Who's behind the news?
Who's behind the news?
Washington, D.C., USA · Founded 1971 · Independent nonprofit consumer advocacy
The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is the United States' leading independent, nonprofit consumer advocacy organization focused on nutrition, food safety, and public health — founded in 1971 and sustained for more than five decades by subscriber revenue and philanthropy without accepting government or corporate funding. It operates on a straightforward institutional premise: that a scientific organization beholden to no commercial interest is uniquely positioned to evaluate the food supply honestly, challenge industry claims, and advocate for regulatory action that industry would otherwise prevent. Its primary public-facing product is Nutrition Action, a newsletter with approximately 900,000 subscribers in the United States and Canada — the largest-circulation health newsletter in North America — which accepts no advertising and whose subscriber revenue is the organization's chief source of income. Its primary advocacy product is a fifty-year record of regulatory wins that have materially changed what Americans eat and what they are told about what they eat.
CSPI's institutional identity rests on three legs: science-based research and analysis, carried out by a staff that includes physicians, registered dietitians, scientists, and lawyers; regulatory and legislative advocacy, conducted through petitions to the FDA and USDA, congressional testimony, coalition-building, and litigation when necessary; and public education, delivered through Nutrition Action, its Chemical Cuisine food additive database, press releases, and direct-to-consumer communications. The organization has been simultaneously praised by mainstream public health institutions as one of the most effective consumer advocacy organizations in the country and criticized by industry-aligned groups and libertarian critics who characterize it as regulatory overreach dressed in scientific language. Both characterizations contain enough truth to be worth noting: CSPI has been wrong before (its early endorsement of trans fats as a safer alternative to saturated fat is the most documented example), has acknowledged those errors publicly, and has continued to operate from a framework in which sound science, honestly evaluated, produces better policy outcomes than industry self-regulation.
CSPI was founded in February 1971 by three scientists who were then working at Ralph Nader's Center for the Study of Responsive Law: Michael F. Jacobson, a microbiologist; James Sullivan, an oceanographer; and Albert Fritsch, a chemist. The founders' original ambition was broader than food — CSPI's earliest work touched on asbestos, lead, and energy policy — but by 1977, when Fritsch and Sullivan departed, Jacobson had focused the organization almost exclusively on nutrition and food safety, a concentration that proved durable and effective. The founding premise, articulated clearly from the beginning, was that the food industry's commercial incentives systematically produced outcomes contrary to public health, and that an independent scientific organization could both document those outcomes and advocate for the regulatory corrections that industry would resist.
From borrowed office space with no money, no connections, and almost no staff, Jacobson built CSPI into what the New York Times health columnist Jane Brody described in 2018 as an organization that "took on the food giants — and won." The FDA Commissioner at the time, David Kessler, credited CSPI with "one of the greatest public health advances of the century" for its role in establishing the link between diet and health in government and public consciousness. The Harvey W. Wiley Special Citation, the FDA's highest honor, was awarded to CSPI in 2007. Oprah Winfrey described Nutrition Action as "the mastermind critic that sounded the food alarms."
CSPI's policy record spans five decades and touches the everyday life of every American who reads a food label, eats at a chain restaurant, sends a child to a school cafeteria, or avoids a food that was once considered safe and is no longer sold. The most significant victories follow a consistent pattern: CSPI identifies a health risk or labeling failure, produces research documenting it, advocates through regulatory channels for correction, and sustains the campaign — sometimes for a decade or more — until a policy change is achieved.
1990
Nutrition Facts Labels
Led advocacy for the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, making Nutrition Facts labels mandatory on all packaged foods. Later expanded to include trans fat disclosure and allergen labeling.
1994–2015
Trans Fat Ban
20-year campaign: 1994 petition led to FDA's 2003 trans fat labeling rule; 2004 petition led to the 2015 FDA determination that partially hydrogenated oil is no longer GRAS, with mandatory compliance by 2018.
2010
Restaurant Calorie Labeling
Decade-long campaign culminating in the Affordable Care Act provision requiring all chain restaurants to display calorie counts on menus and menu boards. Effective May 2018.
2010
Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act
Led coalition (NANA) that secured passage of the landmark child nutrition law, improving school meal standards and removing soda and junk food from schools nationwide.
2021
Sweet Truth Act (DC)
Won passage of District of Columbia law requiring warning symbols on menus for prepackaged foods and drinks with more than a day's worth of added sugars.
2022–23
MacKenzie Scott Grant / White House Nutrition Conference
Received $15 million from MacKenzie Scott — the largest single gift in CSPI's history. White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health (2022) adopted several CSPI priorities including front-of-package labeling.
2026
New York Food Chemical Reform
New York passed sweeping food chemical reform legislation following CSPI advocacy — a model for state-level action on food additive safety and transparency in the absence of strong federal action.
