{"id":8988,"date":"2016-09-12T19:49:24","date_gmt":"2016-09-13T01:49:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/?p=8988"},"modified":"2016-09-12T22:17:50","modified_gmt":"2016-09-13T04:17:50","slug":"a-sweet-deal-for-harvard-scientists-helped-spark-the-low-fat-diet-craze","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/2016\/09\/12\/a-sweet-deal-for-harvard-scientists-helped-spark-the-low-fat-diet-craze\/","title":{"rendered":"A Sweet Deal For Harvard Scientists Helped Spark The Low-Fat Diet Craze"},"content":{"rendered":"

Follow the money.\u00a0 Follow the money.\u00a0 Follow the money.<\/em><\/p>\n

If you’ve seen Fat Head,<\/em> you probably remember that line.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a perfect example of why you should follow the money, as reported in The New York Times<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Shocking, isn\u2019t it?\u00a0 Actually, no, it\u2019s not shocking.\u00a0 Arterycloggingsaturatedfat!<\/em> hysteria was always about money.<\/p>\n

The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today\u2019s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.<\/p>\n

The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today\u2019s dollars to publish a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Harvard scientists were not only whores, they were cheap whores.\u00a0 The equivalent of $50,000 in today\u2019s dollars<\/em> to steer the blame for heart disease from sugar to fat?\u00a0 Man, you got taken.\u00a0 Think of all those Snackwell\u2019s sold in the \u201880s \u2013 fat-free, so they\u2019re guilt-free!\u00a0 Think of all the sugary products (Cocoa Puffs come to mind) that sported the American Heart Association seal of approval because they were low in fat.\u00a0 You morons should have demanded at least $10 million each.<\/p>\n

The Harvard scientists and the sugar executives with whom they collaborated are no longer alive.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Funny how always seems to be the case, isn\u2019t it?\u00a0 We learn about these scientific shenanigans after the shenanigators are deceased.\u00a0 Back in April, I wrote about a \u201crediscovered\u201d study<\/a> conducted in the 1960s in which subjects who cut back on animal fats in favor of vegetable oils actually had a higher rate of heart disease.\u00a0 The investigators apparently buried the study.\u00a0 One of those investigators was Ancel Keys \u2013 long deceased when the data was \u201crediscovered.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anyway \u2026<\/p>\n

One of the scientists who was paid by the sugar industry was D. Mark Hegsted, who went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where in 1977 he helped draft the forerunner to the federal government\u2019s dietary guidelines. Another scientist was Dr. Fredrick J. Stare, the chairman of Harvard\u2019s nutrition department.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you\u2019ve read Good Calories, Bad Calories<\/em> or The Big Fat Surprise<\/em>, you know how much influence these two shenanigators had on our diets over the decades.<\/p>\n

Dr. Hegsted used his research to influence the government\u2019s dietary recommendations, which emphasized saturated fat as a driver of heart disease while largely characterizing sugar as empty calories linked to tooth decay. Today, the saturated fat warnings remain a cornerstone of the government\u2019s dietary guidelines, though in recent years the American Heart Association, the World Health Organization and other health authorities have also begun to warn that too much added sugar may increase cardiovascular disease risk.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Way to go, American Heart Association!\u00a0 It only took you 40 years to become sort of half-right about diets and health!\u00a0 If I live to be 120 or so, I might even see you drop the nonsense about arterycloggingsaturatedfat!<\/em><\/p>\n

The documents show that in 1964, John Hickson, a top sugar industry executive, discussed a plan with others in the industry to shift public opinion \u201cthrough our research and information and legislative programs.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the time, studies had begun pointing to a relationship between high-sugar diets and the country\u2019s high rates of heart disease. At the same time, other scientists, including the prominent Minnesota physiologist Ancel Keys, were investigating a competing theory that it was saturated fat and dietary cholesterol that posed the biggest risk for heart disease.<\/p>\n

In 1965, Mr. Hickson enlisted the Harvard researchers to write a review that would debunk the anti-sugar studies. He paid them a total of $6,500, the equivalent of $49,000 today. Mr. Hickson selected the papers for them to review and made it clear he wanted the result to favor sugar.<\/p>\n

Harvard\u2019s Dr. Hegsted reassured the sugar executives. \u201cWe are well aware of your particular interest,\u201d he wrote, \u201cand will cover this as well as we can.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019m pretty sure as well as we can<\/em> didn\u2019t mean as objectively as we can.<\/em><\/p>\n

As they worked on their review, the Harvard researchers shared and discussed early drafts with Mr. Hickson, who responded that he was pleased with what they were writing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u201cGood job, guys.\u00a0 If you meet me in the underground parking garage around midnight tomorrow, I\u2019ll give you thick envelope full of other scientific insights I\u2019d like to share, mostly in the form of unmarked bills.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Dr. Walter Willett, chairman of the nutrition department at the Harvard T. H. Chan School of Public Health, said that academic conflict-of-interest rules had changed significantly since the 1960s, but that the industry papers were a reminder of \u201cwhy research should be supported by public funding rather than depending on industry funding.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Awww, isn\u2019t that cute?\u00a0 Dr. Willet thinks research supported by \u201cpublic funding\u201d is unbiased.\u00a0 I mean, it\u2019s not as if \u201cpublic funding\u201d was yanked away from researchers who disagreed with the Lipid Hypothesis once the U.S. government bought into the idea. And it\u2019s not as if studies supported by \u201cpublic funding\u201d were buried when the results weren\u2019t what the overlords at the USDA and NIH wanted to hear.<\/p>\n

The fact of the matter is that is there is no easy answer for the funding problem.\u00a0 Industries will of course support researchers who produce results the industries like.\u00a0 But governments do exactly the same thing.\u00a0 All we can do is try to become scientifically literate enough to separate the garbage studies from the legitimate studies \u2013 some of which are funded by governments, and some of which are funded by industries.<\/p>\n

After the review was published, the debate about sugar and heart disease died down, while low-fat diets gained the endorsement of many health authorities.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Welcome to Snackwell\u2019s, Slim-Fast, fat-free frozen yogurt, cereal instead of eggs for breakfast, Weight Watchers Smart Ones frozen dinners, I Can\u2019t Believe It\u2019s Not Butter, chocolate-flavored skim milk in schools, and countless sugar-and-grain products proudly bearing the American Heart Association\u2019s seal of approval \u2013 oh, and the diabetes epidemic too.<\/p>\n

I hope those jackasses really enjoyed the $49,000.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Follow the money.\u00a0 Follow the money.\u00a0 Follow the money. If you’ve seen Fat Head, you probably remember that line.\u00a0 Here\u2019s a perfect example of why you should follow the money,… Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8988","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bad-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8988","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8988"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8988\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8996,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8988\/revisions\/8996"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8988"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8988"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fathead-movie.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8988"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}