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Gratitude

Written to highlight bias in a report with a covert agenda, plus to defend Prof Noakes’ online reputation from yet another Big Food-funded smear.

Published in September 2025, The Changing Markets Foundation’s Meat vs EAT LANCET publication positions itself as a credible, investigative report. By contrast, I argue that it should rather be understood as a covert 'smear' communication event. In simple terms, a smear is 'an effort to manipulate opinion by promulgating an overblown, scandalous and damaging narrative' (Attkisson, 2017). The goal is often 'to destroy ideas by ruining the people who are most effective at communicating them' (p.3). The ‘Meat vs EAT-LANCET’ report fulfils a smear's criteria; its investigation uses inconclusive evidence to defame critics of the original “planetary health” diet (Willett et al, 2019) as shills for the meat industry.

As a communication event, ‘Meat vs EAT-LANCET’ is located within a long-running scientific argument and diet controversy. This concerns; what constitutes a healthy diet for individuals, the best food systems to support this, who gets to decide, and what research merits funding. In the Health Sciences and related fields, this rivalry pits two sides against each other. The dominant orthodoxy promotes high carbohydrate diets that suit the interests of the plant-based and processed food industry. In contrast, dissenting experts advocate for low carb lifestyles, plus real foods from the farming of livestock and regenerative agriculture (Teicholz, 2014). It is not co-incidental that the Meat vs EAT-LANCET report's release occurred shortly before the next communication from the orthodoxy- the EAT-Lancet Commission report (2025). The former's release was planned to pre-empt criticism of 2025's report by smearing the most influential critics of its 2019 pre-cursor. Such blowback seems motivated by the low-carb critics' initial successes- for example, a flagship launch event was planned at the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, but  the WHO pulled out. Its withdrawal ‘followed a massive online backlash, which had concentrated on one of the report’s recommendations: to cut global red meat consumption by 50 percent’ (Carlile, 2025).

As described in Lars Magne Sunnanå’s Substack post (‘A diet to save the planet - brought to you by a Wall Street bet on margarine’), the supporters of Environment, Agriculture, and Transformation (EAT)'s Commission learnt from this failure. The EAT-Lancet Commission 2025 report's release will be better co-ordinated- with 70 scientists, new safeguards against "misinformation", plus many more partners and allies ready to defend the research. Other plans include involving scientific institutions like Harvard and Cornel to produce and publish a range of translation articles, alongside a campaign with a “celebrity influencer group”. Funders that include the Rockefeller Foundation and Gates Foundation, plus sponsors such as the Flora Food Group are providing additional support. Widespread coverage can be expected in scientific publications and key media to promote the revised diet. It merits consideration why the steep fees of a large PR campaign were supported by the report's funders to make this the report 'du jour', versus funding other forms of outreach (such as open debates on its merits?).

Published on the 3rd of October, The EAT-Lancet Commission 2025 report is part of a broader campaign for EAT and its collaborators to establish themselves as an “independent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for food systems. Should they succeed, their IPCC will likely be able to increase its sponsorship and attract more funders. At the same time, the proposed IPCC for Food is part of an agenda to "streamline" decisions on food systems. Driven by an few highly influential actors, this initiative has the risk of imposing a narrow view of science by excluding many voices on food systems (IPES, 2021).

From a PR perspective, the Meat vs EAT-LANCET communication event is part of a pre-emptive campaign. Its funders hope that by framing the most influential critics of the “planetary health” diet (PHD 🙄) as surrogates for the meat industry, the content of their arguments can be ignored. The report frames critics of the 2019 report as: (i) being funded by an “evil” meat industry; (ii) taking funds from its PR agencies; and (iii) being co-ordinated by them in an attempt to discredit “the science”. This frame suggests that influential individuals' criticism of the “planetary health” diet is commercially-driven, anti-science heresy. Such framing illustrates Wolpe's (1994) insight that "heresy" is socially constructed by orthodoxy. Its defenders have the power to define which views are unacceptable and will face marginalisation. Here the orthodoxy presents critics of the EAT-LANCET commission to be an amoral group of duplicitous outsiders. They are “attacking” a virtuous group of meat-industry-fighting truth seekers, whose noble role is to “defend the science”. In stark contrast, critics of the PHD are presented as basely-motivated. They are defamed as reliant on the meat industry’s financing and planning for launching a significant online “backlash”.  This publication's argument is very close to calling for action to get rid of influential experts who have dared to contest the EAT-Lancet's scientific guidance (Stanton, 2025).

