Science…it ain’t what it used to be – Viva!life 92

Tony Wardle takes a look at how scientific research is being perverted for commercial gain

Featured in Viva!Life 92/Summer 2025

Did you know that Penelope Keith, one of the UK’s favourite actors (The Good Life and To the Manor Born), assassinated President John F Kennedy? You didn’t? Of course you didn’t because it’s a load of old tosh spread by the conspiracy clan. But then facts have never stood in the way of a good conspiracy theory.

Covid-19 provided a gift to conspiracists that just doesn’t stop giving! Vaccination didn’t work and killed more people than the disease itself; it was just a moneymaking scam; Covid was introduced purposely to weed out the old and infirm; the 5G mobile network 1) spread Covid on its radio waves or 2) weakened the immune system, making you more susceptible to the disease.

The most paranoid claim was that Covid vaccinations injected microchips into your bloodstream so that ‘they’ could control you (whoever ‘they’ are). But this was a recycled theory that began with the World Health Organisation’s global vaccination programme. Decades have passed and still no one has produced one of the offending microchips as proof.

If you don’t fancy any of these, there are plenty more. Aircraft condensation trails are, in fact, chemical trails (chemtrails) that make you infertile, exert mind control, poison you or weed out the sick and elderly (again). Clearly this last one isn’t working as old wrinklies like me are increasing almost exponentially. The world is flat, the Holocaust never happened, evolution is a myth and all creatures great and small were made in six days by a divine hand. He/she/it must have been at the end of the shift when they came up with the blind, hairless mole rat and the Loa loa worm that burrows into children’s eyes and blinds them.

The fear of ‘control’ keeps cropping up even though we couldn’t already be more controlled if we were Pelham Puppets. There are tens of thousands of laws – with 4,200 Acts of Parliament passed between 1950 and 2019 alone and around 2,500 Statutory Instruments passed every year.

There are some corkers still on the statute book. It’s illegal to get drunk in a pub, to drive your cattle down a high street in daylight, to carry a plank of wood along a pavement, and for MPs to wear a full suit of armour into parliament. But I digress.

All we had to worry about in my youth were flying saucers, that Russian mothers ate their babies and that some garbled electronic words at the end of The Beatles’ Sergeant Pepper track presaged Armageddon.

As a journalist, I’ve always had one simple response to all dubious claims – prove it, and my fallback has always been science! But according to the conspiracy bunch, all scientific sources are corrupt. And, sadly, some are, particularly research into the health effects of meat and dairy.

A study on impoverished Kenyan children, published in the Journal of Nutrition 20 years ago, first alerted me to the fact that science ain’t always what it professes to be.

The study took malnourished African youngsters, divided them into four groups (one being a control group) and supplemented their diet with either meat, milk or vegetable oil to see how it improved their nutrition (whoever thought that vegetable oil had any equivalence with meat?).

Surprise, surprise, the meat group came out on top. With such a deprived group of children, even the introduction of boiled cardboard might have improved their lot!

The US National Cattlemen’s Beef Association largely funded the research and it allowed them to boast of the importance of meat in the diet of young people. In the food and pharmaceutical industries, results from sponsored research tend to reach conclusions that favour the sponsor’s products – and if they don’t, they’re likely to be suppressed.

As universities increasingly struggle for funding and governments cut back on research grants, industry is only too happy to bridge the gap. It’s just as well that Viva!’s head of research, Dr Justine Butler, is well practised in filtering out impartial science from the potentially prejudiced.

We are currently working on a documentary film called What do You Really Know About Dairy? which involves a huge amount of research. An analysis of 15 studies into cheese consumption and heart disease essentially found that the more cheese you eat, the lower your risk of heart disease and stroke.

When the study was first published in 2017, the authors declared they had no conflict of interest. However, in 2019, they admitted that this claim was incorrect and that they were affiliated with Yili Industrial Group, the largest dairy company in Asia.

Throughout our lives, we’ve been subjected to claims that milk gives you strong bones and if you trawl through the science, you’ll find claims that support this – you’ll also find claims that the opposite is true and show that countries with the highest calcium and total milk product intakes have the highest fracture rates.

It’s vital that research looking at the effects of dairy products on health is not carried out by scientists with links to the dairy industry. Fat chance! Of 22 recent studies looking at milk, dairy or other dairy products and bone health, we found that more than half were written by at least one author with links to the dairy industry!

The US Food and Drug Administration has just approved research that allows Danone to claim that yoghurt lowers the risk of diabetes. Part of that research compared the impact that yoghurt had to that of chocolate and biscuits! Back to boiled cardboard again!

So, at every toss and turn, commercial interests are perverting science to obtain the results they want and then spending massive amounts to disseminate them.

The UK’s Agriculture and Horticulture Development Board (AHDB) has just launched the Milk Every Moment campaign, “empowering the next generation”. By partnering with British Universities & College Sports, it makes no bones about its targeting of university students and Gen Z to persuade them to consume more milk.

Back in the US, the ‘Nutrition and Health Committee’ of the Cattlemen’s Beef Board has produced a list of tactics to target health professionals, telling them how wonderful beef is, even though it’s a carcinogen and cattle ranching is one of the greatest threats to the global environment.

It isn’t just a case of vested interests being selective with science, they also completely ignore it when it doesn’t chime with their interests. Mr Trump has cancelled anything and everything that might help to reduce global heating emissions and sacked those involved for being woke. Richard Tice (Reform) has described the climate crisis as “absolute garbage”, while Nigel Farage (Reform) has described it as a “scam”. Almost all of Reform’s major donors have links to climate denial.

In March this year, Kemi Badenoch changed the Tory party’s policy of net zero by 2050, saying it was impossible to achieve, shortly after receiving donations from the Global Warming Policy Foundation, and pressure group Net Zero Watch – both climate change deniers.

The thing about global heating is that the science is so overwhelming it can absolutely be defended – over 15,000 positions that it is real and largely man-made – and not a single study showing the opposite.

This is why I get so cross about those who have wasted their time by disappearing down the rabbit hole of nonsensical conspiracy theories – lift your head up from your keyboard, I want to say, look around you and you’ll see real-life, 24-carat, armour-clad actual conspiracies that threaten all our futures. It needs warriors to expose them so now’s your chance to do something genuinely of importance – go get ‘em!