Mumbai. Since the launch of World Nutrition in May, we have been pootling along at a rate of traffic steadily moving up to around 10,000 sessions a month. (Hits, not a meaningful measure, are around 10 times that rate). Over 100,000 sessions a year, from over 70 countries, sounded good. Our ‘star’ story was Michael Latham on The great vitamin A fiasco, which has been accessed over 2,500 times. In October, bar the last day, overall sessions rose to just over 13,000. We felt pleased.

Then on Sunday 31 October, the team member who monitors our website statistics came in from a Hallowe’en children’s Trick or Treat party, to find that our gauge of sessions, meaning the number of times people had opened at least one of the contributions on our site, had for that one half-day rocketed above 5,000. Oh, he thought, the machine was broken. By the end of that Sunday – normally the quietest day – the figure was 6,445. Downloads were at 2.93 gigabytes. The machine was measuring a new reality. We were in the world of social media, borne up by potent friends.

Our ultra-processing commentary

This is what had happened. Carlos Monteiro, author of our epic 12,000 word November commentary on ultra-processing, which we posted as part of our November issue in the late evening of Saturday 30 October, had emailed Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food, in Berkeley CA, and Marion Nestle, author of What To Eat, in Manhattan NY, asking for their opinion on his thesis.

They both loved it, and on Sunday said so, on their websites. Michael made it his ‘Pick of the Day’, and Marion wrote a 1,000 word blog extensively quoting from it, and both of them tweeted (twittered? twote?) recommendations to their followers. Whoosh! It ‘went viral’, and since then has been featured in The Atlantic and the Time magazine health website, and a lot of other sites. Then later in the month our page traffic ‘spiked’ again. This followed Felicity Lawrence of The Guardian, also author of Eat Your Heart Out, linking to Carlos’s commentary on the brand-new Guardian ‘Big Food’ section she masterminds– which also links to Michael Pollan and Marion Nestle. So this is networking. Sessions for Carlos’s commentary for the month of November plus Hallowe’en day, will be well over 15,000, and for the whole site as well as WN will be around 35,000.

This is exciting, and also confusing. What is our potential? We have no idea. Marion, whose website is fairly recent, tells us that she has nearly 40,000 people following her tweets. Maybe, once we bolt Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and the rest on to our site, we’ll gain the electronic equivalent of a 50,000 circulation a month. But is this good? Perhaps at that number we still would be hopelessly underestimating the hunger among professionals and others, for reliable coverage of public health nutrition. We will see.

Our SCN news story and updates

Meanwhile yes, quality impact counts also. We know that Carlos’s commentary has been passed to the US First Lady to peruse, and that its implications for Healthy Eating Pyramids are being studied by US federal government officials.

We also know that the 1,000+ readers of our October news story and updates on the UN Standing Committee on Nutrition (SCN) crisis, which continues on this home page this month, include executives in the office of the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, and high-ups in the relevant UN agencies, as well as heavy-hitters working for various national governments.

Our SCN coverage is on a highly controversial and important and now very urgent issue. So our ‘scoop’, our exposure of the fact that the SCN remains close to being starved to death by funding deprivation and deficiency, is itself controversial. As Association President I feel I should share my views with you here.

In real senses the Association is a ‘broad church’. Our members include a lot of senior nutrition scientists with a commitment to public health. They also, and increasingly often now, include a lot of public health professionals with a commitment to nutrition. These two groups have different perspectives, as indeed do the many UN agencies involved with nutrition or with food policy, and another group of our members are current or former UN executives or officers. We also have members currently working for national governments and their agencies, and for health professional and civil society organisations. Plus within these and other groups our members are fairly well balanced in terms of age, experience, gender, location, and attitude.

As I have been working with Council and Association colleagues on the unfolding SCN drama, I – and they – have been discussing when or if it is right to poke a stick into a hornets’ nest. I have some real experience of doing this in my garden, with wasps. The first lesson I learnt was that individual wasps react fast, and unlike bees are able to keep stinging you as long as you keep annoying them. But wasps are also well organised. They communicate danger and have a collective strategy. Perhaps I should not think too much about where this metaphor is leading!

