Sugar industry funded studies to blame fat for heart disease

By September of 1966, according to the report, Hickson was requesting additional drafts of the literature review from the Harvard researchers, though there is no direct evidence that the Foundation commented on or edited the drafts. In 1964, the vice president and director of research for the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), John Hickson, proposed that the group “embark on a major program” to dispute the data as well as any “negative attitudes toward sugar”. As per the analysis, the researchers exaggerated the literature’s consistency on fat and cholesterol, while distracting readers from studies on sugar.

That revelation, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, comes from Dr. Cristin Kearns at the University of California San Francisco, a dentist-turned-researcher who found the sugar industry’s fingerprints while digging through boxes of letters in the basement of a Harvard library.

Scientists began to uncover a link between sugar and heart disease about 60 years ago, and now, the general consensus among experts is that sugar intake is associated with heart disease risk. Their interest is in the process. One recent study in PLoS One found 1,500 pages of correspondence between sugar executives, which reveal that the industry ensured that all but one member of the government task force on tooth decay was paid off by Big Sugar. Kearns and colleagues also found papers from Harvard professor Mark Hegsted, who directed Sugar Research Foundation studies.

For one thing, there’s motivation and intent.

“Since the late 1970s, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and its predecessor, the Dietary Goals for the United States, have advised the public to consume less added sugar”. It’s not uncommon in dietary science research, either. He said the JAMA article offered a “useful warning that industry funding is a concern in research as it may bias what is published” and noted that Congress has allocated less and less funding for the past decade. By the 1980s, few scientists focused on the role of sugar in heart disease. Project 226 authors eventually received $6500, or $48,900 in 2016 dollars, from SRF, the report said.

The sugar industry has one goal – to sell more sugar.

The 1960s paper was to review the research on sugar, fat and heart disease but corruption was not far from the minds of the Sugar Research Foundation who, at the time, paid the Harvard researchers the equivalent of $50,000 in today’s money in order to make sugar look more favorable to the public. But it was finally published in 1967.

Almost 50 years later, some nutritionists consider sugar a risk factor for coronary heart disease, though there’s no consensus. In some cases the scientists alleged investigator incompetence or flawed methodology.

“In the review, there was double standard – anything that was written against sugar was hyper-critical while research against fat had a free pass”, Glantz told ABC News of the 1967 review. Studies available today say sugar does plays a role in heart disease. Experimental studies were dismissed for being too dissimilar to real life.

The American Heart Association now advises limiting added sugars in a diet to help avoid obesity, which can reduce heart health.

Another study, in which rats were given a diet low in fat and high in sugar, was rejected because “such diets are rarely consumed by man”.

“Generally speaking, it is not only unfortunate but a disservice that industry-funded research is branded as tainted”. What is often missing from the dialogue is that industry-funded research has been informative in addressing key issues.

Tobacco, chemical and pharmaceutical companies are widely suspected of influencing research on their products’ health effects, but food companies or their representatives doing the same is somewhat less known. The food industry has and continues to influence nutrition “knowledge” because federal agencies encourage it. It was Kearns who unearthed the industry documents. In July 1965, just after articles linking sucrose – ordinary table sugar – to coronary heart disease appeared in the Annals of Internal Medicine, he approached Hegsted.