Narrative review calls for higher choline recommendations in Europe – one author runs a company selling choline supplements. COI statement: none declared.
I'm not an academic myself, but I follow nutrition science as an interested layperson (based in Europe/Germany).
I'm posting this here because I genuinely don't know where else to take it, and I'd appreciate input from people who know more about publication ethics than I do.
I came across a narrative review that was published in February 2026 in the MDPI journal Dietetics – "The Case for Establishing Choline Intake Recommendations Throughout Europe—A Narrative Review on the Importance of Choline for the European Population"
(DOI: 10.3390/dietetics5010012).
The COI statement says the authors declare no conflicts of interest.
One of the authors is Nikolaus Rittenau. He's listed publicly as managing director of Watson Nutrition / Beyond Food GmbH. Watson Nutrition sells choline supplements. Like, specifically choline – choline capsules, choline powder, citicoline. That's the thing the paper is about.
Now, I want to be careful here, because I'm not trying to say the paper is wrong or should be retracted or whatever. Choline probably is underappreciated in European nutrition policy, I genuinely don't know enough to judge the science. But that's sort of the point – readers should be able to judge it themselves, with full information. And the paper isn't a neutral "here is what we know about choline" overview. It argues that intake is underestimated, singles out vegan and plant-based diets as a particular risk, and calls on European nutrition societies to revise their recommendations upward in some cases. There's also video content around the paper where Rittenau explicitly frames this as a public-health problem that institutions like the DGE are failing to address.
I kept thinking: if a pharma-industry employee published a narrative review calling for wider prescribing of a drug their company makes, would "no conflicts of interest" fly? I don't think it would.
The narrative review part matters too, I think. It's not a systematic review with a registered protocol. There's judgment involved in which studies you emphasize, how you interpret the evidence. That's not a criticism of the format – but it does make the question of whose judgment we're trusting more relevant.
So I guess my actual questions are:
- Is this the kind of commercial relationship that should normally be disclosed, even if the author didn't directly profit from this specific paper? My instinct is yes, but maybe I'm missing something.
- Is contacting the journal the right first step, or does that rarely go anywhere with MDPI?
- If the journal doesn't respond or dismisses it – what then? COPE? The author's institution? Both?
- And if a COI was genuinely missed, what's the usual fix – a corrigendum, an editorial note, something else?
Sorry for the long post. I've been sitting on this for a few days and wasn't sure whether I was overreacting.