Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments

SoylentNews is people

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the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal—and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine [open, DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5394].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

 
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
Display Options Threshold/Breakthrough Mark All as Read Mark All as Unread
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by opinionated_science on Wednesday September 14 2016, @02:17AM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Wednesday September 14 2016, @02:17AM (#401586)

    Well for food, the technology is widespread and available. Build a ton of clinics with treadmills, CO2/O2 measurment equipment, and give everyone a free test every year or so. Well at least 18,21,25,30,35.... For children we have to be careful not to interfere with natural development, so this methodology would not be appropriate.

    I have a friend (6'1", was 280 lbs) that lost 100 lbs in 18 months by getting his metabolism measured - 1200 kCals, and adapted his diet to match.

    Everyone can get a personal kCal number to do what they want - but here's the rub - it's an objective, repeatable , known quantity. No guessing FDA daily rates, a real number for every person alive. There will be those in denial (like the smokers today), but the science is done. The vast majority of the population could be given sufficient information to manage themselves. And probably as we learn more, we will find the medical "edge" cases that have specific problems making it hard to gain healthy equilibrium.

    My preference is to burn an extra 3-4kCals/week to make the equations easier to balance!

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Moderation   +1  
       Interesting=1, Total=1
    Extra 'Interesting' Modifier   0  
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  

    Total Score:   3  
  • (Score: 2) by edIII on Wednesday September 14 2016, @02:42AM

    by edIII (791) on Wednesday September 14 2016, @02:42AM (#401602)

    I completely agree with you. The FDA should adopt the stance of explaining the equations and that people should be measured. All charts are approximations, or even better, averages of actual reports and demographics. That would be useful.

    Thanks for the tip.

    --
    Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.