Fallon Currie Consulting

This article is part of the Lobbying Portal, a sunlight project from Spinwatch.

Fallon Currie Consulting calls itself "an international marketing consultancy with offices in London and Switzerland". It has set up websites, presented as information services for the public, which give positive messages about the controversial food additives aspartame and MSG (see below).

Reassuring the public about the safety of aspartame

In 2000 Fallon Currie set up a website, Aspartame Information (http://www.aspartame-info.com), to give information to the public about the controversial artificial sweetener aspartame.

In 2009 Ailbhe Fallon, managing director of Fallon-Currie, who described herself as a spokesperson for Aspartame Information, told FoodNavigator.com that a reassurance about the safety of aspartame from the EFSA "came as no surprise". EFSA's assurance came in response to a study by the Cesare Maltoni Cancer Research Center of the European Ramazzini Foundation (ERF) published in June 2007 by Soffritti et al. The study's authors concluded that their results confirmed and reinforced their first experimental demonstration of aspartame’s carcinogenicity at a dose level close to the human ADI (acceptable daily intake). They also suggested that carcinogenic effects are increased when lifespan exposure to aspartame begins during foetal life.

The EFSA concluded that the findings did not provide sufficient evidence to call into question their classification of aspartame as safe for human consumption. In a statement defending aspartame to Foodnavigator.com, an EFSA spokesman said:

Most of the lymphomas and leukaemias reported in the study appear to have developed in rats showing signs of chronic respiratory disease rather than being caused by their treatment with aspartame.

The increased incidence of mammary tumours is not considered indicative of a carcinogenic potential since the incidence of mammary tumours in female rats is rather high and varies considerably between carcinogenicity studies.

Moreover the increased incidence of mammary tumours in female rats reported in the study was not found in the previous ERF study, in which much higher doses of aspartame were tested.

Reassuring the public about the safety of MSG

In 2000 Fallon Currie set up a website, the International Glutamate Information Service (http://www.glutamate.org/) to provide the public with information on the controversial food flavouring ingredient, monosodium glutamate (MSG).

The website states:

Our goal is to provide you with accurate and up-to-date information about glutamate (MSG). There is information about the discovery and taste of glutamate, the role it plays in our food and our bodies and its nutritional benefits.

The message is positive and reassuring about the safety of MSG, with featured articles (as of 23 March 2010) such as "Scientific review shows no link between MSG and development of allergic reactions or asthma" and "Savoury taste can help lower blood pressure".

The scientific review claiming to show no link between MSG and allergic reactions or asthma contradicts a 1995 report from the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), an independent body of scientists, which found that people with severe, poorly controlled asthma may suffer temporary worsening of asthmatic symptoms after consuming MSG.

And the positive study mentioned by the International Glutamate Information Service as giving rise to the headline about blood pressure is on glutamic acid, a naturally occurring ingredient in vegetables as well as MSG, not on MSG itself.

Sponsoring debate on reporting of medical stories

Fallon Consulting sponsored a Guild of Health Writers debate in 2005 called "Standards in Medical Journalism Are Putting the Public's Health at Risk". According to the Guild's website, featured speaker Niall Dickson "criticised the ‘cartoonism of science’ which not only scared people - but in the case of the controversy over MMR also had the potential to kill people". The Guild's website does not mention if Dickson had anything to say about reported mortalities from the MMR vaccine itself.

And the Guild's website page on the debate quotes Raymond Tallis, Professor of Geriatric Medicine at Manchester University, as follows: "'There’s sufficient garbage being produced to undermine the work of good journalists,' he said. Medicine, he said, was reduced to breakthroughs and scandals, and in the case of the crisis over BSE, he said there was ‘a juvenile preference for conspiracy theory over data’." It is unclear as to which aspect of the BSE crisis Tallis believes is a "conspiracy theory". There is no mention of the false reassurances of safety from government and the food industry - and the culture of secrecy that meant the public were not kept informed - at the heart of the BSE crisis.

People

• Emma Eggleton Account Executive at Fallon Currie Consulting, October 2001 — April 2004 (2 years 7 months)
• Ailbhe Fallon, managing director (as at 23 Mar 2010)
• Jamila Jones - former marketing executive at Fallon Currie Consulting

Clients

• LycoRed, a company specialising in "nutrient fortifications"

Affiliations

• Associate Parliamentary Food and Health Forum, member in 2009.

Contact

Address (UK): Fallon Currie Consulting, 29 Bressenden Place, London SW1E 5DD

Phone (UK): + 44 20 7630 6070

Email:

Address (Switzerland):Fallon Currie Consulting, Postfach 96, 6318 Walchwil, Switzerland

Phone (Switzerland): + 41 41 758 0362

Website: Unusually, the firm's website is password protected and not open to the general public. http://www.fallon-currie.com/