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Viva! |
13 October 2000 Nutritionist Denies ‘Meat Essential for Health’ Claim In a bizarre saga of denial and counter denial, the director general of the British Nutrition Foundation (BNF), Professor Robert Pickard, claims never to have said that meat is essential for health. It was one of several pro-meat claims attributed to him in a widely-reported press release issued in July by the Meat & Livestock Commission (MLC). The MLC, however, insists their press release was accurate. This extraordinary disagreement has been revealed in a series of letters between the two organisations and the animal charity Viva! The BNF’s principal officers have remained silent in the face of this embarrassment. The press release quoted Pickard as saying that vegetarians risked damaging their health because lack of meat resulted in pathogens taking hold in the gut and causing illness. But the BNF’s vice-president, Prof Ian Macdonald, now claims: “The comments did not emanate from the BNF or Prof Pickard but from the PR people working for the MLC”. The MLC press office denies this and insists that the release was written by the BNF and approved by Pickard. “The claims are pseudo-scientific claptrap”, says Tony Wardle, Viva!’s communications director. “While disclaiming them to Viva!, Pickard and the BNF have refused to issue a public retraction. They have used the media to help sell meat on the basis of phoney science, despite an avalanche of research linking meat and animal products to strokes, coronary heart disease, cancer and premature death. “The British Nutrition Foundation is part-funded by the MLC and this is the result of their unhealthy relationship. No other nutritional body in the world would put itself in the position of compromising people’s health for commercial reasons. Clearly, you can no longer believe anything the BNF says because you don’t know who is making the claim, them or the meat industry. Prof Pickard has shown he is not independent at all”, concludes Tony Wardle.
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