Yudkin was marginalised and derided and as time passed by fat was held culpable for heart diseases and obesity. In 1954, the then president of the Sugar Research Foundation pointed out that by encouraging the American public to cut fats from their diet, they would replace those lost carbohydrates with sugar.
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“It was a very smart thing the sugar industry did, because review papers, especially if you get them published in a very prominent journal, tend to shape the overall scientific discussion”, co-author Stanton Glantz told The New York Times. Yet the sugar industry paid Harvard scientists during the 1950s and ’60s to publish research saying fat was the key cause.
Analysis of 50-year-old documents suggests the sugar industry manipulated research to play down the harmful effects of sugar on the heart, a new study says.
In the early 1960s, there was mounting evidence demonstrating that a diet low in fat and high in sugar could cause in increase in serum cholesterol levels (a.k.a. the bad cholesterol that raises your risk of heart disease).
Internal industry documents suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease – including many of today’s dietary recommendations – may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry. “The American Heart Association recommends that children’s diets contain no more than about 6 teaspoons (25 grams) of added sugar a day”. “Then we can publish the data and refute our detractors”, he wrote.
The documents show that in 1964, John Hickson, a top sugar-industry executive, discussed a plan with others in the industry to shift public opinion “through our research and information and legislative programs”. “We are well aware of your particular interest”, he wrote, “and will cover this as well as we can”.
In one instance, according to the new analysis, foundation Vice President John Hickson received drafts of a review by Hegsted and replied, “Let me assure you this is quite what we had in mind and we look forward to its appearance in print”.
Three Harvard researchers, now deceased, were paid by a sugar industry group and subsequently published an article in a major medical journal in 1967 examining sugar and its relationship with heart disease, according to the report published Monday.
In 1984, the New England Journal of Medicine began requiring researchers to disclose their funding sources, according to a statement released by the Sugar Association to The New York Times. What is often missing from the dialogue is that industry-funded research has been informative in addressing key issues.
When the New England Journal of Medicine published the article, the funding and role of sugar industry in it were yet to be exposed.
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.
Some of the letters, about 319, were in correspondence with Roger Adams, an organic chemist at the University of IL who died in 1971, and about 27 documents were in correspondence with David Mark Hegsted, a nutritionist at Harvard University who died in 2009.
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“It is challenging for us to comment on events that allegedly occurred 60 years ago”. They also concluded that sucrose consumption should not be considered in a patient’s risk assessment for developing heart disease.
