Article shows issues with journalism and weight loss industry funding

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I recently came across an article called “Is it time to rebrand ob*sity?” that was billed as a “Special Report” on “Stigma.” It is an excellent example of weight loss industry tactics - claiming that they want to  focus on quality of life instead of weight but then repeatedly insist that “ob*sity” is a disease and trying to expand the definition. There was nothing new in the article, just the regular diet industry attempts to co-opt true anti-weight stigma work. But I noticed that those who were quoted were either directly part of the weight loss industry or industry funded but, as is unfortunately the case with many publications - including those specifically for healthcare audiences - there were absolutely no disclosures.

I an email explaining: (note: that the links that are not hyperlinked go to pages steeped in weight stigma, including stigmatizing terms and suggested eradication of higher-weight people.) 

“I wanted to point out the lack of disclosures for those people/organizations included:

The European Coalition for People Living with Ob*sity (ECPO) gets their funding from the weight loss industry, whose talking points they offer to the article
https://eurobesity.org/sponsors

Susie Birney, who is quoted on their behavior works for the ECPO. She also works for the Irish Coalition for People with Ob*sity (ICPO) which also gets their funding from the weight loss industry https://icpobesity.org/about-us/#partners and the Association for Studying Ob*sity in Ireland which does not disclose its funding partners but whose leadership is made up of members of the weight loss industry
https://asoi.info/about-us/

These are astroturf organizations that claim to be patient advocacy groups but are, in fact, funded by and working as lobbying groups for the weight loss industry.

The World Ob*sity Federation is funded by the weight loss industry https://www.worldobesity.org/our-network/partnerships/champions#support

Luca Bussetto receives personal funding from Novo Nordisk, Boehringer Ingelheim, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Bruno Farmaceutici as a member of advisory boards, and from Rythms Pharmaceuticals and Pronokal as a speaker
https://cdn.easo.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/04173242/FINAL-Busetto-Comment-41591_2024_3095_OnlinePDF.pdf

Jason Halford reports consultancy fees from Boehringer Ingelheim and Dupont (paid to the University of Leeds), honoraria from Novo Nordisk (paid to the University of Leeds), support for attending meetings from Novo Nordisk, and financial support for participation in an advisory board for Dupont (paid to the University of Leeds)
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/ijpo.12957

He was also part of a sanction against Novo Nordisk for failing to disclose weight loss industry ties in media interviews individually and as the President of the European Association for the Study of Ob*sity (EASO)
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/mar/12/revealed-experts-who-praised-new-skinny-jab-received-payments-from-drug-maker 

 I received the following reply, that I’ll address paragraph by paragraph.

Hi Ragen,

After reviewing the article, we found that it does include disclosures by listing the organizations the experts are affiliated with, such as the World Ob*sity Federation and the European Coalition for People Living with Ob*sity. These organizations publicly disclose their partnerships, and the article links to relevant studies and statements where competing interests are noted.

This is an…interesting…take on disclosures. Take Susie Birney, for example. They note that she is affiliated with the European Coalition for People Living with Ob*sity (ECPO), but they don’t mention the Irish Coalition for People with Ob*sity (ICPO) or the Association for Studying Ob*sity in Ireland. For that I had to search and find her LinkedIn.

Also - if you google them, find their website, and look in the right place you might be able to find their funders - is NOT a disclosure. I’m trying to imagine academic and medical conferences if the required disclosure slide just said “You know I exist. Google me and figure it out." I would argue that a proper disclosure would be something like “The ECPO, an organization that gets x% of their funding from the weight loss industry…” but at the very least the disclosure of the industry tie should appear clearly in the piece in which they are quoted, not some other place that the reader might be able to find if they happen to know to look. These organizations are specifically named to appear as patient advocacy groups so someone just seeing the name would not necessarily know that they may be astroturf organizations that are operating as lobbying organizations for the companies that hand them fat bags of cash and whose language they are repeating in the article.

In terms of “relevant links” they link to a “position statement” from the World Ob*sity Federation called “Changing the global ob*sity narrative to recognize and reduce weight stigma: A position statement from the World Ob*sity Federation” but the only disclosure is that one of the authors works for Weight Watchers. It does not mention who funds WOF. Here’s how you find that out:

Go to their website. Go to Networking and click on partnerships. Scroll to the middle of that page and click on Our Partners, Scroll to the middle of that page and click Champions. Learn that their platinum sponsor is Eli Lilly which makes and markets that weight loss drug Zepbound. They explain “Our Platinum Supporters play a pivotal role in our endeavours, providing substantial support that drives our key initiatives and expands our capacity on a global level.”

