Scandalous Huffington Post Columns Retracted, So Eat More Cheese!

Two of my columns for the Huffington Post have been retracted, and believe it or not, that has something to do with a well-orchestrated effort to scuttle national nutrition policy, and get you to eat more meat, butter, and cheese.

The columns in question were written and posted just a bit under two years ago.  Hardly anyone read them then, and certainly no one is reading them now- so their retraction is by and large inconsequential.  To most of us, that is.

They had nothing to do with my professional activities. They were, in a departure from the nearly 500 columns I have written for the Huffington Post on matters of health, medicine, and science, philosophical rambles about an epic fiction novel, written in the style of the novel itself. The purported scandal is that the novel is my own, self-published book, written under a pen name- and that when I wrote about it, I preserved that camouflage. In other words, I did not say the book was my own.

I did exactly that, however, roughly 6 weeks later- and thus also the better part of two years ago. I alerted the editors at the Huffington Post, and they appended an editorial note indicating the book was mine.

Because those who read me routinely are generally seeking my views on health promotion and disease prevention, or an interpretation of the latest study generating hyperbolic and distorting headlines, these particular columns, which as noted were philosophical and written with literary flourish, were among the least read of any I have ever published, on the Huffington Post or elsewhere. To some extent, that was by design. I wrote them so that only those likely to find the book appealing would find the columns appealing and of interest in the first place.

I am writing this account mostly because the part of this story that is about cheese really warrants telling, and in part because I have been asked the same questions about the retraction several times, and this is a more efficient way of answering those questions once and for all.

The Huffington Post does not compensate for blogging, so in my case, I have contributed those nearly 500 columns- or the equivalent of several long, full-length books- as a free public service. I have, in addition, been reviewing content for HP for years, as part of the Medical Review Board for the Healthy Living section- and that, too, is uncompensated. Some of us have voiced concerns about this lack of compensation over the years. There is a related joke in this age when writers are routinely offered “exposure” rather than any currency as compensation, about a highly successful artist, dying of such exposure- but it really is no joke. In any event, the Huffington Post stood by its policy, and uncompensated we remain.

What they do offer, as the only form of compensation, is the opportunity to “promote” one’s wares in the context of one’s writing. There are general guidelines about this (although nothing so formal as a contract) intended to prevent columns from turning into infomercials, but to be honest, that line is quite blurry. As a reviewer, I have seen innumerable pieces over the years, most of them approved for publication, that were really all about the author’s book, program, webinar, or supplement line. There has to be some basic content to justify such a pitch, but in some cases I have reviewed, the former ran rather shallow, and the latter rather deep. No professional credentials of any kind are required to write for the Huffington Post, and many of the writers leveraging their blog for this kind of promotion have none, although that varies.

I also note that for certain individuals with relationships very high up the Huffington Post hierarchy, not only is book promotion acceptable, but the Post gets actively involved in it- such as publishing a Q&A with the author about a book, as part of a promotional series. I will not name any names here for obvious reasons. The one exception that can be mentioned is the person who runs the whole show, Arianna Huffington. Not surprisingly, Ms. Huffington has used her eponymous platform to promote what she cares about, including her own book. To the best of my knowledge, no one begrudges her that- and certainly, I do not.

All of this to say that any rules against self-promotion on the Huffington Post are rather vague and malleable, and applied rather variably.

What this means for me is that had I wanted to say- “Dear readers, I have written a new book and think it’s terrific, please check it out!”- I could certainly have done exactly that. In fact, I did exactly that, more or less, when my most recent health book, Disease Proof, was published.   I have a very large following on-line, and that simple, direct announcement was effective enough to result in a PBS special based on the book.

In contrast, the veiled “promotion” of reVision was massively less effective. In fact, so far as I know, nobody bought the book as a result of those columns.

I wasn’t hoping for that, clearly, but I was also not trying to promote the book per se, knowing there were far better ways to do that than epistemological reverie. Rather, the separation between the author and me is germane to the integrity of the tale, and protecting that meant more to me than recruiting book buyers. It still does, and I regret that I have had to tread on that space, although I have come to refer to Ms. Iyyam as a child of my imagination, rather than me. She really isn’t me. Moving on.

reVision is self-published, meaning these ucompensated columns were, and remain, about an uncompensated book. I have written 14 other books, many of them textbooks, but know nothing about the world of fiction writing. In light of my cluelessness, self-publishing was the path of least resistance.

