“There are all kinds of ways that you can subtly manipulate the outcome of a study, which industry is very well practiced at”, said the study’s senior author, Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at UCSF. Over ten years later in 1965, the Sugar Research Foundation, being formed by members of the USA 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. “The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was 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”, the New York Times reports.
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The Harvard scientists and the sugar executives with whom they collaborated are no longer alive.
Researchers from the UCSF analysed more than 340 correspondences between the sugar lobby and two scientists, Roger Adams and Mark Hegsted.
Another scientist was Fredrick J. Stare, chairman of Harvard’s nutrition department. The New England Journal of Medicine did not begin to require financial disclosures until 1984.
Last year, it emerged the Sugar Research Foundation downplayed the role of sugar in tooth decay. Even so, it defended industry-funded research as playing an important and informative role in scientific debate.
The review identified high cholesterol as the major risk for heart disease, suggesting high triglycerides associated with sugar were less problematic, Kearns and colleagues said.
The association also questioned the motives behind the new paper. “We’re disappointed to see a journal of JAMA’s stature being drawn into this trend”.
Those Harvard scientists received the equivalent of $50,000 in today’s dollars, the investigators said.
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.
Monday’s report cites the industry continued to fund research that sidestepped sugar’s effects on health, including a 1970s review influencing the 1976 US Food and Drug Administration evaluation of the safety of sugar.
New research has been published refuting that fat is what leads to coronary artery disease.
Early signs sugar plays a key role in heart disease emerged in the 1950s – a stance now widely accepted.
Dr. Walter Willett from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health said that the research paper has unveiled why all important research papers should be supported by public funding and not through industry funding.
“I think it’s appalling”, she said.
The New York Times reports on it more in-depth here; the published paper can be read here. 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. In fact it paid them to highlight the emerging science regarding saturated fat as a more probable contributor to heart disease issues in comparison to sugar.
Hickson proposed countering the alarming findings on sugar with industry-funded research.
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Hickson hired Harvard nutrition experts to put together a fresh, well-crafted 1967 study.
