Any question that reporting can have real influence on how we live should be dispelled by a story that broke this week. A story published Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine revealed how beginning in the 1960s, the sugar industry paid scientists to deflect growing concern about the role of sugar in heart disease and instead blamed fat.
Besides revealing some shoddy ethics, and reinforcing reasons to doubt industry-funded research, this revelation should spur further examination of sugar’s role in heart disease. That, in turn, could lead to real change in how we look at sugar and from there in Americans’ diets.
As recounted by The New York Times and The Associated Press (Herald, Sept. 14), a former dentist named Cristen Kearns, doing research at the University of California at San Francisco, unearthed internal sugar industry documents that showed an industry group, now called the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard researchers about $50,000 (in today’s dollars) to publish a 1967 review of research into the role of sugar and fat in heart disease. The article, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, played down any link to sugar and emphasized the effects of fat.
According to JAMA Internal Medicine, which is an organ of the American Medical Association, evidence had surfaced in the 1950s suggesting a link between sugar and coronary heart disease. Studies at the time looked at how a number of dietary factors affected cardiovascular risk, including cholesterol, fat, amino acids, carbohydrates, vitamins, minerals and sugar.
By the 1960s, the discussion had largely congealed into views, with one camp emphasizing sugar and another pointing at total fat, saturated fat and dietary cholesterol.
The industry move likely came in response to those blaming sugar. And it appears to have worked.
The three scientists who took the industry’s money are dead, but one went on to become head of Harvard’s nutrition department. Another led the nutrition department at the U.S. Department of Agriculture where he helped draft federal dietary guidelines. And to this day, those guidelines largely focus on limiting saturated fat.
As Stanton Glanz, a professor of medicine at UC San Francisco and an author of the JAMA Internal Medicine paper, told the New York Times, “They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades.”
Unlike 50 years ago, respectable journals now ask contributors to reveal the sources of their funding. But the sugar industry keeps trying. The New York Times reported last year that Coca Cola gave millions of dollars to researchers “who sought to play down the link between sugary drinks and obesity.” And The Associated Press recently reported that candy makers paid for studies purporting to show that kids who eat candy actually weigh less than those who do not.
Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health, told the Times that, “Given the data that we have today, we have shown the refined carbohydrates and especially sugar-sweetened beverages are risk factors for cardiovascular disease, but that the type of dietary fat is also very important.”
That would seem to make sense. But so too did Willett’s remarks about the sugar-funded article from 1967. It is a reminder, he said, of “why research should be supported by public funding rather than depending on industry funding.”
