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Sugar Industry Bought Off Scientists, Skewed Dietary Guidelines For Decades (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Back in the 1960s, a sugar industry executive wrote fat checks to a group of Harvard researchers so that they'd downplay the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal -- and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine. One of those Harvard researchers went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where he set the stage for the federal government's current dietary guidelines. All in all, the corrupted researchers and skewed scientific literature successfully helped draw attention away from the health risks of sweets and shift the blame to solely to fats -- for nearly five decades. The low-fat, high-sugar diets that health experts subsequently encouraged are now seen as a main driver of the current obesity epidemic. The bitter revelations come from archived documents from the Sugar Research Foundation (now the Sugar Association), dug up by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco. Their dive into the old, sour affair highlights both the perils of trusting industry-sponsored research to inform policy and the importance of requiring scientists to disclose conflicts of interest -- something that didn't become the norm until years later. Perhaps most strikingly, it spotlights the concerning power of the sugar industry. In a statement also issued today, the Sugar Association acknowledged that it "should have exercised greater transparency in all of its research activities." However, the trade-group went on to question the UCSF researchers' motives in digging up the issue and reframing the past events to "conveniently align with the currently trending anti-sugar narrative." The association also chastised the journal for publishing the historical analysis, which it implied was insignificant and sensationalist. "Most concerning is the growing use of headline-baiting articles to trump quality scientific research -- we're disappointed to see a journal of JAMA's stature being drawn into this trend," the association wrote. But scientists disagree with that take. In an accompanying editorial, nutrition professor Marion Nestle of New York University argued that "this 50-year-old incident may seem like ancient history, but it is quite relevant, not least because it answers some questions germane to our current era."
This is how the system works. Now it's up to us to break it.
[company] or [industry] will liberally shower money on schools, politicians and scientists so they can spread the word of how wonderful their [thing] is.
Break it. Break the goddamned system.
Demand to know where the money for "studies" come from. Then act accordingly.
Demand campaign reform that actually has fangs to bite with.
Does it incense me that Big Sugar has been doing this? Nah. I'm not surprised in the least. This is exactly how America operates. Oh and don't get me started on the corn people, with their HFCS in our drinks and ethanol poisoning our gasoline!
What I am incensed about is the absolute reluctance to question things. The People simply accept what is told to them in schools, churches and media. Ask. Fucking. Why. Every time.
Or, you know, keep doing the same idiotic thing we've been doing for the past 200+ years. It works sooooooo well.. for the rich.
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
So, you're trying to tell me that scientists are mere mortals, with human tendencies like the rest of us? That they are not divinely inspired conduits of the Truth, who can solely interpret the cryptic texts of the Journals de Academe?
There are two major things ruining science. First, scientists are revered like priests, and the laypeople do not feel worthy to question them, even though at the end of the day it all boils down to logic and math. Laypeople even beat each other up for speaking out without the proper credentials. Are you less likely to be right about a study if you're a layperson? Of course. But this is still an important check on the system. Second, every clown PhD and pre-PhD who is avoiding the real world needs to publish publish publish in order to advance. This leads to ever more silly and esoteric journals full of silly and esoteric studies that nobody reads and very few can be bothered to try to replicate. And of course you get no credit for replicating a study, because credit = being published. So replication, another important check on the system, is diminished. And within the mainstream subjects, you have ever more pressure to come up with a new result, because there are many more PhDs looking to publish and only so many will. Scientific results, which were already susceptible to human biases, are victim to marketing spin and selective publishing. If nobody will ever try to replicate your results, who cares anyway. And if it's advancing interest in your field, which I'm sure you care about for at least some make-the-world-better reasons, then it's quite easy to convince yourself you're doing a neutral or positive thing.
The scientific method is solid. We just don't follow it anymore. And the #ifuckinglovescience crowd isn't helping.
Except that tobacco companies spent years not only funding bullshit research to minimize the effects of first hand and second hand tobacco smoke, but had other scientists sorting out ways to make it even more addictive, not to mention marketing to teenagers.
But I get it, we should never hold commercial interests responsible for the vile and immoral things they do. That's what ordinary people are for, the little people that make rich industrialists even richer by consuming their products, whether they die or fuck up the environment in the process.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
The whole point of the pseudo skeptic movements, whether they been anti-AGW, tobacco company "research", sugar industry "research" and the like isn't really to convince people that their dangerous products are safe, but rather to create just enough doubt so that people will continue their existing habits. It doesn't have to convince people the legitimate researchers are out and out wrong, it just has to create enough uncertainty to prevent people from wholesale change.
