Sugar Industry Documents Reveal 1960s Campaign to Shift Heart Disease Focus from Sugar to Saturated Fat
By
aldarion
Not artisan, but a perfectly fine bagel. Hits the spot.
Summary
Historical documents reveal that the sugar industry collaborated with nutrition scientists in the 1960s to shift public health focus away from sugar's role in heart disease toward saturated fat and cholesterol. The sugar trade organization recognized as early as 1954 that low-fat diets would increase sugar consumption, and subsequently funded research to downplay sugar's cardiovascular risks while emphasizing fat as the primary dietary culprit. The analysis of these documents was published in JAMA Internal Medicine by UC San Francisco researchers.
Key quotes
· 4 pulledA newly discovered cache of industry documents revealed that the sugar industry began working closely with nutrition scientists in the mid-1960s to single out fat and cholesterol as the dietary causes of coronary heart disease and to downplay evidence that sucrose consumption was also a risk factor.
The internal industry documents, which were found in public archives, showed that a sugar industry trade organization recognized as early as 1954 that if Americans adopted low-fat diets, they would need to replace that fat with something else — and that something was likely to be sugar.
The Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) secretly funded a 1967 review article in The New England Journal of Medicine that downplayed sugar's role in heart disease and singled out fat and cholesterol as the dietary culprits.
The documents reveal that the SRF set the review's objective, contributed articles for inclusion, and received drafts, but the SRF's funding and role were not disclosed.
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