Assessing and discussing health claims can be difficult. Imagine a friend who tells you it’s important that you eat several servings of fish each week. Your plant-based lifestyle, they suggest, is putting you at risk of not getting all the nutrients you need to thrive. How would you respond?

In an ideal scenario, you would be prepared to speak eloquently on the scientific evidence, weighing the pros and cons of fish consumption before describing a decision that’s fair and nuanced. You would account for the most essential, relevant considerations. You may not convince your friend, but at least you could rest easy knowing you did your due diligence to understand this potentially health-affecting decision.

What about the more common and less ideal scenario in which you aren’t sure how to respond? Suppose you want to remedy this ignorance—what steps will you take? If you’re like most people, you might begin with a basic Google search, which would promptly return more hits on the subject than you could reasonably be expected to read. The top results would come from outlets with a strong online presence. Think the New York Times. The Guardian. But also, perhaps, less well-known or reputable sites, plus sites that more explicitly advertise themselves as evidence-based health resources, like Healthline. This could very well be where your search ends. What these resources have to say about the latest research on fish consumption is, for many, sufficient.

But what about those more prone to skepticism? Those who are wary of the changing media landscape, those who understand on some level the changes that have occurred in how people consume news and how news organizations produce and distribute that news. With the decline of print sales, shrinking newsroom staffs, and the instantaneous transmission of information across the internet, many have noted the rapid erosion of journalism’s ideals.^[1] In the vacuum left behind, the tendency toward sensationalism and the pressure to exaggerate findings contribute to a higher rate of sloppiness and inaccuracy.

Journalists are short on time, untrained in science, and urged to generate headlines that garner the most clicks possible. “Even if journalists had the time to read journal articles,” which they likely do not, “the majority of those articles remain behind journal paywalls.”[1] Researchers have noticed this breakdown in quality too, describing how “the desire to create newsworthy stories about science [has] led to a perverse situation where poorer quality research can garner more news coverage than robust research.”^[1]

The most logical next step for a skeptical reader is presumably to skip the intermediary reporting and seek out the original research directly, but this also presents many challenges. Even assuming that gaining access to full articles is not a problem, how does a layperson make sense of the flood of published research? How do they better understand a particular health or nutrition topic when it seems every other article published in a scientific journal is industry funded?

Any of the difficulties described so far could be the subject of a lengthy critique. But here, we’re going to narrow our focus on the role of money in science. Many people are aware of the influence industry has over science. And we probably expect and understand on an intuitive level that funding sources can influence research. But do we appreciate just how important and pervasive the influence is? In the rest of this article, we’ll look at five of the biggest concerns related to industry-funded research.

1. Funding Buys Findings

This will probably not come as a surprise. Although researchers will invariably defend their integrity and insist on the objectivity of the scientific method, analyses have shown that the source of funding does seem to affect study results.

One such analysis was published in 2007.^[2] It included over two hundred articles published between the beginning of 1999 and the end of 2003. The researchers analyzed multiple study types—interventional studies, observational studies, and reviews—in articles related to common beverages (milk, juice, and soft drinks). “The main finding of this study,” they write, “is that scientific articles about commonly consumed beverages funded entirely by industry were approximately four to eight times more likely to be favorable to the financial interests of the sponsors than articles without industry-related funding [emphasis added].”

This bias may manifest in numerous ways. Investigators conducting a review might selectively include only favorable research (i.e., cherry-picking); they might not publish results when conclusions don’t favor the funder (more on this later); or, as is often the case, they might design the study in such a way that produces misleading results.^[2] To read about specific examples, I recommend checking out Marion Nestle’s Food Politics blog, on which she regularly posts about industry-funded research.

2. Transparency Is Lacking

Critical readers can sometimes pick apart the methodological faults of industry-funded studies. However, the trick, for want of a better term, is not always blatant. Sometimes, seeing through the bias requires a greater proficiency with statistics and an understanding of study design, which many lay readers do not have. Additionally, even for those who do understand statistics well, industry-funded studies often fail to make their data easily accessible.

