A nonprofit organization founded in 1978 by Elizabeth Whelan that bills itself as an independent research and advocacy organization devoted to debunking “junk science” however it is a a group of scientists and journalists that report findings of studies done by the companies that manufacture pesticides and the philosophies shared by big business with financial interests at stake in the name of Biotechnology. It often does battle with environmentalists and consumer safety advocates, wading into public health debates to defend fracking, to fight New York City’s attempt to ban big sugary sodas, and to dismiss concerns about the potential harms of the chemical bisphenol-A (better known at BPA) and the pesticide atrazine. The group insists that its conclusions are driven purely by science. It acknowledges that it receives some financial support from corporations and industry groups, but ACSH, which reportedly stopped disclosing its corporate donors two decades ago, maintains that these contributions don’t influence its work and agenda.
Elizabeth M Whelan (died 2014) was a demographer who turned herself into a nutritionist/publicist with the Nutrition Department at Harvard University, and her elder mentor/teacher Professor Frederick Stare. Stare had earned himself the reputation of being Doctor Sugar for his vocal advocacy of sugar and cereal interests through the Nutrition Department of Harvard’s School of Public Health. Stare also mentored Dr Carl C Seltzer, a physical anthropologist from the Peabody Museum, who became one of the tobacco industry’s principle early scientific lobbyists by claiming to be a ‘heart specialist’.
Whelan (who was anti-smoking) obtained the backing of the American Chemical Association to create the ACSH, and Stare joined her at the top to give the new organization some scientific authenticity. They described the ACSH as “a consumer education consortium concerned with issues related to food, nutrition, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, lifestyle, the environment and health.” There are now many recent documents which confirm that ACSH actively solicits funding from corporations on specific issues — anti-GMO labeling, for example — that benefit from it taking positions favorable to those corporations.
Consumer advocate Ralph Nader once said of ACSH,
A consumer group is an organization which advocates the interests of unrepresented consumers and must either maintain its own intellectual independence or be directly accountable to its membership. In contrast, ACSH is a consumer front organization for its business backers. It has seized the language and style of the existing consumer organizations, but its real purpose, you might say, is to glove the hand that feeds it.[1]
ACSH takes the position that “junk science” promotes unnecessary fear among the population that too many ingredients in foods are implicated as cancer-causing agents, also known as carcinogens, mutagens, pathogens, pesticides, synthetic preservatives and chemical additives. Although one in every three Americans will get cancer in their lifetime and half will not survive it, ACSH moves to discredit any concerns about the food industry and food products that have been proven as such by the very science they claim to be protecting. Actual “junk science” is now understood to be food that is processed to be addictive to humans, like monosodium glutamate, extremely powerful synthetic sweeteners (chemicals), and hydrolyzed soy proteins (genetically modified). Junk science refers to the chemical and processed food industry mixing synthetic ingredients to make food habitual and health damaging, thus fueling the lucrative allopathic medical field and the cancer industrial complex of America. Australia and the United States rank as two of the top six countries in the world that suffer the most from junk science addiction and cancer, and the statistics prove it. (TruthWiki)
Numerous ACSH publications (that do not disclose the corporations that have funded the organization) take positions attacking public concerns about various corporate products and practices, such as genetically modified foods (GMOs), pesticides, herbicides, and more, and have sought to downplay concerns raised by scientists and consumers. However, the tobacco industry has never been an ACSH client, and Whelan has very cleverly used her anti-tobacco stance to gain some credibility among health professionals and some activist groups. All of the tobacco connections were conducted by her partner, Fred Stare.
Some of the products ACSH has defended over the years include DDT, asbestos, and Agent Orange, as well as common pesticides. ACSH has often called environmentalists and consumer activists “terrorists,” arguing that their criticisms and concerns about potential health and environmental risks are threats to society.[2]
ACSH has been funded by big agri-businesses and trade groups like Kellogg, General Mills, Pepsico, and the American Beverage Association, among others. See Funding below for more.
Internal financial documents (read them here) provided to Mother Jones show that ACSH depends heavily on funding from corporations that have a financial stake in the scientific debates it aims to shape. The group also directly solicits donations from these industry sources around specific issues. ACSH’s financial links to corporations involved in hot-button health and safety controversies have been highlighted in the past, but these documents offer a more extensive accounting of ACSH’s reliance on industry money-giving a rare window into the operations of a prominent and frequent defender of industry in the science wars.