Because the book was self-published, there was no marketing program. For a span of many weeks, while the book was in press, I asked contacts at the publishing house how I could even let anyone know about the book, while preserving the important camouflage for the alter-ego. I don’t think anyone really knew, so I kept getting responses along the lines of, “we’ll figure something out.” What was figured out in the end was: blog about the book in the third person. I followed that advice, offered in all innocence, and here we are.

Note, finally, that the publisher was not inventing anything with this advice. Of course, blogging did not exist at the time, but Samuel Clemens was known as a routine promoter of the works of Mark Twain, apparently both when people did, and didn’t know the two were the same. Much the same may have been true of the great Theodore Geisel, a.k.a. “Dr. Seuss,” who granted himself an unspecified doctorate into the bargain. In fact, the issue of pen names has been addressed explicitly on the Huffington Post, by an author promoting- you guessed it- his own new book.

So, to wrap this up: if I made any kind of mistake here, I apologize sincerely. I was not trying to invent anything- the path is well worn. I was not taking advantage of my blog; self-promotion is standard, common, and the only compensation offered. As best I can tell, I avoid it more than almost anyone, and offer up a trove of some 500,000 words in the public domain as evidence. I have received not a single complaint or message about those ancient columns, or the book.

Until now. And that begs the question: why is this scenario, about as scandalous as a vanilla bean, suddenly interesting?

Because, as noted, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans are under active assault, and believe it or not- this is really all just a footnote to that story.

Writing novels is not my day job; I did that on my own time, without compensation, and not as part of any plan, but merely because the story and characters took over my mind and held it hostage until I chronicled their story (as I continue to do; reVision is the first book of a trilogy, meandering toward completion as the demands of my day job allow). Defending public health IS my day job, and I do that with all the gusto I can muster. I trust, and hope, that devotion is evident in the hundreds, and indeed thousands, of blogs and columns I have written across many platforms- almost all, as a free public service.

In the course of that duty, I had cause to call out the misrepresentations of an author opposing the evidence-based and consensus-based recommendations of actual nutrition experts, and promoting her book into the bargain. I did not know this person- and still do not- and had no interest in confrontations about personhood or character. I was doing my job, and addressing deficiencies of content, and to a lesser extent, qualifications. Yes, actual expertise does matter.

What I have learned since is something well known to those who care about diet, health, and related nutrition policy. The writer in question is apparently backed by billionaires with ties to such enterprises as Enron, and the beef industry. I don’t profess to know what all of their motivations are, but their intentions are clear enough: they would like to scuttle the translation of the 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee Report into actual Dietary Guidelines for Americans, and thus- sabotage national nutrition policy so suit their personal inclinations.

This group is clearly very good at what it does. They have seemingly had a hand in persuading Congress to expunge sustainability from the Dietary Guidelines already. That’s clearly cause for celebration, right?

They have also helped a writer with no credentials or expertise in nutrition or public health, and with rather flagrantly erroneous conclusions set herself up as a counterweight to a multidisciplinary assembly of leading nutrition scientists, land commentaries on such rarefied real estate as the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and rather inexplicably- the British Medical Journal. This last one has prompted more than 180 leading nutrition and public health scientists from 19 countries, yours truly among them, to call for- wait for it- a retraction.

And that’s where the dots finally all connect. I first voiced my grave concerns about these egregious misrepresentations of current nutrition science, to say nothing of the indelible ties between dietary patterns and the fate of the planet, back in May of 2014. I have done so repeatedly since, because it is my job. And, I have apparently done so with enough people listening- thanks to you, my on-line following is well over half a million- that I am of particular concern to the cabal in question.

So, as I have noted before, they have been bullying me relentlessly for months. Most of this has been indictment by innuendo in cyberspace, with every derisive suggestion- he has done industry-funded research, his opinions are for sale- retweeted ad infinitum by other members of the same club. One of the great liabilities of social media and the blogosphere is that any given small group- including a band of wingnuts living in their mothers’ basements- can create enough echoes to seem like a movement.

