Using archival documents, a new report published online by JAMA Internal Medicine examines the sugar industry’s role in coronary heart disease research and suggests the industry sponsored research to influence the scientific debate to cast doubt on the hazards of sugar and to promote dietary fat as the culprit in heart disease.
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Foods that are labeled as “low in fat” can also be bad for the body because they are full of sugar to compensate for the lack of taste from fat.
A researcher at the University of California, San Francisco recently discovered documents from inside the sugar industry that suggest five decades of research on the relationship between nutrition and heart disease (the leading cause of death globally) may have been largely influenced and manipulated by the sugar industry. SRF-now called the Sugar Association-paid three of them the equivalent of $49,000 in today’s dollars to publish the misleading literature review. In 1964, the group secretly discussed a campaign to downplay the link of sugar to coronary heart disease (CHD).
In other words, the move to single out fat and cholesterol as the biggest problems in American diets was a coordinated effort by the trade association, the Sugar Research Foundation, meant to increase the consumption of sucrose.
Anthony Devlin/ZUMA Press/NewscomNewly released historical documents show how the sugar industry essentially bribed Harvard scientists to downplay sugar’s role in heart disease-and how the US government ate it up.
The UCSF researchers analyzed more than 340 documents, totaling 1,582 pages of text, between the sugar industry and two individuals: Roger Adams, then a professor of organic chemistry who served on scientific advisory boards for the sugar industry; and D. Mark Hegsted, one of the Harvard researchers who produced the literature review.
One of those Harvard researchers went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where he set the stage for the federal government’s current dietary guidelines.
The emergence of early warning signs of connection between heart disease and sugar started in the 1950s. All in all, the corrupted researchers and skewed scientific literature successfully helped draw attention away from the health risks of candies and shift the blame to exclusively to fats-for almost five decades.
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. We should carefully review the reports, probably with a committee of nutrition specialists; see what weak points there are in the experimentation, and replicate the studies with appropriate corrections.
The Harvard scientists and the sugar executives with whom they collaborated are no longer alive. “Then we can publish the data and refute our detractors”. Findings of a new review, however, revealed that the sugar industry may have played a role why high consumption of fats is considered as the primary driver of cardiovascular diseases.
“We are well aware of your particular interest and will cover this as well as we can”, read Dr. Hegsted’s response to Hickson.
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”.
Hickson proposed countering the alarming findings on sugar with industry-funded research.
The journal did not require conflict of interest disclosure until 1984. “Yet, health policy documents are still inconsistent in citing heart disease risk as a health effect of added sugars consumption”.
Reviews published by the paid-off scientists not only helped shape public opinion on causes of heart disease, but even led to many of today’s dietary recommendations.
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Just previous year, the media learned that Coca-Cola was founding several studies worth over millions of dollars to disproof the link between obesity rates and sugar drinks, just a few months after the company had told the public there was no relation between sugar and obesity.