According to the ACSH documents, from July 1, 2012, to December 20, 2012, 58 percent of donations to the council came from corporations and large private foundations. ACSH’s donors and the potential backers the group has been targeting comprise a who’s-who of energy, agriculture, cosmetics, food, soda, chemical, pharmaceutical, and tobacco corporations. ACSH donors in the second half of 2012 included Chevron ($18,500), Coca-Cola ($50,000), the Bristol Myers Squibb Foundation ($15,000), Dr. Pepper/Snapple ($5,000), Bayer Cropscience ($30,000), Procter and Gamble ($6,000), agribusiness giant Syngenta ($22,500), 3M ($30,000), McDonald’s ($30,000), and tobacco conglomerate Altria ($25,000). Among the corporations and foundations that ACSH has pursued for financial support since July 2012 are Pepsi, Monsanto, British American Tobacco, DowAgro, ExxonMobil Foundation, Phillip Morris International, Reynolds American, the Koch family-controlled Claude R. Lambe Foundation, the Dow-linked Gerstacker Foundation, the Bradley Foundation, and the Searle Freedom Trust.
Dr. Gilbert Ross, the group’s executive director, declined to answer specific questions about ACSH’s fundraising. He did not dispute the authenticity of the documents provided to Mother Jones. (Multiple corporations listed as donors on these documents confirmed they had supported ACSH.) Ross says the group doesn’t disclose its backers because “the sources of our support are irrelevant to our scientific investigations.” According to Ross, “Only science-based facts hold sway in our publications, even if the outcome is not pleasing to our contributors.”
As Mother Jones reported in 2005, Ross was previously convicted for defrauding New York State’s Medicaid program of roughly $8 million. His medical license was temporarily revoked and a jury sentenced him to 46 months in prison, of which he served 23 months. Ross currently has his license and is allowed to practice.
Elizabeth Whelan, a Harvard-trained public-health scientist, founded ACSH in 1978 as a counterweight to environmental groups and Ralph Nader’s consumer advocacy movement. “ACSH protects consumer freedom from a variety of unscientifically based activist organizations-such as the Natural Resources Defense Council, Center for Science in the Public Interest, and Environmental Working Group-that use ‘junk science’ and hyperbole about risk to promote fears about our food, pharmaceuticals and chemicals, and other environmental and lifestyle factors,” ACSH says on its website. “Their agenda is to limit or dismantle many technological achievements that contribute to consumer choice and good health.”
From the start, ACSH has faced questions about its funding. It was launched with $100,000 in seed money from the Sarah Scaife Foundation, which has also supported the Heritage Foundation, the American Legislative Exchange Council, and Americans for Tax Reform, among other conservative groups. By the early 1980s, ACSH’s donors included Dow, Monsanto, American Cyanamid, Mobil Foundation, Chevron, and Bethlehem Steel. In 1984, Georgia-Pacific, a leading formaldehyde maker, funded a friend-of-the-court brief filed by ACSH in an industry-backed lawsuit that overturned a ban on formaldehyde insulation.
When ACSH was founded, Whelan stated that the council “intends to remain free from financial ties with corporations with a financial interest in the topics we are investigating.” Initially, ACSH disclosed its donors, and it was obvious that the group embraced numerous causes connected to its funders. ACSH defended the chemical Alar, used to regulate the growth of apples-and accepted donations from Uniroyal, which manufactured and sold Alar. It also opposed new mandatory nutrition labeling requirements-and pocketed money from Coca-Cola, General Mills, Kellogg Co., Nestle USA, and the National Soft Drink Association.
ACSH maintains that it doesn’t accept donations from corporations or trade associations earmarked for specific research projects-that is, that there’s no quid pro quo. But in a March 1992 internal memo obtained by Consumer Reports, Whelan wrote that ACSH staffers would ask the Calorie Control Council, a trade group backed by diet food and drink companies, and McNeil Specialty Products, a Johnson & Johnson subsidiary that owned the US marketing rights to Splenda (an artificial sweetener), for contributions to underwrite the dissemination of a research paper touting artificial sweeteners. (Splenda was then seeking approval for sale in the United States.)
The newly revealed documents say that ACSH staffers should approach potential corporate financial backers with pitches geared toward specific issues. Last year, the documents note, the group planned to “seize opportunities to cultivate new funding possibilities (Prop 37, CSC, and corporate caving, etc.).” Proposition 37 was a 2012 California ballot initiative mandating the labeling of genetically modified foods. (It failed.) “CSC” is shorthand for the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, a consumer watchdog group that seeks to eliminate dangerous chemicals from cosmetic products. The documents suggest ACSH planned to mention CSC in its fundraising pitches to L’Oreal, Avon, and Procter and Gamble.
