Popkin and his team based their estimate on a 20-year longitudinal study that included more than 5, 100 participants.

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"It's kind of a mind-boggling set of numbers, " said Barry Popkin, the program's principal investigator.

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Father was Max Popkin, a fashionable painter whose portraits of New York notables fetch good prices these days at auction.

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Popkin would take a different approach to helping Americans eat better.

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Popkin is a close collaborator with Brownell, and they co-authored a paper calling for a soda tax which, inter alia, also claims that industry is distorting the data.

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Popkin and his team will use the database to evaluate whether the foundation's members have met their pledge, they will also go deeper, seeking to correct for the economic climate and trends among other food makers.

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And while ABC News alludes to the idea of there being many critics of Allison in the field of nutrition research, it mentions just one by name, Barry Popkin, a professor of nutrition at the University of North Carolina.

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