During the 1960s, researchers were paid off by the sugar industry to downplay sucrose’s role in causing coronary heart disease, focusing instead on fat and cholesterol as the primary causes of the condition, a shocking new report published in JAMA Internal Medicine has revealed.
According to Reuters and Ars Technica, the study in question was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, and while it was written by nutrition professors, the core objectives of the research were set forth by the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), which is today the Sugar Association– a fact which was not disclosed by the authors at the time.
Furthermore, Laura A. Schmidt of the University of California, San Francisco and her colleagues revealed in the newly-published report that they had found evidence that the SRF also funded the research and reviewed drafts of the manuscript prior to publication. Their activity was one part of a larger campaign to counter “negative attitudes toward sugar,” Reuters explained.
We know candy is bad for us, but the sugar industry changed public perception of the substance (Credit: Thinkstock)
Harvard University professor of nutrition D. Mark Hegsted, who co-led the SRF’s first studies into heart disease in 1965-66, also went on to become head of nutrition at the US Department of Agriculture and had a prominent role in establishing the dietary guidelines that are still in use by the federal government today, according to Ars Technica.
“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 website reported on Monday.
Project 226 and its decades-long impact on public health policy
Schmidt and her co-authors wrote that they had unearthed a series of communications between the SRF, Hegsted, and Roger Adams, a professor who served on the SRF’s scientific advisory board between 1959 and 1971, in the archives at the University of Illinois and Harvard Medical Library, as well as additional foundation literature obtained through other sources.
What they found, Reuters said, is that in 1954, SRF president Henry Haas gave a speech which emphasized that convincing Americans to reduce their fat intake and replacing that caloric intake with carbohydrate-rich foods would increase per-capita sugar consumption by one-third. Studies published in 1962, however, argued that low-fat, high-sugar diets could increase cholesterol, and in response, the SRF launched an aggressive campaign to promote the benefits of sugar.
As an increasing amount of research examined the link between blood sugar and arterial plaque accumulation, the SRF approved “Project 226” in July 1965. Project 226, the report said, was to be a literature review on cholesterol metabolism helmed by Hegsted and other scientists who had financial ties to the sugar industry. In September 1966, the SRF first asked for an additional draft of the research, but there is no direct evidence that the group edited those drafts in any way.
On November 2, the SRF approved a draft which concluded that the only dietary change needed to prevent coronary heart disease was the reduction of fat consumption. The two-part review was published the following year in the NEJM, Reuters noted, but no mention was made of the SRF’s funding or participation in the study (the journal did not require authors to disclose any potential conflicts of interests until 1984, the news organization pointed out).
“Although the contribution of dietary sugars to CHD is still debated,” Schmidt’s team wrote, “what is clear is that the sugar industry… steadfastly denies that there is a relationship between added sugar consumption and CVD risk.” They added the documents they uncovered demonstrate “how the industry sought to influence the scientific debate over the dietary causes of CHD in the 1950s and 1960s, a debate still reverberating in 2016.”
“The sugar association paid very prestigious Harvard scientists to publish a review focusing on saturated fat and cholesterol as the main causes of heart disease at the time when studies were starting to accumulate indicating that sugar is a risk factor for heart disease,” the UCSF health professor told Reuters during a telephone interview. “That has an impact on the whole research community and where it’s going to go.”
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Image credit: Thinkstock
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