ILSI / IAFNS

The International Life Sciences Institute was founded in 1978 as an industry-funded scientific organization active on food safety, nutrition and risk assessment. Its U.S. branch was rebranded in 2020 as the Institute for the Advancement of Food and Nutrition Sciences (IAFNS), following a decade of critical journalistic and academic scrutiny of the organization’s role in shaping public nutritional policy.

Why it matters here

ILSI/IAFNS occupies the vocabulary of nutritional science with the resources of the food industry behind it. Its outputs, workshops, expert panels, technical reports, are formally scientific and materially aligned with a specific set of commercial interests. Any argument advanced in the same vocabulary has to reckon with the fact that this actor has already, for four decades, been shaping what the vocabulary is understood to mean.