How sugar industry shifted blame to fat

New York

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to downplay the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.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 on Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease 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 UCSF 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 US$50,000 in today's dollars to publish a 1967 review of sugar, fat and heart research. The studies used in the review were hand-picked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimised the link between sugar and heart health and cast asper…