Sugar industry secretly paid for favorable Harvard research - and skewed dietary guidelines for decades As nutrition debates raged in the 1960s, prominent Harvard nutritionists published two reviews in a top medical journal downplaying the role of sugar in coronary heart disease. Newly unearthed documents reveal what they didn’t say: A sugar industry trade group initiated and paid for the studies, examined drafts, and laid out a clear objective to protect sugar’s reputation in the public eye. That revelation, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, comes from Dr. Cristin Kearns at the University of California, San Francisco, a dentist-turned-researcher who found the sugar industry’s fingerprints while digging through boxes of letters in the basement of a Harvard library. Hegsted and Stare tore apart studies that implicated sugar and concluded that there was only one dietary modification — changing fat and cholesterol intake — that could prevent coronary heart disease. Their reviews were published in 1967 in the New England Journal of Medicine, which back then did not require researchers to disclose conflicts of interest. Glantz said the sugar industry used a similar playbook to the tobacco industry, whose internal documents he has written about extensively. The letters reveal how sophisticated the sugar executives were in swaying public opinion, he said. They closely tracked the research and were careful about which influential scientists to approach. See http://ift.tt/2c9V4FY
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