Food PR Credibility: Getting research right.

Image courtesy of Welltech

How can brands make sure that nutrition research stands up to PR scrutiny?

The Guardian recently published an article claiming scientists were being paid to give credibility to an argument that ultra-processed foods were being unfairly demonised. This highlights a recurrent criticism levelled at food PR research campaigns – how can consumers believe what the experts tell them if a brand or industry is paying the bill?

Consumers often say that it’s hard to know what’s the truth about healthy and unhealthy foods when the media has so many conflicting headlines. For example, there can be rafts of scientific papers and headlines explaining how eggs are a nutritious food, good for health and good for the heart, only for a one off study to claim eating eggs ‘is as bad for your heart as smoking’. How can consumers work out what and who to believe?

Nutrition is a complex subject – the relationship between food, nutrition and health is affected by multiple influences: biological, environmental, socio-economic, cultural, and behavioural factors, so that alone makes is tricky. But in addition, nutrition science continues to move forwards and how we interpret it can be nuanced.

It’s an indisputable fact that without industry funding there would be much less nutrition research carried out to provide a bank of evidence to draw from, but interests are always declared to aid transparency. And it’s insulting to most scientists to suggest that they can simply be paid to add credibility to a scientific argument that doesn’t stack up. Very few would risk their reputation. Perhaps more concerning is that increasingly, people are consuming the nutrition content of influencers that have no scientific credentials, are unregulated and who may not be basing claims on published scientific research.  

At Nexus we’ve delivered transformational nutritional food PR research to help categories, brands and consumers. We believe in working ethically with qualified health professionals and in drawing together a mix of people with different expertise and viewpoints. This is the bedrock of any nutrition PR campaign.

One issue is that the mass media want hard-hitting headlines and a ‘life or death’ dynamic in health stories, another is that a complicated topic often needs to be condensed into a simple paragraph for media, whilst science is full of detail and caveats – so blending the two will always pose problems.

But the job of a good PR agency is to find the middle ground. A place where information is useful and interesting to consumers, helps them to understand the benefits of a food, but in a news story based on sound nutrition science. Credibility + readability = a job well done.

Working together nutrition PR professionals, qualified health professionals and journalists can share information that will help enlighten people and aid their understanding of how diet impacts health and wellness.

As one high profile health professional, who will remain nameless, once straightforwardly told us ‘You are paying for my time, not my opinions’ – without them we could not successfully back up our argument for the media and gain attention, but it was clear that their professional views could definitely not be simply bought.

About Lucy Egerton: Lucy is an accomplished Public Relations expert, leading industrywide food campaigns for some of the UK’s biggest generic boards – she understands the complexity involved in helping brands and categories build lasting consumer trust through credible research.

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