Ongoing
Sugary Drink Taxes
CSPI advocacy contributed to sugary drink tax adoption in Berkeley, Philadelphia, Boulder, San Francisco, Oakland, Albany (CA), Cook County (IL), and Seattle. Also: Berkeley's 2014 ballot measure was the first successful US soda tax.
Nutrition Action (formerly Nutrition Action Healthletter) is CSPI's flagship publication and its primary revenue source — a bimonthly newsletter with approximately 900,000 subscribers in the United States and Canada that accepts no advertising. The no-advertising model is the organizational foundation of CSPI's independence: because the newsletter's revenue comes entirely from subscribers rather than from food or pharmaceutical advertisers, its editorial positions are not constrained by commercial relationships. This is not a hypothetical distinction. Consumer health publications that accept advertising from food manufacturers face structural pressure to soften criticism of those manufacturers' products; Nutrition Action does not. The newsletter covers nutrition science, food safety, supplement claims, restaurant and packaged food evaluations, and government and industry policy — always from the perspective of what the available evidence actually shows rather than what industry communications departments would prefer it to show.
CSPI's Chemical Cuisine database — available on the website and updated regularly — rates food additives from "safe" to "avoid," providing consumers with a reference point for evaluating the hundreds of ingredients that appear on packaged food labels without public understanding of their safety status. The database reflects CSPI's core approach: translating scientific evidence into accessible, actionable consumer information.
CSPI's current advocacy operates across three domains. In nutrition, its active campaigns include front-of-package nutrition labeling (pushing the FDA to finalize a uniform system making the healthfulness of packaged foods immediately visible on the front of the package), school food standards, SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) integrity and benefit levels, and restaurant kids' meals. In food safety, current campaigns target food dyes (building on CSPI's multi-decade work on artificial food colors and their behavioral effects on children), foodborne illness prevention (farm-to-fork pathogen control), food additives and chemical transparency, and dietary supplement oversight. In health more broadly, CSPI has become an active voice on vaccine policy — defending childhood immunization schedules and opposing the anti-vaccine policy agenda of the second Trump administration's HHS leadership — and on laboratory-developed test regulation.
The organization's current posture is explicitly defensive as well as offensive. The dismantling of federal public health infrastructure under the second Trump administration — cuts to the FDA, the CDC, and the USDA's nutrition programs; changes to SNAP eligibility that CSPI documented had removed 770,000 children from the benefit rolls as of mid-2026; the anti-vaccine policy direction at HHS under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — has made regulatory rollback resistance a central part of CSPI's work. Its "Straight Shot" newsletter tracks federal vaccine policy changes; its government accountability coverage documents what it characterizes as the prioritization of personal belief over public health evidence at the federal level.
The CSPI Action Fund, the organization's 501(c)(4) arm, allows CSPI to engage in direct lobbying and political advocacy beyond the limits applicable to its 501(c)(3) operations. Its 2025–2030 strategic plan commits to continued expansion of state and local advocacy — exemplified by the New York food chemical reform legislation — as a parallel track to federal advocacy during a period of reduced federal regulatory ambition.
The most instructive episode in CSPI's history for understanding both its strengths and its limits is its relationship with trans fat. In the 1980s, CSPI advocated against the use of beef tallow-based cooking oils in fast food restaurants, citing their high saturated fat content, and endorsed partially hydrogenated vegetable oils — the primary source of artificial trans fat — as a healthier alternative. CSPI published explicitly positive statements about trans fats in Nutrition Action. By the early 1990s, new research established clearly that trans fats significantly increased cardiovascular disease risk — in some analyses, more severely than the saturated fats they had replaced. CSPI reversed its position, acknowledged the error publicly, and launched the successful two-decade campaign that ultimately resulted in the FDA's trans fat ban in 2015. Michael Jacobson stated publicly: "Twenty years ago, scientists (including me) thought trans fat was innocuous. Since then, we've learned otherwise." The episode is cited by critics as evidence of overconfidence in preliminary science; it is cited by CSPI itself as evidence that a science-based organization can and should update its positions when the evidence changes. Both characterizations are accurate. It is also, for Newsjunkie's purposes, one of the more instructive case studies in the institutional sociology of scientific error and correction.
Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI)
1250 I Street NW, Suite 500, Washington, DC 20005
Phone: 1 (866) 293-2774 · cspi.org
President: Peter G. Lurie, MD, MPH (since 2017)
Co-founder / Senior Scientist: Michael F. Jacobson, PhD (founded 1971)
Customer service: customercare@cspi.org / customercare@nutritionaction.com
Nutrition Action: cspi.org/page/nutrition-action · ~900,000 subscribers · No advertising · Largest-circulation health newsletter in North America
Chemical Cuisine database: cspi.org/page/chemical-cuisine-food-additive-safety-ratings