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from the no-sugar-tonight-in-our-coffee dept.
Conspiracies aren't real, are they?
The Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard researchers $6,500 (2016 equivalent: $48,900) to write a literature review, published in 1967, that downplayed sugar's links to heart disease. One of the researchers went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture:
Back in the 1960s, a sugar industry executive wrote fat checks to a group of Harvard researchers so that they'd downplay the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal—and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine [open, DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5394].
One of those Harvard researchers went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where he set the stage for the federal government's current dietary guidelines. All in all, the corrupted researchers and skewed scientific literature successfully helped draw attention away from the health risks of sweets and shift the blame solely to fats—for nearly five decades. The low-fat, high-sugar diets that health experts subsequently encouraged are now seen as a main driver of the current obesity epidemic.
The bitter revelations come from archived documents from the Sugar Research Foundation (now the Sugar Association), dug up by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. Their dive into the old, sour affair highlights both the perils of trusting industry-sponsored research to inform policy and the importance of requiring scientists to disclose conflicts of interest—something that didn't become the norm until years later. Perhaps most strikingly, it spotlights the concerning power of the sugar industry.
See the accompanying editorial: Food Industry Funding of Nutrition Research: The Relevance of History for Current Debates (open, DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5400) (DX)
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday September 13 2016, @10:46PM
The US constitution was written by people who assumed that good God-fearing slaveholders would not corrupt their governments to allow themselves to profit from injuring their fellow citizens.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @11:22PM
Even if that's true, the Constitution remains as it is. You can change the Constitution through the amendment process, but outright ignoring it isn't (shouldn't be) an option.You might think Citizens United had and continues to have terrible effects on our political system, but the logic they used to decide that case wasn't wrong if you actually read the highest law of the land.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @02:30AM
The logic they used was terrible becomes it all depends on the notion that money = speech. Allowing that association violates the equal protection clause because money is not evenly distributed. It also fucks the value of the first amendment. Free speech value lies in ideas thriving or dying based on their inherent merit not the political power wielded by those who like it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @03:46PM
The logic they used was terrible becomes it all depends on the notion that money = speech.
Most of it is about political advertising and running smear campaigns against particular candidates, which is all speech.
It also fucks the value of the first amendment.
The value of the first amendment is that it allows people to speak freely. Whether or not people accept your ideas or even bother to listen to them is an entirely separate matter. You seem to be focused on the practical value of freedom of speech, but freedom of speech would still be a fundamental human right without it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @11:26PM
There is no way around the simple concept of lobbying. What really needs to happen is government funded campaigns. All information for candidates is housed on a government website, so one easy place to read everything. No private ANYTHING allowed, they can attach any media items on the central website, so if you want to put a sign in your yard just take the promo image file from the website and get it printed at whatever size you want. No political commercials, at all. Publicly funded and OPEN debates, get rid of party nominations.
This way the main method for lobbyists to affect the election is nullified, no candidate will need to promise anything to anyone in order to properly run for office.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @11:33PM
While we're at it, change the voting system so that voters can vote for as many candidates as they wish to vote for, rather than just one. And make the electoral college proportional, rather than winner-take-all. But all of these incredibly obvious measures would require the two parties to essentially give up the duopoly they have, which is just a pipe dream.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:23PM
There is no way around the simple concept of lobbying. What really needs to...
If there's no way around it, then why did you just try?
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday September 14 2016, @05:59PM
The US constitution was written by people who assumed that good God-fearing slaveholders would not corrupt their governments to allow themselves to profit from injuring their fellow citizens.
The First Amendment is pretty absolute in its restrictions on Congress and the laws they can pass, but that doesn't mean that the supporters of the amendment could not conceive of ways that it could be abused, including expediting bribery and such. I suspect if we looked at the writings of the people involved, we'd find that they were for the most part a lot more clued in about potential abuses of the amendment that they had than you are now, despite you having more than a couple centuries of hindsight on your side.