In the current case, it is now clear that the aspersions directed at me were of the “keep throwing dirt until something sticks” variety. My opinions are not for sale, and I was raised by good and loving parents to be an honest and honorable person, so not much stuck. Until the group stumbled on those posts about reVision, which apparently hadn’t bothered a soul. In my morbid fantasy, I picture them like the repulsive Senator Bob Rumson, played with beautiful abandon by Richard Dreyfuss in The American President, breaking out into a chorus of: “it’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas!...” when their relentless pawing for dirt landed them there. If you haven’t seen the movie, I certainly recommend it, and hasten to note: No, I did NOT write it!

I am surmising that since the BMJ is now under some pressure to retract the “investigation” it published for reasons most of us cannot fathom (and that warrant an investigation in their own right), it provides very timely cover for the campaign against sound nutrition policy to have something else, and someone else, subject to any kind of “retraction.”

The writer in question, who promotes her book in every way imaginable, has impugned the character and qualifications of everyone who opposes her on matters of content. So, for instance, in her own blog (titled, inevitably, for the book), she has essentially reduced the redoubtable Walter Willett of Harvard to a book salesman, and done much the same to the iconic Marion Nestle. In the latter case, she has further suggested that Prof. Nestle is something of a food industry black marketeer.

The game plan here seems quite transparent: yes, I have a diet book to sell; but Katz, and Willett, and Nestle have nutrition books to sell, too- so if I have a conflict, so do they. Of course, this is an absurd comparison. It’s a bit like asserting: swatting mosquitoes is a lethal act, and detonating a suicide vest in a large crowd is a lethal act- so swatting mosquitoes makes us terrorists. A common rubric can be parent to progeny of such extreme incomparability as that.

We- and I honor myself with the company here- have hard-earned credentials and expertise, and have devoted our careers to the topic of nutrition and health. Of course we have written books on the topic of our expertise. When we opine, however, the foundation is an entire career, patient care, research, and/or a large volume of peer-reviewed publications, not a single book that is our sole claim to relevance. The strategy, though overtly fallacious, is admittedly clever: I’ve written a book, they’ve written books- the playing field must be level. Remember those mosquitoes.

The same thing, then, is apparently going on now with retractions. Yes, a global coalition of scientists wants my piece in the BMJ retracted, but look- Katz has had pieces retracted! Good cover, that.

That’s pretty much the story, with one noteworthy addition. I have told part of it before, and the result was an email to authorities at Yale University, accusing me of libel, and implying recourse to legal action. Intimidation tactics, in other words. The cabal would like me silenced.

There are two problems with that effort. First, for something to be libelous it must diverge from verifiable fact- and nothing in this account does. Second, as many have cause to lament- Tweets, like herpes, are forever. The originating “concerns” about the reVision columns, like all the other flying mud in this sorry chronicle, are thoroughly covered in the same, single set of cyber-fingerprints. Those are readily discoverable, now and forever, to anyone who bothers to look.

Of course, glaciers are still melting; California is still running out of water. Storms are getting larger, temperatures rising, and biodiversity falling. There are ever more Homo sapiens, ever less of everything else that matters. And rabid ideologues, who have somehow perverted purposeless hatred into a religion, are wreaking the havoc of terrorism around the globe, and pose a threat to us all. And while on such happy topics, yes, national nutrition policy is imperiled by those who derive profits elsewhere, and yes- Congress has decided we may just go ahead and eat our children’s food.

But we can all sleep better at night knowing that my two 2-year-old mostly unread columns about my mostly unread epic fantasy novel have been retracted.

Or, maybe we can’t sleep better. But we can always just eat more cheese.  

-fin

David L. Katz, MD, MPH, FACPM, FACP, FACLM wrote reVision, an epic fantasy novel that he thinks is terrific, and recommends. And, by the way, he does some other stuff…

Director, Yale University Prevention Research Center; Griffin Hospital
President, American College of Lifestyle Medicine

Founder, The True Health Initiative

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