14:10, 17 August 2024 (UTC)

I undertook the September 2023 rewrite of the article on the BNF because previously the article had oscillated between extremely anti-BNF texts concentrating on historic criticism and pro-BNF texts of blatant promotion. Both were far from NPOV, which was an objective I feel that the revision achieved, although some may disagree. The Talk draft of the revision did not elicit any comments before going live. The revision has now been replaced by an anti-BNF text that perpetuates the position of the earlier non-NPOV versions. What is the justification for this? Douglian30 (talk) 01:36, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

I agree that it would be good to have more recent reliable sources. I couldn't find any independent pro-BNF sources, or any sources saying the concerns raised a decade ago are now resolved. I tried to reflect the balance of reliable sources in the article, without falling into bothsideism or quoting the BNF on itself. I think I could also cite some content on the specific positions that the BNF has taken on policy questions, like sugar taxes; I'd be happy quoting the BNF for things like whether the BNF supported or opposed a sugar tax in year X. Obviously I'm not omniscient; suggestions on sources welcome. I'd also very much welcome comment on any of my points raised above. HLHJ (talk) 09:51, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

I see in my notifications that you've e-mailed me, but I'm not able to read my e-mail at the moment; it'll be a couple weeks at least. Apologies, I should perhaps have turned off the feature, but no-one's used it for years. Per WP:EMAIL, I'd prefer to discuss the article content publicly, especially given the topic. If it's about COIs, those really do need to be posted publicly. If you are sure you need to talk to someone about COIs privately, it would be appropriate to talk to the Wikipedia:Arbitration Committee privately. If you e-mailed me about something other than this article's content or COIs (I don't think we've interacted before?) and it really can't wait, I'll see what I can do. HLHJ (talk) 16:29, 18 August 2024 (UTC)

The text of my email was:

Thank you for the reply to my comment. I kept this general, rather than commenting on the specific points that you raised, because we were coming from very different starting points. However, your reply suggests that we should collaborate to find common ground and see if we can come up with agreed revisions to the BNF article. I feel that we should do this through email discussion between the two of us and then post further, joint comments to the Talk page. How do you feel about that?

As far as I know, there are no COIs involved.

My question amounted to why was an anti-BNF text preferred to an NPOV one. Your implied reply was that that is what reliable sources say. Unfortunately, reliable sources overall are inevitably biased, since criticism is newsworthy and gets published, whereas corrective action is not and does not. My addition of the section on Governance, based on the annual report submitted to the Charity Commission rather than just the BNF website, was intended to use an authoritative document to show the current situation and provide a balanced NPOV. The added statement that “[Paul Hebblethwaite] is also chairman of the Biscuit, Cake, Chocolate and Confectionery Trade Association” is almost certainly incorrect and at the very least, if it remains outside quotation marks, should be in the past tense. There are 14 citations of the Chamberlain (2010) publication, which seems excessive for a critique that is bound to be out-of-date in various regards. I can address your more detailed comments later, but that’s probably enough for now. Douglian30 (talk) 23:38, 19 August 2024 (UTC)

I understand you to say that you don't have any conflicts of interest relating to this article (please correct me if I've misunderstood). That's great.

I'd really prefer to discuss this in public, especially as the topic is clearly critically politically important to the BNF, and the article seems to have attracted COI editing in the past. Public discussion is generally recommended in this sort of case, to avoid a possible appearance of impropriety.

You're quite right that the info about Paul Hebblethwaite is too dated to be likely to be correct. I've rewritten that content accordingly.

NPOV on Wikipedia is defined as "what the reliable sources say". WP:NPOV begins:

All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.

It is perfectly possible for reliable sources, individually or as a whole, to be biassed with respect to reality, or plain wrong. The balance of reliable sources has said that continental drift has no plausible physical mechanism, that the US is certainly never violated its own ban on selling arms to Iran, and so on. Wikipedia is primarily a tertiary source, based on secondary sources. If the secondary sources are wrong, Wikipedia will be wrong. If they are biassed, Wikipedia will be biassed. If they are out-of-date, Wikipedia will be out-of-date. By core policy, Wikipedia does not take any notice of primary sources, which in this case includes any materials written by the BNF, regardless of whom they were written for, or how much authority they may have (with a minor exception for trivial stuff like the physical address).

