Washington: Cut down on those fatty foods, we are told, or you’ll clog your arteries. For years we’ve been hearing of how fat causes heart diseases. But what about sugar? Oh it’s harmless. But is it really?
In 1957, John Yudkin, a British professor of nutrition, in a book called Pure, White, and Deadly had floated his hypothesis that sugar was a hazard to public health. Yudkin was marginalised and derided and as time passed by fat was held culpable for heart diseases and obesity. Sugar got away scot free.
But according to newly-discovered documents published in JAMA Internal Medicine, the sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to downplay the link between sugar and heart diseases. Fat was instead blamed, a report in the New York Times says. “They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA paper.
A trade group — Sugar Research Foundation — paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease. The sugar group handpicked every study and article which was published. The result was that the link between sugar and heart health was minimised and aspersions cast on the role of saturated fat.
At the time, studies had begun pointing to a relationship between high-sugar diets and the country’s high rates of heart disease. John Hickson, a top sugar industry executive, proposed countering the alarming findings on sugar with industry-funded research. “Then we can publish the data and refute our detractors,” he wrote.
Last year, The New York Times had revealed that Coca-Cola had provided millions of dollars in funding to researchers who sought to play down the link between sugary drinks and obesity.
