Food industry has EURRECA moment

12 June 2008

Metric martyrs looking for a new cause now the British pint is safe might want to turn their attention to Eurocrat meddling in nutrient recommendations, writes Stephen Gardner. These – dealing with consumptions of vitamins and minerals such as fluoride, magnesium and salt – are set in the UK by the Food Standards Agency. But for how much longer? A European Commission project, known as EURRECA and funded with £10.5 million of taxpayers' cash, is pushing for standard EU-wide recommendations. The project will carry out research at a number of European universities, but is coordinated by the European arm of the International Life Sciences Institute (ILSI). This US-headquartered organisation is a front for the food and bioscience industry. Members include Bayer CropScience, Coca-Cola, McDonald's and Monsanto. In fact many of these companies manage to participate twice in the project through another front organisation, the European Food Information Council, the membership of which largely reproduces ILSI's. Why deep-pocketed food multinationals should be paid from the public purse to develop nutrition recommendations is unclear, but one thing is for sure: ILSI has form. BBC Panorama investigated it in 2004 for secretly funding a United Nations study on the role of sugar and carbohydrates in nutrition. We await EURRECA's no-doubt scientifically rigorous and entirely unbiased conclusions in due course. A version of this article originally appeared in Private Eye.

 

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