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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the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal -- and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.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."
The sugar industry and food manufacturers have been essentially doping our food with sugar. They put sugar in damned near everything. The only real way to avoid it is to stay far away from processed foods.
I don't disagree with the notion of personal responsibility, but like smoking, when corporate interests put their profits ahead of human wellbeing, and then compound their sins by actively subverting public health and legislative solutions to keep the cash flowing in, I think the penalties should be massive. Quite frankly, in a properly functioning world, there wouldn't be a tobacco company left in the Western world, and their boards, senior management and their researchers would be rotting in jail cells.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
How do you explain the fact that Michael Mann's methodology generates a hockey stick even when applied to completely random data? It sure seems like those results are highly misleading, at best. Or will you trot out some lame excuses to try to justify these blatant problems and insult me like you do to everyone else?
I've been wondering if Capitalism is fatally flawed. We've seen reckless, foolish greed destroy lives time and time again. It seems capitalism elevates psychopathic individuals to positions of great power and responsibility. Of course people of that sort abuse their power. Strip resources from everything within reach, leaving behind waste and destruction.
We moved from monarchy to democracy because the former just doesn't work for long. Monarchy works okay until an idiot gets elevated to the kingship, solely because he's the oldest son of the previous leader, and not because he has any qualifications whatsoever. It's a horrible way to choose leaders. Even when a talented, vigorous, enlightened king comes to the throne, he's still just one man. If a monarchy has instilled passivity in the people, only the monarch himself can inspire action. These days, nations are far too large for that to work well no matter how talented the monarch is. Our nation is a democracy, yet many of our private corporations operate as feudal domains. And it shows in these incredibly short-sighted, anti-social moves they make.
What Big Sugar has done is bad, but it's just another greedy corporate action that we, with our low expectations of corporate behavior, hardly notice. The one that will change that blase attitude is Big Oil, when all our coasts drown.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
No.
There's a lot of fructose that can only be broken down in the liver in it. While vast amounts of either sugar is bad for you HFCS is a bit worse.
In small doses the difference is ignorable but people eating shitloads of HFCS for their body size are getting a variety of extra health problems on top.
It really isn't.
Once you've made it to being a basically healthy adult, you can live off water, carbs, and a bit of protein for a long time with no adverse effects. The first thing to happen would be scurvy. You don't need to actively balance your diet unless you're doing something retarded like trying to be vegan.
Don't blame the scientists for Al Gore dumbing things down and "jazzing" things up in response to some Republicans spouting PR bullshit they were paid to say.
Some of the prominent creationists here are from Australia. There are also some prominent creationists in Turkey that have adapted fundamentalist Christian creationism for Islam. The anti-vaxx movement in Australia has also been bad in the past, not sure about now. Culturally perhaps the US and Australia tolerant dissent more than some others? Maybe there's a sociology thesis paper in there somewhere...