Does the American Diabetes Association work for patients or companies? A lawsuit dared to ask | Neil Barsky

a A cloak of silence has descended on the recent whistleblowing case to claim that the American Diabetes Association (ADA) accepted corporate money in exchange for recommending prescriptions that threatened the health of people with diabetes.

Elizabeth Hanna, the former ADA chief nutritionist who claimed her former employer fired her over her refusal to approve Splenda-filled salads, has quietly settled her case. In a statement to the Guardian, Hanna’s attorney, Lauren Davis, said “the matter has been resolved.” No details were provided either by Davis or an ADA spokesperson, who declined to comment.

For Hanna, accepting an ADA settlement was undoubtedly an easier, less stressful, and risky alternative to a lawsuit, but for me and the other 38 million people with diabetes in the country, it’s a turnoff. What a great opportunity a trial would have been to expose the inner workings of the ADA, the patient advocacy group, right down to its eyes on corporate financing.

I recently wrote about Hanna’s lawsuit as part of our series Death by Diabetes: America’s Preventable Epidemic. My view is that diabetes is an urgent national scandal. More than 100 million Americans have diabetes or prediabetes, and 100,000 die from the condition every year. In addition, every year hundreds of thousands of people with diabetes have limbs amputated or suffer from blindness or kidney disease. Diabetes costs our country $400 billion annually to treat.

And while type 2 diabetes is often reversible through a low-carb diet, the ADA and the pharmaceutical industry don’t seem very interested in recognizing that. Instead, they are promoting a litany of corporate deals and pharmaceutical treatments that have failed to stem the disease’s deadly and expensive impact on American life.

Hanna’s complaint, filed last year in a New Jersey court, alleged a litany of wrongdoing by one of the nation’s most powerful patient advocacy groups. Hanna said executives at the ADA pressured her to approve recipes containing generous amounts of the artificial sweetener Splenda, despite research published in the ADA’s own scientific journal. find that artificial sweeteners may increase consumers’ risk of type 2 diabetes.

Hanna further claimed that the push was the result of a $1 million contribution to the ADA by Heartland Food Products Group. Finally, she said the ADA was a revolving door of nutrition directors, with seven leaders coming and going over the past four years — largely because, she claimed, her predecessors “were either fired by the ADA when they refused to comply with its unethical rules of the ADA. and unlawful practices or were constructively terminated by the ADA due to the abusive and hostile work environment they faced for refusing to comply.”

The ADA rejects the allegations in the lawsuit. Heartland Food Products Group, which was not named in the lawsuit, also said it denies any allegations of wrongdoing and indicated it would continue to cooperate with the ADA. “Heartland will continue to support the ADA and honorably provide recipes and educational information to help people successfully lower sugar levels and live happier, healthier lives,” Heartland said in a statement.

By reaching a settlement, the ADA is able to avoid the discovery process and the potentially embarrassing revelations that could come with it.

Hanna’s lawyers appear to have understood the implications of her lawsuit and initially suggested that her quest could take on heroic dimensions. “Hanna’s story could be the next movie Americans need to see to understand what’s happening behind closed doors between large for-profit companies and the nonprofit healthcare sector,” they wrote in their legal complaint.

Although she chose to join the ADA, in reality, Hanna has already performed a tremendous public service. Her legal complaint is a public document that can be read by the ADA Board of Directors, physicians in the US and around the world, and by members of Congress. Her meticulous account portrays the world’s leading diabetes advocacy organization as a cynical fundraising machine bent on appeasing corporate executives at the expense of the millions of people with diabetes it should be trying to help.

“Defendant’s conduct shows that they were part of a scheme to defraud the American people by approving and endorsing prescriptions submitted by Splenda to be praised by the ADA as a healthy choice for people with diabetes, while the ADA knew that those prescriptions violated the ADA’s guidelines and established and emerging scientific principles,” the complaint reads.

In case you’re curious, the ADA and Splenda appear to still be going strong. As I write this, the ADA’s Diabetes Food Hub webpage is still open functions no fewer than 203 recipes – some marked “sponsored,” others not – including Splenda, whose parent company’s $1 million contribution exposed the utter madness of our diabetes epidemic.

Isn’t it long past time for the ADA board to take action?

• Neil Barsky, former reporter and investment manager for the Wall Street Journal, is the founder of the Marshall Project