In the neverending battle against obesity, heart disease, and bad health, what are we supposed to avoid eating, fat or sugar?
The question is important, because, if you fear fat, those fat-free products you may be substituting are packed with sugar and other carbohydrates.
We should consult science to settle the issue, but it turns out that the nutritional science of the last few decades has been seriously compromised. It has been discovered that back in the 1960s, the sugar industry paid all-too-human scientists from Harvard large amounts of money to shift nutritional blame from sugar to fats. Those studies have continued to influence other studies, which build upon them. The scientists, who are now deceased, include one who helped draft the government’s dietary guidelines.
From Anahad O’Connor, How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat – The New York Times:
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to downplay the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.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 that 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 at U.C.S.F. and an author of the new JAMA paper.
The documents show that 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, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized 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 the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where in 1977 he helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines. Another scientist was Fredrick J. Stare, the chairman of Harvard’s nutrition department.
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