How Sweet: Sugar Industry Made Fat the Villain Harvard researchers received sugar industry money to write a NEJMreview

Newly uncovered documents reveal that 50 years ago the sugar industry gave secret support to prominent Harvard researchers to write an influential series of articles in the New England Journal of Medicine that downplayed the negative effects of sugar. Instead, the articles shifted the blame from sugar to fat as the "dietary culprit" behind heart disease. In recent years there has been growing awareness that decades of dietary policy demonized fat and ignored or played down the dangers of increased consumption of carbohydrates and sugars. Many believe this policy had a significant adverse effect on public health, contributing to the obesity and diabetes epidemics. In the new paper, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, Cristin Kearns, DDS, MBA, of U.C. San Francisco and colleagues examined archives containing letters between the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), the predecessor to today's Sugar Association, and prominent Harvard researchers, including the late Fredrick Stare, chair of Harvard's School of Public Health Nutrition Department, and D. Mark Hegsted, a professor in Stare's department. Hegsted died in 2009. In the mid-1960s the SRF sought to counter research suggesting that sugar was a more important cause of atherosclerosis than dietary fat. The SRF invited Stare to join its scientific advisory board and approved funds -- eventually amounting to nearly $50,000 in 2016 dollars -- to support a review article that would respond to the research showing the danger of sucrose. In a letter to Hegsted the SRF gave a clear indication of its agenda: "Our particular interest had to do with that part of nutrition in which there are claims that carbohydrates in the form of sucrose make an inordinate contribution to the metabolic condition, hitherto ascribed to aberrations called fat metabolism. I will be disappointed if this aspect is drowned out in a cascade of review and general interpretation." http://www.medpagetoday.com/Cardiology/CardioBrief/60177?xid=NL_breakingnews_2016-09-13&eun=g721819d0r