Three members of a newly formed federal advisory committee on dietary guidelines have conflicts of interest because of their ties to food and pharmaceutical companies, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a watchdog group, said this week.

The advisory committee, which held its first meeting last week, will recommend changes next year in the government’s guidelines on daily food intake.

According to the watchdog group, the three scientists, who work at Harvard, Northwestern, and Tufts Universities, respectively, have received research funds from a number of companies and organizations, including General Mills and Lluminari Inc., which produces health-related multimedia content for General Mills, PepsiCo, Newman’s Own, and other companies.

The center asserts that the Departments of Agriculture and of Health and Human Services failed to disclose the committee members’ conflicts of interest to the public.

The disclosures come amid heightened attention recently to such conflicts. Just last month, the National Institutes of Health announced it would suspend a $9.3-million grant to Emory University because of financial documents indicating the project’s former chief scientist, who is also a professor of psychiatry at the university, failed to disclose some payments he received from pharmaceutical companies. A number of other academic researchers have also been under scrutiny this year for possible conflicts of interest. —Caitlin Moran