For many decades, health officials encouraged Americans to reduce their fat intake, which led many people to consume low-fat, high-sugar foods that some experts now blame for fueling the obesity crisis. The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease, and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.
“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 JAMA Internal Medicine paper revealing internal sugar industry documents. “It was a very smart thing the sugar industry did, because review papers, especially if you get them published in a very prominent journal, tend to shape the overall scientific discussion.”
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 may increase cardiovascular disease risk.
Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, wrote an editorial uncovering “compelling evidence” that the sugar industry initiated research “expressly to exonerate sugar as a major risk factor for coronary heart disease.”
The documents show that in 1964, John Hickson, a top sugar industry executive, paid Harvard researchers the equivalent of $49,000 in today’s money to debunk anti-sugar studies. Harvard’s Dr. Hegsted reassured the sugar executives. “We are well aware of your particular interest,” he wrote, “and will cover this as well as we can.”
Hickson responded that he was pleased with what they were writing. The Harvard scientists had dismissed the data on sugar as weak and gave far more credence to the data implicating saturated fat.
“Let me assure you this is quite what we had in mind, and we look forward to its appearance in print,” Hickson wrote.