A meta-research assessment of six hundred of the most-cited clinical trials from 2019 to 2022 found that trials funded by industry often reported plans to share data and make statistical analysis accessible but the raw data was rarely available.^[3]

Another noteworthy finding from the same study was that more than 90 percent of trials funded exclusively by industry included at least one author affiliated with the industry; however, only in a small percentage of those cases were the industry-affiliated authors listed as either the first author or the corresponding author. It’s not unlikely that the industry-affiliated authors in many of those trials were not the lead researcher or appropriately placed to be listed as the corresponding author; nevertheless, by being listed in less prominent places, their industry affiliations could be easier to overlook.

As the authors write, “The prominence of industry funding in influential trials is unsurprising.”^[3] What’s more alarming, and perhaps more surprising to most people, is the high degree to which industry is represented in authorship or analysis roles. And that’s just for the listed authors. Additional ghost authors may also be contributing. According to one study, the prevalence of ghostwriting could range from as little as 0.9 percent to as much as 75 percent.^[4] The extremity of that range is itself an indication of the problematic lack of transparency in scientific research and publishing.

3. The Problem Transcends Industries

The entanglement of industry and pharmaceutical research is well established. In 2023, members of the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America trade group spent ninety-six billion dollars on research and development.^[5]

As mentioned above, funding also influences research on various beverages, including dairy and soda.^[2] One 2019 article questions the “radicalised discourse” that “sees industry-funded research as inherently biased.”[6] It concedes that pharmaceutical industry–funded research may deserve scrutiny but then suggests that dairy-funded research may not warrant the same suspicion. Oh, and did I mention—this was published in the International Dairy Journal and funded by the Israel Dairy Board Research Fund? They found “no significant differences between industry-funded and neutral, non-industry-funded research studies.” Recall the contradicting findings described above: industry-funded research was four to eight times more likely to reach favorable conclusions.^[2]

We see the same pattern repeat in every industry, whether from genetic engineering corporations, tobacco, sugar-sweetened beverages, or trade groups like the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association. Big business does not fund research to further the collective knowledge. They fund research because it’s profitable. It is, like money spent on marketing or public relations, a form of investment.

4. Unfavorable Results Aren’t Published

You might wonder what happens when an industry-funded study reaches a conclusion that does not favor the funder. The answer may surprise you. In the 2007 study cited above, “none of the interventional studies with all industry support had an unfavorable conclusion.”^[2] This suggests one of three things: (1) there are legitimately no unfavorable conclusions to be found, (2) the research design has been compromised to a perfect extent, as far as the funders are concerned, or (3) unexpectedly negative findings are blocked from publication.

I mentioned Marion Nestle’s Food Politics blog above. In a recent post there, she summarized the findings of a systematic review of clinical trials on unprocessed red meat and cardiovascular disease.^[7][8] Here’s the key takeaway from that study: “All studies with funding ties to the meat industry reported favorable (20.7%) or neutral (79.3%) results [emphasis added].” Meanwhile, in a nearly opposite direction, “all independently funded studies reported unfavorable (73.3%) or neutral (26.7%) results.” (In the case of red meat and cardiovascular disease, a neutral finding could be categorized as pro-industry, for it contributes to public confusion and the notion that there is no scientific consensus.)

The journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics published a study in 2016 that analyzed discontinued or unpublished studies from 2008 to 2010.^[9] They found that industry-funded studies were less likely to be discontinued; this may be because non–industry-funded studies had a more difficult time getting enough subjects (“patient accrual” was the top-listed cause for discontinuation of randomized clinical trials). However, among trials that were completed, nearly a third were never published. Industry-funded trials were more than two and three times as likely to be unpublished at two or three years following the trial, respectively. This nonpublication could put patients at risk, especially if the findings included potential adverse side effects.[^[10]

Science, then, is not the same thing as the scientific literature. If it were, the advice we hear so often, to “follow the science,” would be much easier: published articles would be more accessible, we would be able to assess the balance of positive versus negative findings, and conflicts of interest would be more transparently disclosed.

5. It May Get Worse

One way to reduce the influence of industry is to provide scientists with sufficient funding opportunities for which they will not feel any pressure, conscious or otherwise, to reach a certain conclusion.

