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Sugar Industry Cover-up (1960s)

The sugar industry paid scientists to lie about what was making you sick.

In the 1960s, the Sugar Research Foundation — a trade group for the sugar industry — quietly funded research at Harvard University designed to downplay the link between sugar and heart disease. Instead, the funded studies pointed the finger at dietary fat. The researchers were paid the equivalent of about $50,000 in today's money, and the resulting papers, published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, shaped nutritional science for decades. The funding was not disclosed.

This wasn't uncovered until 2016, when a researcher at UC San Francisco found the internal documents and published the findings in JAMA Internal Medicine. The papers showed that the sugar industry had handpicked the studies to review, guided the conclusions, and reviewed drafts before publication. The Harvard scientists involved went on to influential careers — one became head of nutrition at the USDA, where he helped write federal dietary guidelines that told Americans to eat less fat and said little about sugar.

The consequences rippled for generations. Low-fat, high-sugar products flooded supermarkets. Obesity and diabetes rates climbed. Millions of people followed dietary advice that was, from the start, shaped by the industry it should have been scrutinising.

When you read a study, the first question isn't "what did they find?" It's "who paid for it?"

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