Sugar's sick secrets: How industry forces have manipulated science to downplay the harm

[rangerrebew]

 January 11, 2019
Sugar's sick secrets: How industry forces have manipulated science to downplay the harm

by Anne Kavanagh, University of California
On average, Americans eat about 17 teaspoons of added sugars every day. That adds up to a whopping 57 pounds a year. Credit: UCSF

Walk into any grocery store, grab a few packaged products, and flip to the ingredients. You'll likely spot added sugars — lots of them — provided you can discern their dizzying array of names: sucrose, dextrose, barley malt, agave nectar, high-fructose corn syrup, treacle, to list just a few.

Why is our food saturated with all these sweeteners? When did they make their way into our yogurt, cereal, and oatmeal? How did they sneak into our salad dressing, soup, bread, lunch meat, pasta sauce, and pretzels?

https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-01-sugar-sick-secrets-industry-science.html

[Sanguine]

One of her studies, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, showed that the Sugar Research Foundation, which later become the Sugar Association, recognized as early as 1954 that if Americans adopted low-fat diets, then per-capita consumption of sucrose would increase by more than one-third.

By the mid-1960s, however, researchers had begun wondering whether sugar might be related to heart disease. The Sugar Research Foundation paid three Harvard scientists today's equivalent of $50,000 to review the existing research on sugar, fat, and heart disease. Their analysis, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), minimized the link between sugar and heart health and promoted fat as the culprit instead.

"It was clearly a biased evaluation," says Kearns, who spent a year analyzing the communications between the industry and the researchers, as well as the studies included in the review. "The literature review helped shape not only public opinion on what causes heart problems but also the scientific community's view of how to evaluate dietary risk factors for heart disease," she says.

These tactics contributed to the low-fat craze, which began in the early 1970s and paralleled a rise in obesity, according to Kearns and Schmidt. Many health experts encouraged Americans to reduce their fat intake, which led people to eat foods low in fat but loaded with sugar (think SnackWell's cookies). The trend is an example of "how industry has deeply penetrated science in order to distort the facts about what's good for our health," says Schmidt, a co-author of the JAMA paper.

Interesting.