According to a recent report by Anahad O’Connor in the New York Times, newly released records show that this mindset shift in public health had it roots in the 1960s, when the Sugar Research Foundation, a trade group, paid off three Harvard scientists to publish a research review that featured studies that “were handpicked by the sugar group”. They say the documents reveal the sugar industry attempting to influence the scientific process.
Advertisement
But in the ’60s, the SRF became aware of “flowing reports that sugar is a less desirable dietary source of calories than other carbohydrates”, as John Hickson, SRF vice president and director of research, put it in one document.
It all goes back to the 1960s, when the sugar industry started writing checks to a group of Harvard researchers to downplay the links sugar has to heart disease, according to a paper published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
When the study was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, however, its industry funding was not disclosed, obscuring significant bias that may have affected the health of millions of Americans since its publication.
The resulting article published in 1967 concluded there was “no doubt” that reducing cholesterol and saturated fat was the only dietary intervention needed to prevent heart disease. In other words: Don’t worry about sugar. Researchers of the latest report examined internal documents from the Sugar Association, formerly known as Sugar Research Foundation (SRF).
As we know now, high cholesterol levels in the blood may portend heart problems, but consuming high-cholesterol food-such as eggs, long demonized as a heart-health no-no-doesn’t correlate to high blood-cholesterol. They discounted studies for using fructose or glucose instead of sucrose, or using rats instead of humans.
Those health authorities have also advised Americans to reduce their consumption of added sugars based on growing evidence that added sugars also promote heart disease.
These key details weren’t noted in the 1967 publication, the authors of the new study said in a report published September 12 in JAMA Internal Medicine. But they didn’t hold studies that implicate fat to the same standard, Glantz said.
The studies that were used in the review were chosen by the sugar group. The authors did not critically evaluate those studies. A few years after he was paid by the sugar industry to demonize fat and cholesterol, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and edited its Nutrition Reviews for a decade.
“Generally speaking, it is not only unfortunate but a disservice that industry-funded research is branded as tainted”.
It found that Hickson recommended an opinion poll “to learn what public concepts we should reinforce and what ones we need to combat through our research and information and legislation programs”, a symposium to “bring detractors before a board of their peers where their fallacies could be unveiled”, and recommended the sugar industry fund coronary heart disease research to “see what the weak points there are in the experimentation, and replicate the studies with appropriate corrections”.
As a result, consumers may have been misled for decades into thinking only saturated fat harmed the heart, and not candies, the researchers said. “The internal sugar industry documents suggest”, writes The Times, “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”. This is exactly what happened when the American Heart Association adopted the low-fat diet in 1970 and when the U.S. Dietary Guidelines adopted the low-fat diet in 1980.
Both men, highly prominent nutrition researchers, are deceased. “It’s like they gave the fat studies a free pass”, Kearns says.
Advertisement
“These findings, our analysis, and current Sugar Association criticisms of evidence linking sucrose to cardiovascular disease suggest the industry may have a long history of influencing federal policy”, the authors concluded.
