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Sugar Industry Shaped NIH Agenda On Dental Research
sciencehabit writes: The sugar industry convinced the U.S. National Institutes of Health that studies that might persuade people to cut back on sugary foods should not be part of a national plan to fight childhood tooth decay, a new study of historical documents argues. The authors say the industry's activities, which occurred more than 40 years ago, are reminiscent of the tobacco companies' efforts to minimize the risks of smoking.
We should be OUTRAGED!
What is also outrageous is the unwritten assumption that the general public didn't know sugar contributed to tooth decay. Like it was some big secret and the world had no idea. Or the notion that sugar consumption would not continue regardless.
Meanwhile, those evil sugar companies were doing stuff like this;
For example, sugar and food companies funded research on a vaccine to prevent tooth decay, and on adding an enzyme to foods to break up dental plaque. (A 1968 newspaper article headlined: “These monkeys may save your teeth” described a monkey lab that was studying the idea of mixing the enzyme with raw sugar.)
Yeah, except, uh, brushing your teeth won't prevent lung cancer.
There is a sugar/cancer tie in though. The insulin spike from sugar consumption promotes tumor growth. Not that the sugar itself is carcinogenic, but the subsequent insulin flooding exacerbates the cancer. I've known people with advanced cancer whose doctors told them this, they wen't completely off carbs and tumor growth slowed significantly.
Peace is easy to achieve, just surrender. Liberty is much harder get/keep.
Although some sugars are worse than others (e.g,. hard candy which sticks to your teeth), just about any carbohydrate you might eat will contribute to plaque (including fruit, vegetables and even whole grains) and indirectly to increased susceptibility to dental caries (how hard your dental enamel is and how acidic your diet is are other contributing factors)...
You can vilify "refined" sugar and HFCS industries all you want, but equivalent sweetness of organic molasses or maple syrup are probably worse when it comes to plaque contribution to dental caries...
FWIW, the existing types of studies that target limiting sugar are not correlation studies, basically they are ecological survey studies on population statistics by estimating their sugar intake vs prevalence of cavities at certain points of time. The author was suggesting specific studies that try to address correlation between certain foods and cavities were being suppressed by the sugar industry.
But back in that time frame of the 60's and 70's people were looking for a vaccine for plaque so interest in such studies may have simply dissipated w/o needing a big conspiracy. This is probably due into a large part of seminal studies on dental caries (in the late part of the 19th century by Miller) that established the link between enamel decay and acids produced by plaque bacteria fed by potato starches (not sugar because it wasn't a wide part of the diet) and later studies in the 1940/50's (by Gustafsson) seemed to indicate the frequency of use of sugars (rather than the quantity of sugars consumed). By the 1960's/70's there were already studies (like Duggal) that implicated snacks like cakes and biscuits (that combined glutinous starch with sugar) which were consumed at higher frequency (more than 3 times per day or basically outside of mealtime) had serious "cariogenic" potential.
Unsurprisingly, this research wasn't suppressed, but basically ignored by the government panels. Sadly, back in the '70's, it was much easier to pay off people to simply ignore research, than to actually suppress the funding to start research (not knowing the outcome).
On the other hand, some of the unrepeatable history of dental research sponsored by the sugar industry, such as the one in Vipeholm, Sweden already yielded habits like lördagsgodis. I'm sure the sugar-industrial complex in the US would love for something like that to pop up in the US (and not just restricted to Halloween)...
As phrased it sounds like it wasn't the studies themselves that were discouraged, but their inclusion in national dental policies. Much easier that way - none of those pesky truth-seeking researchers involved at that level. It would hardly be the first time - just look at what the meat and grain lobbies did to the dietary recommendations in the food pyramid - very little grounding in what the research actually recommended there.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.