Sugar industry officials have funded research in order to obscure the dangers of sugar as far back as the 1960’s, according to internal documents of a group called the Sugar Research Foundation, now called the Sugar Association, which have just come to light. That involved the Sugar Research Foundation paying the equivalent of $50,000 in today’s dollars to Harvard researchers who published in the New England Journal of Medicine, all the while discussing their process and sharing drafts with the Sugar Research Foundation.
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But even though the influence-peddling revealed in the documents dates back almost 50 years, the revelations are important because the debate about the relative harms of sugar and saturated fat continues today, Glantz said.
The sugar industry would have us believe that the way it once did business is in the past and that it no longer engages in bribery to advance its interests. In a statement, the Sugar Association said it “should have exercised greater transparency in all of its research activities”, but that funding disclosures were not the norm when the review was published.
Hegsted used his research to influence the government’s dietary recommendations, which emphasized saturated fat as a driver of heart disease while largely characterizing sugar as empty calories linked to tooth decay.
In the early 1950s, warning signs appeared that linked sugar consumption to coronary heart disease. Nationwide nutrition guidelines followed suit, resulting in many Americans consuming the recommended low-fat, high-sugar diet that is now viewed as a big factor in the obesity epidemic.
Hickson proposed countering the alarming findings on sugar with industry-funded research. Most concerning is the growing use of headline-baiting articles to trump quality scientific research were disappointed to see a journal of JAMAs stature being drawn into this trend.
Problematically, numerous studies reviewed were chosen by the Sugar Research Foundation itself.
The authors also establish a timeline which they claim shows premeditation and motive for the Sugar Research Foundation, namely, to increase profits.
Industry-sponsored research is not a rarity.
Companies including Coca-Cola Co. and Kellogg Co.as well as groups for agricultural products like beef and blueberries regularly fund studies that become a part of scientific literature, are cited by other researchers, and are touted in press releases. But critics say such studies are often thinly veiled marketing that undermine efforts to improve public health.
“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades”, Stanton Glantz, Ph.D., an author of Monday’s JAMA paper and a professor of medicine at University of California San Francisco, told the New York Times.
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Nevertheless, they say the documents underscore why policy makers should consider giving less weight to industry-funded studies.