Some of our members have said to me that we shouldn’t get involved with the issue of whether the SCN survives or not, and even that it is none of our business. Besides, this argument continues, why should UN executives pay attention to what we say? As a body, our Council does not agree with this view, and besides, we know for sure that our views are being taken seriously. We think this is because of the quality and salience of what we are saying. This is evident from what we have published, and also from conversations and documents that we have not disclosed.

The consensus supports what we are doing and will continue to do, with no flat disagreements. Most members have urged us on and said in effect ‘At last! We are right behind you’ (and some of these have said ‘don’t tell anybody I am saying so’!). We continue talking with many people, including some key players in the UN system, consulting widely, taking soundings, finding out what among the information that is cascading into our in-boxes may be inaccurate or misleading and what is reliable and disinterested, and always seeking to do our best to judge what is in the public interest. Yes, in this case we are engaged in investigative journalism, in an area of public life that is peculiarly obscure. Judgement is involved throughout, and any judgement can be flawed or mistaken.

We believe that the issue of whether the SCN will live, die, or be crippled and stagger on somehow, needs to come out into the open. We also decided that we should discover and publish our own position on the SCN. Our Council is mandated to do this, on behalf of our membership. Our position, summarised last month, is now set out in full as the main contribution in World Nutrition this month, together with an editorial setting out the background and our reasoning.

As a body, the Association upholds the principles and vision of the United Nations family. Having travelled a lot around the world, I know how important the UN agencies such as WHO, FAO and UNICEF are, and how well respected and trusted they are, especially in lower- income countries. I also know that a lot of effort is wasted because agencies do not always harmonise with each other when they should. And this is a key reason why we also uphold the SCN, in a new stronger and more resilient form. To use a well-known phrase, if the SCN did not exist it would be necessary to create it, and the task now is to re-create and re-form it. More power to current SCN chair Alexander Müller.

Engaged for and with the people of Mumbai

Mumbai. Yes, really now! I am working here now with project leaders Caroline Fall of the MRC unit in Southampton, and Ramesh Potdar who is based in Mumbai. We are asking: Can we improve the health of the mother and her children, by improving the quality of her diet before she becomes pregnant? To date most interventions are not food based, and do not start until women are pregnant, after many key biological processes are already set for life. The slums we are working in are close to and more impoverished than those filmed for the movie Slum Dog Millionaire (which incidentally was not well received in India). We want to see if a food-based approach using locally available foods can make a difference.

The project employs upwards of 300 people, mostly recruited and trained from the local communities – which is another form of intervention. It is led mostly by local paediatricians and public health workers, who thus develop their skills in research leadership. This approach is not common in low and middle income countries, when research in these settings is mainly funded from rich countries. Very often the whole management team flies in and consists of ex-pats and young rich country PhD students developing their own careers, with occasionally a local PhD student who may also be doing a PhD. Many if not most such projects are mostly useful for the career development of the foreigners, but do relatively little for the professionals and the communities in the host country. This keeps the research agenda, and budgets for research, in the hands of the already rich country universities. This is not the philosophy of our team here in Mumbai, and as always I feel proud to serve India as best I can.

Our WN Board members

This month we welcome Shiriki Kumanyika as the latest member of the Board of World Nutrition. The Board is responsible with me as chair and Geoffrey Cannon as editor, with reference to our Council, for the publishing and editorial policies of our journal. Shiriki is co-chair with Boyd Swinburn of the International Obesity Task Force, and Vice-President (US) of the American Public Health Association. She has just completed her task as chair of the US Institute of Medicine committee on ‘An evidence framework for obesity prevention decision making’ and its game-changing report Bridging the Evidence Gap in Obesity Prevention, just now hot off the US National Academies Press. She joins fellow Association and WN Board members Ted Greiner, Roger Hughes, Urban Jonsson, Harriet Kuhnlein and Carlos Monteiro, and – with apologies for not yet having posted their member’s profiles – John Mason and Walter Willett.

Barrie Margetts
B.M.Margetts@soton.ac.uk