fat NOT sugar How the sugar industry paid prestigious Harvard researchers to say fat (NOT sugar) caused heart disease
- Newly-unveiled papers reveal sugar industry bribed Harvard scientists
- It was in the 1960s - before conflict of interest had to be reported
- After 'bad press' for sugar, industry chiefs commissioned a new review
- They told Harvard professors to say fat was a worse cause of heart disease
- The finding shaped public views of nutrition for years
The
sugar industry paid prestigious Harvard scientists to publish research
saying fat - not sugar - was a key cause of heart disease, newly
unveiled documents reveal.
At the time, in the 1960s, conflict of interest disclosure was not required.
It
meant sugar chiefs could work closely with researchers to re-draft and
re-draft their paper until it was 'satisfactory' - without having to
report their involvement.
The result shaped public health approaches to nutrition for years.
The findings, revealed today in a special report in JAMA Internal Medicine, has sent shockwaves through the research community.
The sugar industry paid prestigious
Harvard scientists to publish research saying fat - not sugar - was a
key cause of heart disease. Now public health officials urge people to
limit excess sugar to just one can of soda per day
'I
thought I had seen everything but this one floored me,' said Marion
Nestle of New York University, who wrote an editorial on the new
findings.
'It was so blatant. And the "bribe" was so big.'
'Funding research is ethical,' Nestle said.
'Bribing researchers to produce the evidence you want is not.
The warped research appeared in a 1967 literature review in The New England Journal of Medicine.
It
pointed to fat and cholesterol as the dietary culprits of heart
disease, glossing over evidence from the 1950s that sugar was also
linked to heart disease.
According
to the new report, the NEJM review was sponsored by the Sugar Research
Foundation (SRF), which is today the Sugar Association.
Its role in the study was not disclosed until 1984.
Harvard professor of nutrition Dr Mark Hegsted co-directed the SRF's first heart disease research project from 1965 to 1966.
In
the new report, Laura A. Schmidt of the University of California, San
Francisco and colleagues have uncovered correspondence that shows how Dr
Hegsted was commissioned by the SRF to reach a specific conclusion.
Archives
from the University of Illinois and the Harvard Medical Library reveal
that the foundation set the objective for the literature review, funded
it and reviewed drafts of the manuscript.
The researchers also reviewed symposium proceedings and historical reports.
In
1954, they say, foundation president Henry Haas gave a speech
highlighting the potential of reducing American fat intake and
recapturing those calories as carbohydrates that would increase the per
capita consumption of sugar more than a third.
In
1962, an American Medical Association nutrition report indicated that
low-fat high-sugar diets may actually encourage the development of
cholesterol.
Two
years later, according to the new report, SRF vice president John
Hickson proposed that the SRF embark on a major program to counter
'negative attitudes toward sugar.'
Increasingly,
epidemiological reports suggested that blood sugar, rather than blood
cholesterol or high blood pressure, was a better predictor of
atherosclerosis.
Two
days after The New York Herald Tribune ran a full page story on the
link to sugar in July 1965, the SRF approved 'Project 226,' a literature
review on cholesterol metabolism to be led by Hegsted and, among
others, Fredrick Stare, another Harvard nutritionist with industry
financial ties.
Nine
months later, Schmidt and colleagues write, Hegsted explained that the
project was delayed to continually rewrite rebuttals to new evidence
linking sugar to heart disease that had been published in the interim.
By
September of 1966, according to the report, Hickson was requesting
additional drafts of the literature review from the Harvard researchers,
though there is no direct evidence that the Foundation commented on or
edited the drafts.
By November 2, Hickson had approved the latest draft as 'quite what we had in mind.'
The
two-part review, concluding that the only change necessary to prevent
heart disease was to reduce dietary fat intake, was published in the
NEJM the following year, with no mention of the SRF's participation.
The journal did not require conflict of interest disclosure until 1984.
'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,' Schmidt
said.
'That has an impact on the whole research community and where it's going to go.'
'For
example a lot of the messaging during this period around how to prevent
heart disease focused on, why don't you use margarine rather than
butter, which has less saturated fat,' Schmidt said. Now we know that
margarine is full of trans fat, which causes heart disease and has been
nearly eradicated from the U.S. food supply.
'When
manufacturers took out fat they added sugar,' she said. 'We've really
lost a lot of time in evaluating how sugar impacts coronary heart
disease,' but the actual impact on public health over the last five
decades is impossible to measure.
Large
amounts of sugar and saturated fats are both detrimental to health and
their effects are hard to separate, Nestle said, but it seems reasonable
to keep sugar intake to about 10 percent of daily calories.
Today,
industry money still funds plenty of scientific research, but
increasingly journals and scientists disclose these funding sources,
Schmidt said.
'We
acknowledge that the Sugar Research Foundation should have exercised
greater transparency in all of its research activities, however, when
the studies in question were published funding disclosures and
transparency standards were not the norm they are today,' the Sugar
Association said in a statement.
'Beyond
this, it is challenging for us to comment on events that allegedly
occurred 60 years ago, and on documents we have never seen.'
'The
Sugar Association is always seeking to further understand the role of
sugar and health, but we rely on quality science and facts to drive our
assertions,' the statement said.
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