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Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat
During that time, obesity and associated ills like diabetes reached alarming levels in the United States.
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Published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine, the analysis is based on the correspondence between the scientists at Harvard University and a sugar trade industry, Sugar Association, which evolved from the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF). So when we heard that the sugar industry may have been punking us for the last 50 years through manipulating science and research, needless to say we were totally tuned in.
“For decades following the funded review”, she wrote, “scientists and dietary guidelines focused on reducing saturated fat as the primary strategy for coronary heart disease prevention”.
“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades”, said Simon Glantz, lead author of the research and medicine professor at the University of California in San Francisco. Essentially, the sugar industry paid researchers to suppress evidence that sugar leads to heart disease, and instead laid the blame on saturated fats and cholesterol.
An American nutrition report indicated low-fat high-sugar diets may encourage the development of cholesterol.
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. The lingering scientific questions around sugar and health are why doctors and standards, such as the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, only began recommending a hard cap on how much added sugar people should eat past year. The New England Journal of Medicine did not begin to require financial disclosures until 1984.
Nestle noted that efforts by the food industry to shape nutrition science continue today.
By July 1965, after more research supporting the link had been published, SRF’s research director John Hickson was knocking on Harvard’s door, looking for scientists to refute the findings.
Paging through the letters, Kearns was “shocked” by his level of cooperation with the sugar industry, she said. “May it serve as a warning not only to policymakers, but also to researchers, clinicians, peer reviewers, journal editors, and journalists of the need to consider the harm to scientific credibility and public health when dealing with studies funded by food companies with vested interests in the results – and to find better ways to fund such studies and to prevent, disclose and manage potentially conflicted interests”, writes Marion Nestle, Ph.D., M.P.H., of New York University, in a related commentary.
“We are well aware of your particular interest in carbohydrate and will cover this as well as we can”, Hegsted replied, according to Kearns.
Unsurprisingly, industry has rejected the suggestion it is pushing bad science to promote its own interests.
However, the Association did criticize the publication of the article categorizing it among the “headline-baiting- articles” that are slowly bein published to disregard the scientific advances made by corporations. The group also questioned Kearns’ “continued attempts to reframe historical occurrences” to play into the current public sentiment against sugar.
The industry spent $600,000 ($5.3 million in 2016 dollars) to teach “people who had never had a course in biochemistry… that sugar is what keeps every human being alive and with energy to face our daily problems”, the analysis said. Meanwhile, the evidence is growing that eating sugar does indeed contribute to heart disease, although the Sugar Association - the modern-day name of the Sugar Research Foundation - disagrees.
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.
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“However, by taking industry funding for the review, and having regular communications during the review with the sugar industry”, Willett acknowledged, it “put him [Hegsted] in a position where his conclusions could be questioned”.