Chamberlain is a thorough, in-depth, solidly reliable source on the BNF, better than any of the others; the article indeed relies heavily on it, though the other RS cited generally concur with it. Relying heavily on a source, or even citing only one source for an entire article, while not ideal, is not a violation of policy; citing the BNF's interpretations of itself would be. I'll try to find some more reliable sources and add them in the future. HLHJ (talk) 11:05, 21 August 2024 (UTC)

August 2024 revisions

As the previous discussion is merged with text about the earlier revision, I will comment on your points under this new topic “August 2024 revisions”. The comments relate to my rewrite of September 2023; we know that any earlier texts where there may be COI can be ignored. UL = Unnumbered (i.e. bullet) points and OL = Numbered points.

UL1 and UL3: Pre-2023.

UL2: The COI statement in the lede was removed by the Wikipedia administrator Diannaa, who also in 2023 helped me resolve the supposed copyright issue, which wasn’t the case for a public document available under an Open Government Licence. Referring to the 2021 change, it is now clear that it was a case of violating one’s own copyright. (Is that possible? Or is blocking the right to copy the violation? Just a thought!)

UL4: Part of the pre-September 2023 toing and froing that caused me to consider that a complete rewrite was necessary.

OL1: No, because if the material is not cited, it cannot be criticised. For example, in the present version of the article, the statement “Self-stated: provision of information on nutrition science” cannot be verified. Specifically, an organisation’s mission statement should be summarised and cited if conformance to it is to be criticised. The final sentence of the present article begins “The BNF website says…” – yes, but irrelevant. The information is correctly cited to the annual report, publicly available through the Charity Commission website. The present text does cite a BNF webpage: "Who we are, what we do", dated 2009 and retrieved 4 April 2011. This linked reference is no longer available and cannot be verified (and, of course, is probably out-of-date). Reference to this former webpage should be removed.

OL2: Possibly, but certainly not in the opening sentence. This is an article about the “BNF”, not “Criticism of the BNF”. (See also UL2, above)

OL2.1: This paragraph is a summary of opinions (well founded or not) from the past (2005 and 2010, respectively), dressed in the present tense. For up-to-date criticism it would be better to look at the current issue of Ultra Processed Foods as the most pertinent starting point, perhaps then relating this to the earlier criticism.

OL2.2: Again the problem of tense. “Chamberlain report[ed], it does not always make its links with industry clear". Exactly, and BNF has gone to considerable lengths to address this, for example in the attributions of Nutrition Bulletin articles. With regard to Nutr. Bull., the 2012 criticism predates the 2023 citation describing a major editorial upgrade. Its citation is accompanied by a request for a better source. Does this imply that the existing text will be deleted if no improved reference is forthcoming? If possible, a post-upgrade review of the journal should be cited, but it might be a while before this appears, if it does at all.

WP:CRITS: In the Sept. 2023 text, the section on criticism was fully titled Historic criticism, and as such was a separate section, but I decided that that title might be considered too controversial.

The latest comments about Wikipedia are concerning, particularly those in bold. Some information morphs in time into misinformation and this is an increasing problem for many information collections. Wikipedia is an important source for search systems that generate textual responses and its policies and their application must reflect this. Thus the tense for expressions of opinion on situations that are likely to change should probably follow Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Dates and numbers#Statements likely to become outdated rather than Wikipedia:Manual of Style#Verb tense. Douglian30 (talk) 10:04, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry to be so insistent, Douglian30, but could you please make a clear statement describing your relationship to the BNF and its funders? It's just that "As far as I know, there are no COIs involved" is a bit vague, and the sort of thing I have previously heard from PR professionals insisting that their relationship with a subject is not a COI because they just want to provide information. I'll be happy to respond to you again once you've done this.

I do not think that the intense COI that the BNF has is likely to change (nor does Chamberlain). Nor do I see any evidence that it is historic. There is an obvious conflict between serving the financial interests of its funders and providing accurate information about which of its funders' products are healthy or unhealthy. This has not changed. It is very important, and it is the main thing the reliable sources are concerned with.

Their second-biggest concern is the BNF's lack of transparency about this COI. I did a quick 2024 search and looked at a half-dozen plus news articles, publications, etc. by or mentioning the BNF. None mentioned that the BNF was industry-funded. The closest any of them got to disclosure was an "About the BNF" link that lead to a text saying

"Changing the food environment – we work with partners from across the food system including the food industry, advocating for change to make it easier to have a healthy diet and lifestyle.... an interface between stakeholders in universities, industry, government, research, healthcare, education and media."