Lately, ACSH has become a vocal player in the debate over hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.” In February, the council posted an outline of a “systematic, objective review” it intends to publish on the scientific literature covering the potential health effects of fracking. In an April op-ed for the conservative Daily Caller website, Whelan criticized Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-N.Y.) for dithering on whether to allow fracking in New York State and asserted that “publicity savvy activists posing as public health experts are spearheading a disingenuous crusade to prevent the exploitation of the vast quantities of natural gas.” Fracking, Whelan wrote, “doesn’t pollute water or air.”
The Daily Caller story included no disclosure of the funding ACSH has received from the energy industry. Big energy companies and ACSH go way back: In the 1992 memo, Whelan called ACSH “the great defender of petrochemical companies.” On an ACSH-run Facebook page supporting fracking, the group acknowledges accepting “money from industry,” but it does not indicate which companies have donated or how much. According to the ACSH documents, it received a $37,500 donation in 2012 from the American Petroleum Institute related to “fracking.” That year, it also received other energy industry funds, including $18,500 from Chevron and $75,000 from the ExxonMobil Foundation.
The ACSH documents list ConocoPhillips as a “projected” donor for “fracking/general” and say ACSH should pitch the National Petrochemical & Refiners Association, a “past supporter,” around the issue of fracking.
According to the documents, ACSH was awarded a grant for fracking work from the Triad Foundation ($35,000 for “gen/fracking”). Triad has supported the Heritage Foundation and the Heartland Institute, a nonprofit that has worked to refute climate science. The Bodman Foundation also gave $40,000to support a forthcoming ACSH study titled “Hydraulic Fracturing: Myths and Realities.” Bodman is a reliable supporter of conservative causes, doling out five-figure sums to the American Enterprise Institute, Hudson Institute, and National Center for Policy Analysis.
Though ACSH has often taken industry-friendly positions on public health issues, it has long campaigned against smoking. In 1993, Elizabeth Whelan wrote in the Wall Street Journal-a frequent home for ACSH op-eds-in favor of a “user’s fee” on smokers to fund health-care reform. Three years later, ACSH published a book called Cigarettes: What the Warning Label Doesn’t Tell You, with chapters detailing how smoking makes men infertile, causes blindness, and leads to brittle bones. Ross, ACSH’s medical director, has backed a call for the film industry to slap an “R” rating on any movie with smoking in it.
Yet more recently, the agendas of ACSH and Big Tobacco have overlapped, thanks to the growing market for tobacco alternatives, including e-cigarettes and other smoke-free products. As ACSH has courted tobacco companies large and small for financial support, it has touted e-cigarettes-some being manufactured by subsidiaries of major tobacco companies-as a saferalternative to cigarettes. And the documents show that ACSH planned to receive a total of $338,200 from tobacco companies between July 2012 and June 2013. Reynolds American and Phillip Morris International were each listed as expected to give $100,000 in 2013, which would make them the two largest individual donations listed in the ACSH documents. (Reynolds confirmed making a $100,000 donation to ACSH in 2012 and donating additional money in 2013. Phillip Morris confirmed donating to ACSH in 2012 and 2013 but didn’t disclose the amounts.)
Ross has stumped for e-cigarettes on TV and radio appearances and in op-eds, writing this month for Forbes that e-cigarettes are a “nascent public-health miracle” and urging US regulators to embrace e-cigarettes-which use liquid nicotine to deliver a smokeless hit for users-as an alternative to cancer-causing traditional cigarettes. Ross’ op-ed was timely. Any day now, the FDA is expected to announce new plans to regulate the $1.5 billion e-cigarette industry, which saw its sales triple this year.
But Ross’ op-ed does not disclose ACSH’s financial support from big tobacco companies like Altria and Reynolds that own e-cigarette-making subsidiaries. Nor does it mention that ACSH, as the fundraising documents suggest, is using the e-cigarettes issue to court potential new funders such as VMR Products and its subsidiary V2 Cigs, Green Smoke, and 21st Century.
In the Forbes op-ed, Ross criticizes nonprofit groups campaigning against e-cigarettes, huffing that they are “heavily funded by pharmaceutical companies in the business of selling near-useless cessation drugs-a fact which they conveniently neglect to disclose.” It was a bold charge, given ACSH’s own record on the disclosure of industry donations.
