The study claims that in the 1960s, the sugar industry paid Harvard researchers to discard evidence linking sugar consumption to coronary heart disease and to instead pin the blame on fat.
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“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades”, said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the new JAMA paper.
Those Harvard researchers didn’t disclose the sugar industry funding source when they published their research, which refuted other studies implicating sugar as a contributing factor to heart disease, in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967.
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”.
Anthony Devlin/ZUMA Press/NewscomNewly released historical documents show how the sugar industry essentially bribed Harvard scientists to downplay sugar’s role in heart disease-and how the USA government ate it up.
The SRF sponsored its first research project into coronary heart disease in 1965 in which it singled out fat and cholesterol as the dietary causes of heart disease. “[However] when the studies in question were published funding disclosures and transparency standards were not the norm they are today”. The incriminating new research is based on thousands of pages of correspondence and other documents in archives at Harvard, the University of IL and other libraries, found by investigator extraordinaire, Cristin E. Kearns, a postdoctoral fellow at U.C.S.F. The main concern with saturated fats has been the link with cholesterol and heart disease.
In an editorial accompanying the JAMA report, professor at the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University, Marion Nestle, said the practice of food companies deliberately setting out to manipulate research in their favour continues today. And this demonization of fat actually helped increase USA sugar consumption, as health conscious Americans replaced morning eggs and sausage with carbs like bagels, or turned to low-fat and fat-free offerings where added sugar helped fill the taste void.
The industry spent $600,000 ($5.3 million in 2016 dollars) to teach “people who had never had a course in biochemistry… that sugar is what keeps every human being alive and with energy to face our daily problems”, the analysis said.
That summer, Fredrick Stare, chair of the nutrition department in Harvard’s School of Public Health and by then also an ad hoc member of SRF’s scientific advisory board, began overseeing two Harvard colleagues in what was dubbed Project 226.
“The literature review helped shape not only public opinion on what causes heart problems but also the scientific community’s view of how to evaluate dietary risk factors for heart disease”, said study investigator Cristin Kearns from the University of California San Francisco, who discovered the industry documents. “What is often missing from the dialogue is that industry-funded research has been informative in addressing key issues”, it said in a statement. In a letter to Hegsted, the foundation’s vice president, John Hickson, wrote, “Let me assure you this is quite what we had in mind and we look forward to its appearance in print”.
The USCF researchers urge health officials to be skeptical of industry-funded studies and to make sure that heart disease risk is included in all future risk assessments of added sugars in the diet.
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Like almost all other medical journals NEJM now requires authors to disclose all relevant conflicts of interest, but this has not put an end to industry influence. “Even more recently, the Associated Press obtained emails showing how a candy trade association funded and influenced studies to show that children who eat sweets have healthier body weights than those who do not”. It was Kearns who unearthed the industry documents. Nestle has been documenting the instances where companies fund nutrition studies that overwhelmingly return favorable results to the industry sponsors.
