Historical analysis reveals Big Sugar disguised the role of sucrose in heart disease for decades

An analysis published last week in JAMA Internal Medicine has revealed that the sugar industry helped downplay the role of sucrose as a risk factor in coronary heart disease beginning in the 1960s.Lead author Cristin Kearns and her colleagues based out of California pieced together a narrative from internal documents at the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), the precursor to the Sugar Association, Washington's sugar lobby. They were being held at the university of Illinois archives and the Harvard Medical Library, Reuters reported.They found that in the 1960s, there were two physiologists advancing theories about the cause of high rates of coronary heart disease in American men. One, Ancel Keys, identified total fat, saturated fat, and dietary cholesterol and the other, John Yudkin, identified added sugars as the primary agent.While people began to embrace lower-fat diets, the SRF found its opportunity to capitalize."If the carbohydrate industries were to recapture this 20% of the calories in the U.S. diet (the difference between the 40% which fat has and the 20% which it ought to have) and if sugar maintained its present share of the carbohydrate market, this change would mean an increase in the per capita consumption of sugar more than a third with a tremendous improvement in general health," said SRF president Henry Hass in a 1954 speech to American Society of Sugar Beet Technologists.As a result the industry spent $600,000 (or about $5.3 million today) to teach “people who had never had a course in biochemistry . . . that sugar is what keeps every human being alive and with energy to face our daily problems.”By 1962, however, the evidence against sugar began to mount. So in 1964, the SRF planned to commission opinion polls "to learn what public concepts we should reinforce and what ones we need to combat" and organized symposia where "detractors" could be brought before other health scientists for questioning.In 1965 they also commissioned a literature review by two Harvard researchers. They paid a total of $6,500 (today $48,900) for the two men to review a hand-picked set of research that claimed carbohydrates made an inordinate contribution to coronary heart disease."I will be disappointed if this aspect is drowned out in a cascade of review and general interpretation," wrote SRF vice-president and director of research, John Hickson, to Harvard researcher Dr. Mark Hegsted."We are well aware of your particular interest in carbohydrate and will cover this as well as we can," Dr. Hegsted replied.While Kearns et al. do not suggest the SRF commented on or edited any of Dr. Hegsted's research, they did find that Hegsted's conclusions were rather fortuitous for the SRF."The review concluded there was 'no doubt' that the only dietary intervention required to prevent CHD was to reduce dietary cholesterol and substitute polyunsaturated fat for saturated fat in the American diet," it said in the analysis.At the time, there was also no obligation for researchers to disclose their sources of funding and so the review ran in the New England Journal of Medicine without any mention of the SRF's involvement.“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 told Reuters Health 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," it continued.According to a report published in the National Review, Courtney Gaine the current head of the Sugar Association said she and her colleagues have been receiving calls, e-mails, and tweets accusing them of killing hundreds of thousands of people and asking how they sleep at night."I never anticipated the anger, the kind of personal attacks I’ve been getting," she told the National Review. Despite the backlash Gaine is adamant that "there’s still no scientific evidence that sugar causes heart disease"—a statement that has been demonstrably false for nearly 60 years.

Historical analysis reveals Big Sugar disguised the role of sucrose in heart disease for decades

Register for free access or login.

Related Topics

Business Topic