Texas A&M chancellor roasts Harvard faculty for their criticism of a beef study

AUSTIN — Texas A&M University System Chancellor John Sharp has a beef with Harvard — over a study about eating beef.

Sharp sent Harvard University President Lawrence S. Bacow a searing letter Wednesday morning condemning Harvard faculty for aggressively questioning a study published in the Annals of Internal Medicine last fall in which an A&M researcher declared that there’s “no need to cut down on red and processed meat for health reasons.”

Texas A&M received flack after the journal issued a correction in December disclosing that one of the researchers behind the study, Bradley Johnston, had failed to disclose his ties to the Texas A&M AgriLife Extension agency, which gets part of its funding from the beef industry.

Harvard faculty members, Dr. Walter Willett and Dr. Frank Hu, helped fuel the controversy by flooding the journal’s editor with emails, including some from bots, right before the publishing of the study, according to an article published in the Journal of the American Medical Association last week.

This was “harmful” to Texas A&M and its faculty, Sharp said. He included a link to the journal article, which suggested the two Harvard professors are directors of a group with strong financial ties to food companies promoting plant-based alternatives to red meat.

“Their actions, as described in a recent JAMA article, are unethical, distort the results of important scientific research, and, in our opinion, are false and harmful to Texas A&M University and its faculty,” Sharp wrote to Bacow in his letter. “These are serious matters that undermine the values espoused by your institution and must be corrected immediately.”

Johnston, who was a professor at Dalhousie University in Canada at the time of the study, received a grant from AgriLife Extension worth more than $76,000 for a separate study on saturated fats and was recruited to become a professor at Texas A&M, according to the Austin American-Statesman. Johnston’s study and tenure at Texas A&M were not slated to begin until August 2020.

Johnston told JAMA he personally has never “had ties with the beef industry.” But the article details the increased politicization of nutrition science, with both Johnston and the Harvard researchers having business ties that raised questions.

Johnston was a senior author of a 2016 controversial study in the Annals of Internal Medicine questioning the methodology behind health guidelines recommending that people eat less sugar.

That study was paid for by the International Life Sciences Institute, a trade industry group that includes companies such as Coca-Cola and PepsiCo.

At a preventative cardiology conference last fall that included presentations on plant-based diets, Willett presented a slide on the “disinformation” on nutrition and singled out Texas A&M AgriLife as part of “Big Beef” interests, according to the JAMA article.

It also notes Willett and Hu serve on the council of directors for the True Health Initiative, a nonprofit with industry ties to “companies and organizations that stand to profit if people eat less red meat and a more plant-based diet.”

Hu told The Dallas Morning News he is one of about 500 members of THI, which he described as a “pretty informal organization with no membership fee and no compensation.”

“The goal of THI is to promote good science and dispel myths and misinformation about nutrition and health,” he said in an email.

Hu and other researchers recently published another article arguing that the analysis Johnston and his colleagues conducted is flawed because it is typically used to assess smaller clinical trials. The article, published in the American Diabetes Association journal, stresses that health guidelines suggesting “limiting red and processed meats” should be followed, despite “uncertainty regarding current evidence.”

Sharp said Willett and Hu “mischaracterized scientific research and falsely accused Texas A&M scientists of selling out to industry interests” and called for a “serious assessment by Harvard of its affiliation with THI.”

“Texas A&M asks that Harvard join us for a purely scientific approach to nutrition for the sake of public health and public trust and reject the politics and unethical actions of THI that have sought to discredit science and interfere in the scientific process,” he said in the letter.

Willett and Harvard University did not respond to requests for comment.