On area college campuses, ambitious researchers are digging in once again to advance what we know. They manufacture knowledge that can influence how we live, work, play and, yes, eat.
Most often, that’s positive. But a recent article in the publication JAMA Internal Medicine lays bare a dark chapter in academic research involving one of the world’s greatest universities, a calculating CEO and a product found in every kitchen.
Today, it is established that overconsumption of sugar can lead to obesity, Type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease.
But at one point, a hidden cabal of sugar industry representatives and researchers at Harvard University worked to obscure this relationship. Their plot played out in the “Mad Men” era, two decades before universities and medical journals adopted rules requiring researchers to disclose their funding sources.
The sugar industry’s disinformation campaign mirrors efforts by tobacco companies to play the American public for fools, risking their health for the sake of profit. While this month’s revelation in the medical journal may seem an obscure footnote, it is a reminder that the pursuit of knowledge must not be corrupted by special-interest funding. Robust government investment in scientific research is the best way to ensure that.
Otherwise, industry-backed research mixes with genuine efforts – muddying the waters. Efforts to get researchers to toe a company line continue. The Associated Press reported this spring that candymakers funded research designed to show that children who eat candy pack on fewer pounds than peers who do not. And the New York Times revealed last year that Coca-Cola invested millions to counter research findings linking soda to obesity.
It was back in 1964 that John Hickson, a sugar industry executive, started talking about ways to shift the blame for heart disease from sugar to saturated fats. According to correspondence unearthed in a variety of archives, including at Harvard, Hickson told industry cronies it was time to fight back through “our research and information and legislative programs.”
“Our research” meant a supposedly independent inquiry at a top university that was, we now know, bought and paid for. Hickson doled out the equivalent of $49,000 in today’s dollars to the Harvard researchers. Their assignment was to review research papers that were starting to appear about the relationship between high-sugar diets and heart disease.
Hickson handpicked the anti-sugar articles he wanted to refute and made it clear to Harvard researchers their job was to shine up sugar’s image. “We are well aware of your particular interest,” one of the hired researchers, D. Mark Hegsted, wrote to Hickson, “and will cover this as well as we can.” Hegsted went on to lead the nutrition unit at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. But in the late 1960s, the Harvard team was in the pocket of the sugar industry, willing to sell its good name with scant regard for the truth.
The team shared findings and drafts with Hickson along the way, getting his blessing. In the 1967 journal article the researchers produced, they downplayed findings on sugar’s adverse health impact on cardiovascular health and said, in effect, that people should instead worry about saturated fat.
“Let me assure you this is quite what we had in mind,” Hickson wrote after reading a draft, “and we look forward to its appearance in print.”
Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the authors of the new journal article, says the sugar exec’s strategy appeared to work. He told the New York Times that discussion of sugar’s connection to cardiovascular problems died down after the Harvard team’s article appeared in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.
The current head of Harvard’s School of Public Health told the Times that researchers have since come to different conclusions about sugar consumption and health, saying, “Given the data that we have today, we have shown the refined carbohydrates and especially sugar-sweetened beverages are risk factors for cardiovascular disease ….”
An American Heart Association study in 2014, also published in JAMA Internal Medicine, said that people who get 17 to 21 percent of their calories from added sugar face a 38 percent higher risk of dying of cardiovascular disease.
That’s the data talking, finally, not the dollars.