Every year the sugar industry is pushing far more sugar into Westerners' digestive tracts than is safe, and every year the oil industry can stave off carbon pricing and other anti-fossil fuel initiatives, is another year of profits. Both industries know much as the tobacco industry must have known, that the reckoning will come, but so long as investors can make a return, and senior management can reap the bonuses, the tactic continues.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Are you saying their lying? You are aware that the sugar industry's tactics are fairly well known, and that research also shows the amount of sugar showing up even in foods not known for being overly sweet, like bread, has been rising for years.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If you have some alternative explanation for where the additional energy being absorbed by higher CO2 concentrations is going, be my guest and provide it. Go on, I openly challenge you to show where the massive heat sink dumping the additional solar radiation being absorbed in the lower atmosphere is.
CO2's properties have been known for over a century. There is absolutely nothing controversial about AGW.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This goes back a lot further than that, long before there was ever a sugar industry to begin with. It's not just in things we make, sugar in all of its forms isn't exactly healthy, and the thing is, we've been selectively breeding our food (especially fruit) to be higher in sugar content for several millennia. I personally can't think of any food in its natural form that's as sugary as we've made it. (Also, for this same reason, the whole frutarian movement is a big fat joke based on something that I wouldn't even like to call junk science because it's not science at all.) Sugar is in more than that too. Honey, milk, rice...
The fact is, sugar is addictive, and that's why we like it. But what it does to your body is actually quite similar to the effects of alcohol (Chiefly because of fructose though, and btw, HFCS is no better or worse than sucrose -- they're essentially the same damn thing, and people who attack HFCS while treating other sugars as benign are idiots.) Alcohol also being addictive, which is why we like it, but few people actually like the taste of alcohol.
I grew up in the 80's, and I remember quite clearly the anti-smoking ads on TV, newspapers, radio, billboards...everywhere. And then there was DARE (drug focused, but also covered cigarettes) and plenty of education in schools about just what exactly smoking does to you. From what I understand, the 70's wasn't much different. And yet in spite of that, in spite of the constant education being thrown at you, I still knew people who started smoking anyways. Why? Because in spite of their education, they just didn't give a fuck. Hell, one of my cousins and I used to talk about how dumb it was, but then he started smoking because "it's something to do when you're with your friends"...uh...WHAT?
If you're younger than 40 and you smoke...well...you're just a bonehead. In spite of all of the social justice nonsense about trying to push the blame for people's problems on to some rich dude, corporations, the government, etc, there's a reality that many find inconvenient, but they know it anyways: Some people are dumber than others. The constitution might say that we're all equal, and by the letter of the law that may very well be the case, but biologically it just aint so.
Global warming denial is a bit like creationist science. Nobody outside the US really takes it serious.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Would you care to list any carnivores which have more than four canines?
They are playing both sides of the field, it just depends on which politicians/agency you are talking about. The Federal government makes more per gallon of gas that anyone in the oil industry in terms of taxes, fees and royalties. They also dump huge sums of money into research for climate and have been agitating for some time to be able to tax us on our carbon use to gain even more control over us.
Corruption at its finest.
Sorry, but I honestly can't think of any sensible way how meat would occur as naturally cooked, at least not in quantities that would provide sustenance to a relevant amount of people for a long enough time that an evolutionary process could occur.
Big fail on understanding how evolution works. Something doesn't have to occur "naturally" to create an evolutionary pressure. Diseases, parasites, technologies, climate, predation, food sources, genetic mutation, selective breeding, politics, war, and much more can all create evolutionary pressures. Some of these are "natural" and others not so much. Evolutionary pressures do not have to occur by random chance. The dogs in my living room are there because of selective breeding by another species (us). Had nothing to do with any "natural" randomly occurring process out in the wild.
One of the reasons why a "Paleo-Diet" works, it takes your body a lot more investment of energy to digest uncooked food, hence you lose weight despite eating "the same" food.
The paelo-diet is another in a long line of diet fads popularized and marketed on cherry picked and often incorrect or unsupported ideas about health and nutrition. It was not developed based on scientific methodologies but instead some half baked ideas poorly supported by actual evidence at the time it was popularized starting around 2002. It draws on an appeal to nature and various conspiracy theories regarding the food industry. It's based on the notion that by eating what our ancient ancestors ate that we will be healthier. (Never mind the fact that the actual foods our ancestors ate are no longer available to us) When it works it has little to do with requiring a greater "investment of energy to digest uncooked food". That's a very convenient (but wrong) sound bite explanation for something which is FAR more complicated in reality.