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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the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal—and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine [open, DOI: 10.1001/jamainternmed.2016.5394].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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:41PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 14 2016, @06:41PM (#401961)

    i dunno.
    proteins are like replacement gears. fat and oils are like coating for the gears.
    vitamins and minerals (calcium, kalium, magnesium and iron, but don't forget lithium) are like secret sauce.
    and suger *tada* is what makes it all GOOO!!

    with our high-tech society, methinks why go thru the trouble of eating other stuff then (high-tech) refined sugar, if the other stuff has GMO, pesticides and un-needed plastic waste and heavy metals (some of them not sure of themselves
    and what they really are thus still in the process of finding themselves -aka- decaying -aka- radioactif) floating in the ocean?

    ofc, even in sugar land there is evil and anything not sugar cane is evil sugar.
    a white crystal, pure and beautiful and will probably keep you alive for a long time (maybe add some tea leafs).