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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday September 13 2016, @10:04PM   Printer-friendly
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the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal—and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine [open, DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5394].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)


Original Submission #1Original Submission #2

 
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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @11:26PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @11:26PM (#401513)

    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.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @11:33PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 13 2016, @11:33PM (#401516)

    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

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:23PM (#401951) Journal

    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?