A sugar industry group paid Harvard researchers to write an article published by a prominent medical journal in 1967 that concluded that reducing cholesterol and saturated fat was the only dietary intervention to prevent heart disease. Nutrition research was showing that both were factors, until a $48,000 check (in 2016 dollars) was given to Dr. Fredrick Stare and Dr. Robert McGandy (both deceased) by a group called Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) to study the link between sugar and heart disease.
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The Sugar Association said in a statement published on its website: “We question this author’s continued attempts to reframe historical occurrences to conveniently align with the now trending anti-sugar narrative, particularly when the last several decades of research have concluded that sugar does not have a unique role in heart disease”.
The sugar industry, saying it was blamed unfairly for its role in heart disease, pointed to fat as the real culprit and funded the research to prove beginning in the 1960s.
The trade group solicited Hegsted, a professor of nutrition at Harvard’s Public Health School, to write a review aimed at countering early research linking sucrose to coronary heart disease.
As the JAMA article noted, the chair of the Harvard department overseeing the review at the time was also invited to be a member of the Sugar Foundation’s board. In a JAMA Internal Medicine commentary, Marion Nestle, a professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU, writes that similar practices are going on today.
A National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) survey released in August noted that “nearly 16 percent of the calories in US children’s diets are from added sugar”, according to a report by the Mayo Clinic’s Katherine Zeratsky, R.D., L.D. What’s worse, she noted, was that the statistics were likely even higher than that, given that NHANES self-reported its numbers, which usually leads to low estimates.
In 1965, the trade organization paid two Harvard researchers to conduct a literature review focusing on papers that had claimed that sucrose and fructose have “some special metabolic peril”, the new study said.
U.S. Dietary guidelines have long recommended that Americans limit their intake of fatty food to reduce risks for heart disease and other illnesses. The same team of UCSF researchers behind the new study previously used sugar industry documents to reveal how advocacy groups influenced federal cavity prevention recommendations.
In response to the new report, the Sugar Association said in a statement that conflict-of-interest policies were less stringent and researchers weren’t required to make financial disclosures back then. By the 1980s, few scientists focused on the role of sugar in heart disease. “Yet, health policy documents are still inconsistent in citing heart disease risk as a health effect of added sugars consumption”. But, he added, “given the data we have today, we have shown the refined carbohydrates and especially sugar-sweetened beverages are risk factors for cardiovascular disease, but that the type of dietary fat is also very important”.
The scientists (one of which would later become the head of nutrition at the USDA) followed through, publishing a two-part review in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967 stating that fat and cholesterol caused heart disease, not sugar.
The review made no mention of funding from the sugar industry.
UCSF researchers found a study called Project 226 was funded by representatives of the sugar industry, who paid researchers at Harvard University $50,000, set the review’s objective, contributed “research” to be included with the study and approved drafts as it was produced.
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This certainly isn’t the first evidence of large food interests attempting to influence research and public policy. Food makers began replacing fat with sugar – which is exactly what the industry had wanted. “What this tells me is that people who on principle refuse to take food industry funding are excluded from the candidate pool”, Nestle said in an email.