Science quacks that back ACSH: Biotech Corporations and Big Food shills
From Dr. Henry Miller (4) to Jon Entine (5) and from Dr. Gilbert Ross (7) to the “Food Czar” Michael Taylor (6), the list of industry hacks and cons is long, but very important to the mission of ACHS, which is to instill common sense and faith in processed food and genetically modified organisms in food. Though ACSH is a non-profit organization, insider reports tell a different story, where ASCH publish booklets and propaganda promoting health-damaging processed sugar (like Hershey Company products) and chemical pesticides for lawn care while trading such work contingent on donations made to ACSH. They receive funding from Syngenta to promote atrazine and “chemophobia,” which, according to Whelan is the strange condition where humans have an unwarranted fear of getting cancer from chemicals. There is a laundry list of corporate “donors” that help ACSH publicize their auspicious agenda of promoting chemical agriculture to help feed the world. This is more of promoting junk science than it is debunking it, but ACSH is firm in their stance of promoting anti-paranoia about food chemicals (basically setting up a straw man and knocking him down).
True science-based research does not rely on industry-funded studies because they are often biased, corrupted and influenced by money rather than honest results. ACSH’s donors range from soda makers and junk food sellers like McDonald’s to tobacco corporations, and from the most powerful pharma corporations like Bristol Myers Squibb to agri-tech monsters like Bayer Cropscience and Syngenta. Pepsi and Monsanto of course donate to the ACSH “mission” of informing the public that all junk food is good for you as well as consuming chemical-laden pesticides. These are the companies that drum up the “science-based facts” that ACSH promotes as peer-reviewed and as the only research they can rely upon.
ACSH claims that the Environmental Working Group (EWG) and the Center for Science in the Public Interest both use “junk science” when they issue warnings about dangerous pesticides, pharmaceuticals and chemicals that endanger certain species in the environment, whether those species are bees, chickens, cows or even humans. Health enthusiasts believe it is the ACSH agenda to “limit or dismantle many technological achievements that contribute to consumer choice and good health.” ACSH even pushes diet foods that contain artificial sweeteners that have been implicated as cancer-causing, carcinogenic agents, like Aspartame. Consumer advocate Ralph Nader once called ACSH, “a consumer front organization for its business backers.”
Acting President Gilbert Ross
Gilbert Ross was acting president and executive director of ASCH as of April 2015.[3] Ross’s medical license was revoked for professional misconduct in 1995, after it was revealed that he had been involved in a scheme that defrauded the New York State Medicaid system of $8 million. Ross was sentenced to 46 months in federal prison and barred from participating in Medicare and Medicaid for ten years. In 2000, a panel rejected his application to reinstate his medical license, and Ross did not regain the license until 2004.[4]
The previous leader of ACSH was Elizabeth Whelan, who passed away in 2014. She did numerous interviews attacking efforts to regulate industries and was a controversial figure.
For example, Nicolas Martin was ACSH’s administrative director during parts of 1988 and 1989. After he left ACSH, he dubbed Whelan the “junk food queen” for her defense of companies who make products with low nutritional value.[5]
Martin says that, during his tenure with ACSH, he saw or was informed of instances when funders were intimately involved in ACSH projects. Before Martin’s arrival at the organization, ACSH published a booklet on sugar and health. He says that he was told by ACSH’s then-vice president, Edward Remmers, that the booklet was printed in-house by The Hershey Company. Martin says that, during his tenure, ACSH was producing a booklet on alcohol and health that the Stroh Brewery Company participated in editing. Neither booklet included an acknowledgement of funder participation.[5]
Martin claims that The Professional Lawn Care Association of America (PLCAA) asked ACSH to publish a booklet defending chemicals used for lawn care in 1999. He says that Dr. Whelan insisted that ACSH would only produce such a defense if the PLCAA made a donation to fund it. This is the sort of quid pro quo that Dr. Whelan has always claimed ACSH has never permitted. Martin says that he notified ACSH board members of these apparent violations of ACSH policy, but that no public acknowledgement or correction resulted.[5]
Since 1989, Martin has been executive director of the Consumer Health Education Council.
Coverage of ACSH Ties
The conflict between ACSH’s hidden sponsors and the views espoused occasionally rates a mention in media coverage too. Writing in the Columbia Journalism Review, Gloria Cooper wryly commented that the Today Show deserved a “dart” for “failing to meet truth-in-labeling standards.” Cooper noted that in a June 12, 2003 segment on the Today Show, Whelan had dismissed the suggestion of New York Assemblyman Felix Ortiz that a one percent tax be placed on junk foods: “There is room in life for potato chips and Twinkies and all these other maligned foods if you don’t eat huge amounts of them,” Whelan said.
“Point well taken”, Cooper wrote, “But one that viewers might well have taken with a mindful grain of salt, had they been given at least a clue to the organization that Whelan represents.”[6]
Continued on next page…
