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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the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal -- and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.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."

5 of 527 comments (clear)

  1. Let the blacks eat cake by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    We could solve a lot of problems if we let the blacks eat cake. And I mean extremely sugary cake that tastes really good. If we ensure that the blacks are well fed, perhaps they'll stop their rampant violent crime. Meanwhile, we'll make the black population increasingly fat, which will make it harder for them to run from the police after committing violent crimes. The long term impact is increased disease among blacks, which should reduce the population and bring about a sustainable reduction in the vast amount of violent crime committed by blacks.

  2. Re: Shocking! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    And the liberals have spent decades funding bogus research to claim that humans are causing the Earth to warm from our emissions. These claims have been repeatedly debunked from all angles, yet the liberals continued to trot out their pseudoscience and ignore the massive weight of facts saying that human activity has virtually no impact on global average temperatures. Will you finally embrace the scientific fact that humans aren't causing global warming, or two you simply become unreasonably angry as you usually do when confronted by cold hard facts?

  3. Re: Shocking! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    I support the use of a sterilizing gene, provided it's introduced to the blacks.

  4. Re: Shocking! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    Creation is right wing pseudoscience. Global warming is left wing pseudoscience. It's also a fact that the same genes regulating skin color also control aggressiveness and intelligence. Both sides like to deny these facts, proven by genetics research.

  5. What other "science" was bought? by blindseer · · Score: -1, Troll

    It seems that in time the truth does come out. That buying cherry picked scientific data will lead to a result that carries a patina of science when it is not.

    Living in an area full of corn fields, windmills, and ethanol plants I hear a lot of "science" about global warming. Why would these industries not try to skew scientific results to make sure their government subsidies come in?

    Am I saying that global warming is a hoax? No. Am I saying that "big wind" and "big corn" have been buying global warming data? No. What I am saying is that since we've been seeing government funded research into global warming, and a lot of political contributions and lobbying from industries like wind, corn, ethanol, electric cars, natural gas fracking, and so forth I am thinking that it is possible that global warming is in fact a hoax.

    What also leads me to believe that it is possible that global warming is a hoax is the little investment in nuclear power. We have new reactors that cannot blow their top like Fukushima, Three Mile Island, or Chernobyl because they don't have cooling water that can overheat and boil explosively. These new reactors have liquid fuel that cannot melt down because it is already molten. If it gets too hot then it expands to reduce the fission rate. If it gets hotter still then it can be drained in to a cooling tank, where fission stops and passive air cooling kicks in.

    If the goal was to reduce carbon output then the best way to do so is with nuclear power. Since nuclear power is stagnant here then I must assume that global warming is not a problem. If nuclear power was a problem then we'd have shut them all down by now. So nuclear power is merely allowed to exist because it is not a problem. It's not a solution because the problem isn't global warming, the problem is that people need to get paid government money, or something. It's hard to explain but it is there. A lot of people spending money to prove a "problem" exists so that more money can be spent to keep these wealthy people employed in doing something that looks like it might solve the "problem" that they didn't create in reality but in the "science". It is either a lie or an exaggeration.

    The government isn't there to solve a problem, but to manage it. If the problem went away then a lot of government people would be out of a job. I expect the global warming lie to be exposed like the sugar lie. It will take decades until the data is hard to ignore. After that I expect a new nuclear renaissance. It's been over 40 years since we've stopped expanding the US nuclear power fleet. For it to replace fossil fuels we must built nuclear power at the same rate as those fossil fuels. That means something like a one new gigawatt nuclear power plant built somewhere in the world every week. Since the USA consume about 1/4th of that then a new nuclear power plant somewhere in the USA every month. Anything less and we continue to live the lie of global warming hoax or that global warming is real and we are lying to ourselves that we are doing something about it.

    --
    I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.