Supporting shoddy science and a long history of deception, this is how many companies have gotten away for years marketing their products as safe. The tobacco industry is a prime example. Cigarette smoking is the leading cause of preventable death in the U.S. and is a proven major contributor to the top two leading causes of death - heart disease and cancer.* It took at least six decades and litigation before the truth finally emerged and the lies of the tobacco industry uncovered.** That very same scenario is now slowly unfolding about “sugar”. Sugar is now the latest public health scandal that is currently being exposed.
As pointed out by Haven Emerson at Columbia University, a remarkable increase in deaths from diabetes between 1900 and 1920 corresponded with an increase in sugar consumption. In the 1960s, the British nutrition expert John Yudkin conducted a series of experiments on animals and people showing that high amounts of sugar in the diet led to high levels of fat and insulin in the blood – risk factors for heart disease and diabetes. Unfortunately, Yudkin's message was drowned out by scientists who blamed the rising obesity and heart disease on cholesterol that was caused by too much saturated fat in the diet. Therefore, the “cholesterol” theory was promoted, and Yudkin's experiments showing high levels of fat and insulin in the blood from high amounts of sugar were ignored.*
Many years later, as published in JAMA Intern Med. 2016, it is acknowledged that there were early warning signals in the 1950s of the coronary heart disease risk of sugar (sucrose). In the late 1960s, the sugar industry actually stopped a study, named Project 259, because it linked sucrose (a common sugar) to coronary heart disease and bladder cancer in preliminary experiments. It was Dr. Cristin Kearns at the University of California San Francisco, who discovered Project 259 while digging through boxes of letters in the basement of a Harvard library. Per Dr. Kearns and UCSF cardiologist Stanton Glantz, the sugar industry buried the evidence and stopped funding of Project 259 due to the sugar industry’s negative findings. Their historical analysis of these internal documents has recently been published by PLOS Biology.
Dr. Kearns also found a separate, undisclosed document showing that the sugar industry had secretly funded research that downplayed the risks of sugar and highlighted the hazards of saturated fat. Further documents discovered had revealed Mr. John Hickson, a top sugar industry executive, proposed countering the alarming findings on sugar with industry-funded research. Per Mr. Hickson's writing, “Then we can publish the data and refute our detractors”. In 1965, Hickson enlisted two Harvard nutritionists, Dr. Fredrick Stare and Mark Hegsted, to write a review that would debunk the anti-sugar studies. The Harvard researchers shared and discussed their early drafts with Hickson who was very pleased with their work. The Harvard scientists had dismissed the data on sugar as being weak and gave far more credence to the data implicating saturated fat as the culprit to coronary heart disease. John Hickson replied to the two Harvard scientists in writing, “Let me assure you this is quite what we had in mind, and we look forward to its appearance in print”. Dr. Glantz said the debate about sugar and heart disease died down while low-fat diets gain the endorsement of many health authorities.** As noted in The New York Times: "Hickson left the sugar industry in the early 1970s to work for the Cigar Research Council, a tobacco industry organization. In 1972, an internal tobacco industry memo on Mr. Hickson noted that he had a reputation for manipulating science to achieve his goals. The confidential tobacco memo described Mr. Hickson as "a supreme scientific politician who had been successful in condemning cyclamates, on behalf of the Sugar Research Council, on somewhat shaky evidence." (my emphasis)
A book recently released by Gary Taubes, titled The Case Against Sugar, writes yet about another industry-driven campaign dating back to the 1950s. He writes that it was Ancel Keys, a prominent physiologist at the University of Minnesota, who first stated that it was fat and not sugar that causes high cholesterol levels that lead to heart disease. Taubes writes what few people knew, however, that it was Key’s research that was also funded by the sugar industry.
The McGovern report of 1977 condemned saturated fats and cholesterol blaming them for causing heart disease. The report was written by a young staff member who happened to be a vegetarian with no background in medicine or health research. Philip Handler, the head of The National Academy of Sciences, considered the McGovern report to be complete nonsense. Carol Tucker Foreman, the USDA Assistant Secretary, ignored Handler and to look for someone who would agree with the report so that official government guidelines could be issued telling everyone how to eat. The problem is that REAL science, unbiased and not tied into industry-funded special interest groups, has exonerated saturated fats and cholesterol from causing heart disease for many years now. Instead of being concerned about fat and cholesterol causing heart disease, we should be concerned about our sugar intake and the use of statins that are shown to contribute to the development of diabetes by impairing the production of insulin, the hormone that lowers blood glucose. Learn more:
Saturated Fat and Heart Disease: "The Greatest Scam in the History Of Medicine"
Truth about Saturated Fats - Exposing the Cholesterol Myth