Study about butter, funded by butter industry, finds that butter is bad for you

The Danish Dairy Research Foundation funded a study in hopes to promote favorable findings abou butter. Instead, they found that eating even moderate levels of butter could result in higher cholesterol. In other words, a study about butter, funded by the butter industry, finds that butter is bad for you. This scenario is rare, but food industries funding self-serving studies is not.

Marion Nestle, the Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University, says "the first thing you need to do when you read a study is figure out who paid for it. It's very telling."

Nestle is currently working on a book about the soda industry, where she estimates 90% of studies about soda funded by the soda industry find that soda isn't that bad for you, while 90% of studies funded by everyone else find the opposite is true. "The purpose of a lot of these studies is to show that food is a superfood so an industry can market it," said Nestle. "It looks like science, but it's not. It's business first."