A biased “research” report with a covert agenda

As a communication event, the report is a patently transparent smear tool which seeks to create a digital pillory for the critics of the original EAT-Lancet 1999 reports’ many flaws (Hirvonen et al., 2020, Zagmutt et al. 2019, 2020). The Meat vs EAT-LANCET report is biased, its authorship is opaque, and its funding sources are hidden:

The obfuscation of funding sources is typical for the network funding man-made climate change research (Nordangård, 2024A), plus other projects that support of Agenda 2030 (Nordangård, 2024B). The Meat vs EAT-LANCET report does not disclose who its funders are, nor does it make an ethical acknowledgment for how that funding shapes its choice of subject and potential biases. The report is a co-production of two non-profits embedded within the Davocracy (Camus, 2022). Renaud Camus' neologism blends "Davos" (referring to the World Economic Forum and its global elites) with "-cracy," describing a managerial, cybernetic regime. Its financial powers—such as banks, multinational corporations and Big Tech - strive to exert sovereign control over human populations. This is facilitated via Global Public-Private Partnerships (GPPP) that stoke exaggerated fears, such as climate change catastrophism (West, 2023), that the GPPP's Social Development Goals (SDG) grant it the mandate to address. Dovetailing with this ideology, The Changing Markets Foundation strives to ‘shift market share away from unsustainable products and companies, and onto environmentally and socially beneficial solutions’.

Changing Market’s analysis in the Meat vs EAT-LANCET report was built off original research done by Ripple Research an “AI-for-Good advisory firm”, owned by the NPO Śrāvaṇa in Switzerland. Ripple is committed to ‘designing solutions for the most pressing global challenges and to effectuate enduring large-scale social impact through our unique Human+AI approach.’ Both non-profits are are bedfellows in having GPPP stakeholder clients who benefit directly from scientific dissent to their industries being miscast as “misinformation”. As part of an "Infodemic", all dissent versus climate change, mRNA vaccines and the WHO’s COVID-19 policies can be simplistically grouped. All such content becomes labelled as "misinformation" from amoral “misinfluencers", even when produced by eminent experts with decades of scholarship in their field! Such simplistic analysis for an "Infodemic" ignores the fact that disinformation, misinformation and malinformation (MDM) from authorities may well have far worse impacts than voices raising dissent, as was evident during COVID-19 (Noakes, Bell, & Noakes, 2022).

It the Meat vs EAT-LANCET report was ethical, it would disclose that its creation is riddled with conflicts of interest. Even with such disclosure, this negative PR exercise would not warrant being placed in the ‘research report’ genre. As an academic report, it would be desk-rejected as unworthy of peer review; it is not a fair-minded exploration of evidence, but merely serves to support a witch-hunt based on tendentious allegations stretched to seem credible. This is another hallmark of the smear, it salaciously works to confirm what a lot of people (e.g. vegetarians, vegans and processed food addicts) want to believe. A smear works by confirming its audiences' pre-existing suspicions (Attkisson, 2017, p.4). As Goebbels observed in his diary, propaganda works best when those who are being manipulated are confident that they acting in their own free will. In this case, sympathetic readers are primed to ignore that it was not poor science that motivated the independent experts' critique. Instead they are asked to believe the Meat vs EAT-LANCET report's claim that the "potential of the report to lead to regulation and societal change" posed a serious threat to the interests of Big Meat and Dairy. In response it co-ordinated a 'significant online backlash – against the report’s findings and the Commission itself' (p.5).

Misinformation in the report regarding @ProfTimNoakes