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.
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Schmidt of the University of California, San Francisco and colleagues point out that Harvard professor of nutrition Dr. Mark Hegsted co-directed the SRF’s first heart disease research project from 1965 to 1966.
The following year, the Sugar Association approved “Project 226”, which entailed “paying Harvard researchers today’s equivalent of $48,900 for an article reviewing the scientific literature, supplying materials they wanted reviewed, and receiving drafts of the article”, Newsday said.
For decades health officials have urged us to reduce our fat intake, which for many people meant an uptick in consuming the low-fat, high-sugar foods that many see as feeding the obesity problem in this country. “The internal sugar industry documents suggest”, writes The Times, “that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry”. Over ten years later in 1965, the Sugar Research Foundation, being formed by members of the U.S. 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.
But in the ’60s, the SRF became aware of “flowing reports that sugar is a less desirable dietary source of calories than other carbohydrates”, as John Hickson, SRF vice president and director of research, put it in one document.
A group then called the Sugar Research Foundation funded some of the early research on fat as the primary risk factor for heart disease, a “sophisticated” tactic to overshadow other research that placed blame on candies as a risk factor, according to researchers.
Nestle notes that both Coca-Cola and candymakers have recently tried to influence research by funding nutrition studies.
Researchers said the early heart disease research has implications for Americans’ health today.
All of the industry executives and Harvard scientists involved are no longer alive, but their influence persists. “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.
For its report, the UCSF team searched public archives for internal corporate documents from the sugar industry.
The journal did not require conflict of interest disclosure until 1984. It was Kearns who unearthed the industry documents. The statement further said research had continued to show that sugar “does not have a unique role in heart disease”. There was a pretty clear case emerging that eating sugar increased triglycerides, which increased heart disease risk.
At the time, studies had begun pointing to a relationship between high-sugar diets and the country’s high rates of heart disease.
The Harvard researchers then turned to studies that examined risks of fat – which included the same kind of epidemiological studies they had dismissed when it came to sugar.
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“It is challenging for us to comment on events that allegedly occurred 60 years ago”.