Want to dig deeper? Go back to the partnership page and click on Annual Report and Financials. That page says:

“We receive significant core funding to support our mission through sales of our journals - Ob*sity Reviews, Pediatric Ob*sity, Ob*sity Science and Practice, and Clinical Ob*sity - and through SCOPE certification and fees. Further support is provided through our members and income from regional and global congresses including the International Congress on Obe*ity.

We also receive funding in the form of project and educational grants, as well as through partnerships with various stakeholders in accordance with our policy on partnerships (currently being updated). You can view more about this on our Partnerships page.

Remember that WOF position paper they linked to? Wouldn’t you know it, they published it in Ob*sity Reviews - which is their own journal.

SCOPE  or The Strategic Centre for Ob*sity Professional Education is “education” created by this weight-loss industry funded organization (made up predominantly of people who profit from selling weight loss) to train healthcare providers in weight loss industry talking points. I’ve written before about my feelings around “ob*sity medicine” and this is basically the same thing. SCOPE is something I’ll probably write about in more detail later. 

If you  click on their 2023 annual report you can find information about their income but not the exact amounts that partners give.  Here is a fun bit though:

Going Concern The trustees have considered the charity’s ability to continue as a going concern to assure themselves of the validity of this assumption when preparing the accounts. n making this assessment, they have taken into account all available information about the future for at least twelve months for the date the accounts are approved. In early 2023 a key donor, Novo Nordisk, communicated that they would be delayed in honouring their funding commitments totally over GBP 900,000 due to a possible breach of ABPI standards. Immediate action was taken to reduce costs while diversifying funding and changing operational models. In May 2023, the company communicated that the expected delay in funding was in fact a cancellation, necessitating some further reductions. Because the organisation has had healthy reserves in place the focus has been on rebuilding support and ensuring the critical work continues for the future.

They are referring to Novo Nordisk being sanctioned by the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI,) for deceptive practices including, wait for it, lack of disclosures! 

Obviously there are any number of issues with the World Ob*sity Federation, but we’ll leave it at that for now.

The next paragraph of the email that I received from the publication said:

For instance, both the World Ob*sity Federation and the European Coalition for People Living with Ob*sity state that their partners do not influence their activities or campaigns. 

Nope. Disclosures exist because we don’t take industry-funded organizations’ word for it that they aren’t influenced by their industry funding. Claiming that you aren’t influenced is not a get-out-of-disclosure-free card. I would argue that if you you truly are on the up and up you would insist on appropriate disclosures. 

The article also references a framework from the European Association for the Study of Ob*sity, which lists competing interests for individuals like Luca Bussetto and Jason Halford.

If you click on the framework link and scroll all the way to the bottom, you’ll find author competing interests. Again, this is not the same thing as having disclosures as part of THIS piece. “If you know to do it, you can click on this link and find the competing interests of some of the people who are quoted in this article” is not a disclosure. Also, the framework does NOT disclose the funding of the EASO which, per its Partnerships page “is currently engaged in project partnerships with Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly and Company, Boehringer Ingelheim, and Pfizer.”

Additionally, I want to bring to your attention that we maintain a list of partners, and the World Ob*sity Federation is among them. While we strive for transparency, it's important to acknowledge that with many health organizations, we can never fully guarantee the absence of hidden agendas. We trust our readers to critically assess the sources we provide.

And there it is. Let me suggest that if they, or any media outlet, really trusted their readers, they would include proper disclosures for people and organizations when they give quotes in articles that support the agenda of themselves/their funders. They certainly should have included in this article that the WOF is one of their partners.

More than once someone has asked me “what’s the point of disclosing weight loss industry funding when they’re funding everything?” 

That, my friends, is precisely the point.

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More research and resources:
https://haeshealthsheets.com/resources/

*Note on language: I use “fat” as a neutral descriptor as used by the fat activist community, I use “ob*se” and “overw*ight” to acknowledge that these are terms that were created to medicalize and pathologize fat bodies, with roots in racism and specifically anti-Blackness. Please read Sabrina Strings’ Fearing the Black Body – the Racial Origins of Fat Phobia and Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness for more on this.