 A series of articles published in the Annals of Internal Medicine recommending people just keep eating their meat was decried by nutrition researchers as irresponsible and unethical, a travesty of science, an assault on public health, and the most egregious abuse of evidence that they had ever seen. There were calls for retraction even before it was published from eminent public health leaders, from a former U.S. surgeon general, former president of the American College of Cardiology, and the directors of Preventive Medicine and Nutrition Institutes from Harvard, Yale, Tufts, and Stanford. In my last video I explained the how, the method by which they manipulated the science, but never really got to the why. I mean, the lead author's similar attempt to discredit the sugar guidelines was explicitly paid for by an industry front group funded by the likes of Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper, Mars, Candy Bars, and Pepsi. But if you look at the meat paper at the panelists' declared conflicts of interest, they all say they didn't have any, including the lead author who was involved in the sugar study, whose primary funder wasn't just representing big soda and candy, but the likes of McDonald's and one of the largest meat packers in the world. Yet Johnston didn't disclose that as a potential conflict of interest when he switched from exonerating sugar to exonerating meat. What did he have to say for himself? Even though the sugar study was published in 2016, he got the money for it in 2015 outside of the three-year mandatory disclosure window. This is the same guy who said the industry front group had no role in writing their paper until the Associated Press revealed the truth and the journal had to publish a correction. But Johnston doubled down this time, saying it is tenuous at best to suggest that his earlier work on sugar had any influence on how his team made the new meat recommendations. The important thing is we have no relationship with the meat industry. Oh, really? A few months later, the truth came out. Correction in the so-called NutriRex panel meat recommendations. Oops! Bradley Johnston failed to indicate he had gotten a grant from Texas A&M AgriLife, which gets millions of dollars a year from the meat industry to do things like run beef boot camp or espouse the health benefits of beef brisket or promote the celebration of National Bacon Day. After all, Texas A&M AgriLife serves pork producers to improve pork producer profitability. This is the group that not only gave Dr. No Relationship with the meat industry Johnston a direct grant for over 75 grand, but they officially joined the whole NutriRex consortium to provide, as Dr. Johnston explained, generous support to impact nutrition-related decision-making and policy in North America and beyond. Yet none of this was disclosed in the paper. No even potential conflict of interest, yet they had formed a partnership with an arm of Texas A&M partially funded by the beef industry to the tunes of millions a year from the beef industry alone. Oops! In fact, Patrick Stover, Mr. No Conflicts of Interest, is the director of AgriLife. And a month before the meat paper was published, Bradley Johnston was offered and accepted a tenured position at Texas A&M AgriLife was already working for them when it was published, but didn't think to mention it. So when the annals initially sent out a press release, which they later corrected, saying no need to reduce red or processed meat consumption for good health, they may have been simply acting as a mouthpiece for meat industry propaganda. The suit of science presented in the annals meat papers appears to have been written solely to create doubt and confusion in the wider population. The misleading recommendations were not intended to convince scientists who clearly understand the nature of the relationship between meat and health and, for that matter, sugar and health. The suit of science is presented solely to create doubt and confusion in the wider population. Frankly, industry will do what it needs to do to push as much of its product into the world as it can and so will do what it needs to do to obfuscate the relationship between its products in human and planetary health. They've done it with tobacco, fossil fuels, Monsanto's Roundup, sugar, and now meat.