Which really doesn't say that this registered charity gets most of its money and employees from the food industry. So if the BNF has addressed the problem of it presenting itself as a neutral, objective, independent party, it has done a stunningly incompetent job. Putting a COI declaration at the top of all online publications would be a considerable effort; not mentioning it even in an about page linked from the bottom doesn't even show willing. And perhaps this is not surprising, because the BNF has very strong financial motivations to conceal its COIs.

If you want to try to change Wikipedia's core policies, the place to do that is Wikipedia:Village pump (policy). But these policies have been very actively developed over -- whoa, nearly a quarter-century -- and all the obvious alternatives are worse. HLHJ (talk) 19:51, 23 August 2024 (UTC)

Please, HLHJ, “don’t shoot the messenger”. Over 50 years ago, I was taught to write NPOV so-called Evaluative Reports on contentious issues and similar principles applied to my subsequent work on abstracting and indexing chemical primary publications, according to strict (American) editorial rules. The latter 25 years of my working life were spent on the management of food composition data, until my retirement 10 years ago. Since then until I wrote my note, I had had no contact with anyone involved with my work on food information, although a couple of days ago BNF did contact me (presumably in belated response to my notification of the September 2023 revision) for (unpaid) advice on the current situation.

As a result of my background, I found the extremely biased anti-BNF and pro-BNF texts for the BNF article very unsuitable for an encyclopedia such as Wikipedia; the September 2023 revision attempted to provide an NPOV alternative. No comments were made on the draft or on the live article until the present undiscussed reversion to an anti-BNF stance.

My concern about information morphing into misinformation is a wider danger than just for Wikipedia, as my Talk topic for Creatinine shows. The latest research shows that in the normal aqueous or solid state only the 2-amino tautomer occurs, with the 2-imino tautomer only detectable in the gaseous state. Many databases, considered reliable, still report the structure and/or name of the 2-imino form as the preferred option. Identifying such situations “manually” probably wouldn’t be cost-effective, but this might be an application for automatic procedures, perhaps supported by AI. Over time, this will be an increasing problem and needs to be addressed.

Returning to the revised BNF article, some statements have been extracted outside the context of the source text. The fact that “(the UK has no requirements for the titles "nutritionist", unlike "dieticians", who must be registered)” arises because dieticians provide medical advice directly to members of the public in respect of their diet. Other nutritionists will either have taken the same degree course or moved from a related field, usually the chemical sciences on the one hand or the medical sciences on the other. The source explains the requirements to be on the voluntary register of nutritionists, as well as describing the role of nutritionists. It doesn’t mention the BNF and is only relevant to the articles on Nutritionist and Dietitian. This is a comment added by a Wikipedia editor; it and the reference should be removed. For the current controversy on UPFs, the cited source is a second-hand report of a position statement by the BNF, but which re-states the reasoning behind the BNF view. Why is the April 2023 BNF statement not referenced in the Wikipedia article? Even the re-statement includes the BNF reasoning, which is necessary to give context. Although the UPF issue post-dates my retirement by some time, I did work in considerable detail on food description systems and appreciate that the issues of definition will be daunting, if not insurmountable. Whether this is the BNF being realistic or dragging its feet depends on one’s prejudices, but at least its reasoning should be mentioned.

If you continue to have doubts on my “good faith”, it might be best to post them to my User Talk page so that they are available to readers of my comments to other articles. In the meantime, I look forward to discussing further the points that I have raised. Douglian30 (talk) 11:08, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry, I didn't mean to doubt your good faith! I honestly don't. I did suspect you might work in the food industry, possibly in PR. I have doubted your knowledge of some Wikipedia policies, including the COI rules, but I really don't mean that as an insult. You're a newer editor, and I wouldn't expect any editor to know everything.

Thank you for that statement. Okay, so you worked in the food industry until 10 years ago, and then you haven't had contact with anyone related to your former work. Since the BNF is funded by an impressively catholic list of food companies, would I be right to assume that your job meant having dealings with them? Would I also be right to assume that you've had no involvement with the food industry (beyond eating food, obviously ) in the last 10 years? Would I be right to assume that your first contact with the BNF was their message a couple days ago, and before that you had no direct relationship with them?

I'd suggest to the folk at the BNF, who are presumably reading this, that they communicate with both of us in public, on-wiki, for the sake of transparency and avoiding 瓜田李下. They don't even need to create an account to join in. I imagine this is irrelevant, but I should mention that if you do accept any benefits from the BNF, you need to declare it on your user page right away.

