In JAMA Internal Medicine, the researchers wrote that the sugar industry gave money to scientists in the 1960s to downplay associations betweensugar and heart disease. Ultimately, the sponsored analysis found “no doubt” that limiting saturated fat and dietary cholesterol was the best way to prevent coronary heart disease.
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In a turn of events that shouldn’t surprise any reasonable person with a distrust of industry-funded research, a study published Monday by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) Internal Medicine provides evidence of an actual conspiracy created to downplay the negative health effects of eating sugar, and instead transfer blame for coronary heart disease to the influence of fat and cholesterol.
The JAMA Network reports SRF paid the equivalent of $5 million in 2016 to tell people they needed sugar to keep their energy up during the day and to keep them alive. Over ten years later in 1965, the Sugar Research Foundation, being formed by members of the United States sugar industry and presently known as the Sugar Association, sponsored its first CHD study project, a literature review that appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine.The UCSF researchers mentioned that the review highlighted fat and cholesterol as the dietary causes of CHD and decreased the importance of proof that sucrose intake was also a risk factor.
“We acknowledge that the Sugar Research Foundation should have exercised greater transparency in all of its research activities”, reads a statement from that group, now called simply the Sugar Foundation.
The studies used in the review were hand-picked by the sugar group, and the article, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.
Last year, it emerged the Sugar Research Foundation downplayed the role of sugar in tooth decay.
“They have produced compelling evidence that a sugar trade association not only paid for but also initiated and influenced research expressly to exonerate sugar as a major risk factor for coronary heart disease”.
The sugar industry may have been sugarcoating the facts.. 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.
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Hickson proposed countering the alarming findings on sugar with industry-funded research. “Then we can publish the data and refute our detractors”. In 1984, NEJM began requiring authors to disclose all conflicts of interest.
