UCSF Industry Document Libraries host U.S. Right to Know food and chemical industry collections

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U.S. Right to Know collaborates with the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF), a highly respected medical school, to give the public free access to documents obtained in our ongoing investigations of the ultra-processed food and agrichemical industries. To date, USRTK has donated more than 200,000 pages of industry documents to the UCSF Industry Documents Library.

The Industry Documents Library is affiliated with the UCSF Truth Tobacco Industry Documents, an archive of 14 million documents created by tobacco companies and their allies. In addition to the food and chemical industry collections contributed by U.S. Right to Know and other researchers, the UCSF library contains documents from the fossil fuel and opioid industries and provide valuable information about how all these industries run their product-defense campaigns.

Agrichemical industry documents

The collaboration between USRTK and UCSF began in April 2018, with our donation of agrichemical industry documents we obtained from public records requests.Those documents – which included communications between the agrichemical industry and publicly funded academics and universities – shine light on the public relations, science denial and regulatory tactics the industry has used to defend its products and profits.

The documents are cataloged, indexed, fully searchable and downloadable so they will be easy to use for academics, journalists, policymakers and the general public. They are available free of charge and housed in perpetuity in the U.S. Right to Know Agrichemical Collection.

Food industry documents

U.S. Right to Know also contributed to the UCSF Food Industry Collection with documents we obtained during our ongoing investigations into the influence large food and beverage companies wield over academic partnerships, public health conferences and government regulatory processes.

Obtained through public access to information laws, these documents contributed to 15 academic papers co-authored by U.S. Right to Know exposing the ultra-processed food industry’s influence on public health and nutrition groups, public health conferences, journalism and government policies. The studies are our effort to synthesize and explain the documents.

Recent papers include a case study in Public Health Nutrition about the food and beverage industry’s sponsorship of public health conferences and speakers; a study in Globalization and Health examining how the International Food Information Council acts as a messaging vehicle for its corporate sponsors; and a paper in Public Health Nutrition reporting on the corporate capture of the nutrition profession in the U.S. via the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, the world’s largest professional nutrition organization.

These studies and documents exposing corporate influence in the food and nutrition arena have been covered in the Washington Post, the Guardian, MedPage Today, the Daily Mail, Environmental Health News, Food Politics and other outlets.

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