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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the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal—and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine [open, DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5394].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: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:43AM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday September 14 2016, @01:43AM (#401569) Journal

    I cannot recall ANY "high sugar" diets being recommended. How about low fat BALANCED diets. Those I've always heard and read as recommended.

    While this is true, for many years having "low fat" or "no fat" versions of processed products was all the rage, to satisfy the urges of those trying to follow FDA dogma.

    The problem with this was twofold: (1) having lower fat in your diet frequently led to lower satiety, causing people to chow down more on these "low-fat" foods (leading to higher caloric intake), and (2) food companies who did taste tests quickly realized that "no fat" products were frequently unpalatable... so they needed to add something else to give flavor, and one of the easiest options was sugar (made suddenly cheap around the same time by corn subsidies).

    So, no -- there wasn't an official "high sugar" diet. But you did have a high-carb diet (which was encouraged, and which quickly metabolizes into sugar) coupled to foods that contained added sugar to offset the reduction in fat and flavor. The result was a diet high in carbs and sugars. Per capita sugar consumption grew by something like 40% in the U.S. in the second half of the 20th century.

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  • (Score: 2) by linuxrocks123 on Wednesday September 14 2016, @04:12AM

    by linuxrocks123 (2557) on Wednesday September 14 2016, @04:12AM (#401635) Journal

    To be fair, what was and is actually encouraged by the FDA is a diet high in whole grains, which were and are still thought to have cardioprotective effects. But the destructive anti-fat crusade resulted in people eating lots of simple sugars ... which the FDA didn't say was good, but didn't say was bad, either.