Sugar scientists: Fat not so sweet
The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to downplay the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.
The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease – including many of today’s dietary recommendations – may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry. ‘‘They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,’’ said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine and an author of the new paper.
The documents show a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of sugar, fat and heart research. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimised the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.
The Harvard scientists and the sugar executives with whom they collaborated are no longer alive. One of the scientists who was paid by the sugar industry was D. Mark Hegsted, who went on to become head of nutrition at the US Department of Agriculture, where in 1977 he helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines.
In a statement responding to the JAMA report, the Sugar Association said the 1967 review was published at a time when medical journals did not typically require researchers to disclose funding sources or potential financial conflicts of interest. It said several decades of research had concluded sugar ‘‘does not have a unique role in heart disease’’. The association also questioned the motives behind the new paper.
The revelations are important because the debate about the relative harms of sugar and saturated fat continues, Glantz said. For many decades health authorities encouraged Americans to improve their health by reducing their fat intake, which led many people to consume lowfat, high-sugar foods that some experts now blame for fuelling the obesity crisis. Today, the saturated fat warnings remain a cornerstone of the government’s dietary guidelines, though in recent years the American Heart Association, the World Health Organization and other health authorities have also begun to warn that too much added sugar could increase cardiovascular disease risk.
Last year, an article in The New York Times revealed Coca-cola, the world’s largest producer of sugary beverages, had provided millions of dollars in funding to researchers who sought to downplay the link between sugary drinks and obesity. In June, The Associated Press reported candymakers were funding studies that claimed that children who eat candy tend to weigh less than those who do not.
The JAMA paper relied on thousands of pages of correspondence and other documents discovered in archives at Harvard, the University of Illinois and other libraries. The documents show in 1964, John Hickson, a top sugar industry executive, discussed a plan with others in the industry to shift public opinion ‘‘through our research and information and legislative programmes’’.
Hickson proposed countering the alarming findings on sugar with industry-funded research. In 1965, Hickson enlisted the Harvard researchers to write a review that would debunk the anti-sugar studies. He paid them a total of $6500 – the equivalent of $49,000 today. Hickson selected the papers for them to review and made it clear he wanted the result to favour sugar.
Harvard’s Hegsted reassured the sugar executives. ‘‘We are well aware of your particular interest’’, he wrote, ‘‘and will cover this as well as we can’’.