We seem to be moving in the exact opposite direction, toward greater industry funding and less government support for research. The share of support from the federal government for basic research has trended downward fairly consistently for decades, from about 70 percent in 1980 to about 40 percent earlier this decade.^[11] Industry is primarily responsible for making up the difference. Unsurprisingly, business makes up an even larger share of total funding for applied research—nearly two-thirds of all funding in 2022.^[12] More recent figures suggest this trend is only accelerating. In less than the past year, NIH funding for biomedical research has decreased by 20 percent.^[13]

None of this is to say that government funding structures cannot or should not be improved. Likewise, government-funded research is not, simply because of the funding source, exempt from criticism. Researchers receiving grants from the NIH can certainly be susceptible to other forms of bias, and even if they aren’t biased, that doesn’t guarantee their findings will be valuable or worth the associated costs. However, if the goal is to ultimately move toward a science less beholden to financial conflicts of interest, we are going about it all wrong.

You Can Empower Yourself

While pharmaceutical companies can splash a lot more cash than the growers of Hass avocados, anyone who can get in on the action will surely do so, because this is the system we allow and reward.

If that seems terribly demoralizing, consider this: we all have the power to hold ourselves accountable and develop the skills to better assess health claims and analyze research. Critical thinking is learnable, and if we insist on that learning, no one—not Novo Nordisk, not PepsiCo, not the National Confectioners Association or your friend recommending fish or anyone else—will easily dupe us.

References

1. Dempster G, Sutherland G, and Keogh L. Scientific research in news media: a case study of misrepresentation, sensationalism and harmful recommendations Jour. of Sci. Comm. 2022; 21(01), A06. doi:10.22323/2.21010206
2. Lesser LI, Ebbeling CB, Goozner M, Wypij D, Ludwig DS. Relationship between funding source and conclusion among nutrition-related scientific articles. PLoS Med. 2007;4(1):e5. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0040005
3. Siena LM, Papamanolis L, Siebert MJ, Bellomo RK, Ioannidis JPA. Industry Involvement and Transparency in the Most Cited Clinical Trials, 2019-2022. JAMA Netw Open. 2023;6(11):e2343425. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2023.43425
4. Yadav S, Rawal G. Ghostwriters in the scientific world. Pan Afr Med J. 2018;30:217. Published 2018 Jul 18. doi:10.11604/pamj.2018.30.217.16312
5. Mikulic M. Spending of U.S. pharmaceutical industry for research and development as a percentage of total revenues from 1990 to 2023. Statista.com. September 2, 2024.
6. Mishali M, Kisner M, Avrech T. Funding sources and outcomes of dairy consumption research – A meta-analysis of cohort studies: The case of type-2 diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Int Dairy J. 2019;95:65–70. doi:10.1016/j.dairyj.2019.02.019
7. Nestle M. Industry-funding analysis of the week: the meat funding effect. Food Politics. May 26, 2025. https://www.foodpolitics.com/2025/05/industry-funding-analysis-of-the-week-the-meat-funding-effect/
8. López-Moreno M, Fresán U, Marchena-Giráldez C, Bertotti G, Roldán-Ruiz A. Industry study sponsorship and conflicts of interest on the effect of unprocessed red meat on cardiovascular disease risk: a systematic review of clinical trials. Am Journ of Clin Nut. 2025;121(6):1246–1257. doi:10.1016/j.ajcnut.2025.02.030
9. Pica N, Bourgeois F. Discontinuation and Nonpublication of Randomized Clinical Trials Conducted in Children. Pediatrics. 2016;138(3):e20160223. doi:10.1542/peds.2016-0223
10. Oransky I, Marcus A. Many clinical trials’ findings never get published. Here’s why that’s bad. STAT. August 19, 2016. https://www.statnews.com/2016/08/19/clinical-trials-unpublished-studies/1
11. Pece CV, Anderson GW; National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES). 2024. Analysis of Federal Funding for Research and Development in 2022: Basic Research. NSF 24-332. Alexandria, VA: U.S. National Science Foundation. Available at https://ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsf24332.
12. Bickell EG, Blevins EG, DeSantis MK, et al. Federal research and development (R&D) funding: FY2025 [CRS Report]. Congress.gov. December 9, 2024.
13. Hwang I, Huang J, Anthes E, Migliozzi B, Mueller B. The disappearing funds for global health. New York Times. June 4, 2025. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/04/health/trump-cuts-nih-grants-research.html