I added that comment in order to explain to the reader what on earth vocational qualifications have to do with nutrition. I didn't include the BNFs reasons for opposing regulation of UFS because the reasons seemed pretty template, and very similar to the reasons used to oppose most regulations, and because I'd have to find much more solid sources to provide context by evaluating those reasons; I really can't cite a statement by the BNF for biomedical infomation. I can add some more content on that, but it will take time, and the interested reader can always click on the cite and read the source.

I've added a 2023/2024 source that very strongly supports the statement that the BNF's COIs and lack of tranparency about them are still issues, establishing that this criticism/problem is not historic. To state it was historic, I'd need a reliable source.

I'll be unavoidably off-wiki for a few days, I'm afraid, but I will come back to this as soon as I can. HLHJ (talk) 15:13, 26 August 2024 (UTC)

Just to be clear, I have never worked in the food industry; my professional background has been in scientific publishing. My few interactions with industry have resulted from my role in the management of food composition data, initially with the UK national data and then with various European food administrations and similar organisations, such as IARC, culminating in the EuroFIR project, coordinated by the then IFR in Norwich. As it happened, BNF were another of the many partners in the project, which led to the establishment of the EuroFIR AISBL, and for that reason I got to know a member of its staff (without contact in the intervening years until that previously mentioned) who I assume will have followed the discussion. I hope that they will be able to participate actively.

In my view, the BNF article should concentrate on the present, UPF, criticism as the vehicle for reporting the transparency issues, while noting the previous, possibly outdated, polemic references. That will allow the currently perceived problems to be reported; action, whether recognised in reliable sources or not, resulting from previous criticism should then be taken into account through the up-to-date assessment of transparency. It seems excessive to report opinions expressed up to 40 years ago, which also in the case of the World in Action citation may fail the Verifiability test (does a recording or transcript exist and is it publicly available?).

Broad-based academic journals such as BMJ publish various types of document. These may include peer-reviewed articles, rapid communications, editorials, letters to the editor, news items, polemics, etc. Each could be considered to have varying levels of reliability. Polemics may be authored externally or internally. Chamberlain (2010) seems external, whereas Coombes (2023) is certainly written by a member of BMJ staff. The latter only makes a passing reference to BNF, but this is focussed on the funding issue and broadened by association with the more detailed criticism of the Science Media Centre. The subject of criticism has the right to reply, either in a letter to the editor or independently. If the criticism is cited in Wikipedia and the response is relevant to this mention, the rebuttal must also be cited. In this case, the determinant of a reliable source is the author (are they able to give an authoritative rebuttal, e.g. on behalf of an organisation?) rather than the source publication, as per Wikipedia:Reliable sources#Definition of a source, with the Wikipedia text having a wording that achieves NPOV.

Coombes (2023) introduces a further aspect of Reliable sources. The webpage version includes Responses, in effect letters to the editor and stated to be subject to editorial selection. They may be relevant to the debate and, if so, should be cited while maintaining NPOV. [It is difficult to disagree with Professor Forsyth’s comments suggesting that confrontation is not the way forward.] Douglian30 (talk) 14:59, 29 August 2024 (UTC)

I'm sorry I misrepresented what you said. I am honestly confused as to your interests. It seems you don't have a paid-editing-type COI, and your social motives for your views of the BNF seem moderately weak. I'm going to leave your COI declarations to you, and concentrate on the content.

Actions not reported in reliable sources cannot be taken into account, nor can we engage in original research to form our own assessment of the BNF's transparency. I did do my own highly informal and convenience-sample assessment of transparency above, and from what I saw, the BNF's COI disclosure is still pretty obscure; but we can't cite that. The reliable sources indicate that the BNF's problems with COI disclosure continue into 2024. There are no reliable sources stating that any of these criticisms are obsolete, and as you say, if there were, verifiably obsolete criticisms would still belong in the article, to avoid WP:recentism.

The BMJ is a reliable source, and I don't think any of the factual statements in this article which are cited to the BMJ are untrue. Letters by BNF staff which were published in the BMJ are not reliable sources for the BNF. It is not the case that the rebuttal must be cited; WP:MANDY applies.

I agree that Derek Shrimpton should have tenure dates. I've added some dates to specific events. To me it seems, from the sources, that the BNF has fought delaying actions against a series of public-health interventions, and is currently opposing action on ultraprocessed foods. The history of these add up to a consistent pattern of lobbying for policies that favour the food industry, regardless of their effect on public health. I can add more sources on more issues over more years, but I don't think the big picture will change much. HLHJ (talk) 02:08, 31 August 2024 (UTC)