Slashdot Mirror
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the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal -- and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.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."
Fortunately for us, this does not seem to be happening in other industries. /s
Ezekiel 23:20
What with the push by the FDA not to eat bacon and eggs in favor of vegetable oils and the creation of millions of diabetics by overloading their systems with sugar it is surprising any of us still live. We were made to eat meat, that is the bottom line.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I remember a decade and a half ago there were scandals where false Global Warming data had been spread around. It took me a long time to trust future evidence because I saw it as a partisan battle, rather than legitimate science. This sort of thing is always bad for everyone involved. Obviously they had 50 years of good profits, so they may disagree. My point is simply that any level of deceit in science can totally scare people away from a subject entirely, and even oppose the idea in the future, whether valid or not.
So what is the statute of limitations on mass murder as a result of fraudulent practice. Have proof, let's see the convictions, let's demand the convictions (victims in the millions, seriously).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
High fructose corn syrup even worse. And it's not just fructose and glucose.
That 42/58 and 55/45 is a bulk culinary description, the truth is there is about 3-5 percent saccharide polymers plus leftover reagents (which until very recently even included mercury)
Food for thought: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Read this story and think for a moment about all the "GMOs are perfectly safe" studies. You don't think it's possible some of the wealthiest, most powerful corporations in the world might have a hand in that?
Just follow the money.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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 about the CEOs of the companies that pay the scientists and buy off the politicians? How about the major institutional investors and boards that put pressure on senior management to maximize profits regardless of every other consideration?
The scientists and politicians are like concentration camp prison guards. Yes, they ought to be criminally culpable, but the real masterminds have MBAs and law and accounting degrees.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
If you haven't seen them, you should go watch the documentary films King Corn and Food, Inc. King Corn in particular goes into detail about the transition in the US from a diet with lots of fat and lower levels of sugar into one where eating fat is evil and will send you to hell and not eating sugar is evil and will send you to hell.
Food, Inc is more general but it shows clearly why food production in the US is so screwed up.
This would be a good time to go after Kellogg, General Mills, Wonder Bread, and all the other purveyors of starchy foods that begin to turn to sugar the moment they touch your tongue. Yes, extreme athletes, insomniacs and a few others will turn these carbohydrates into energy and muscle, while the rest of us turn carbs into fat.
The promoters start with the children and insidious advertisements for sugary cereals and high carb snacks. Children often don't immediately show the bad effects of excess carbohydrates. Once the children are hooked, they will remain so for the duration of their short lives. They can expect obesity, diabetes, dementia, other diseases, and a short lifespan.
This huge industry knows that, as well as the governments of the world, but lobbyists have suppressed and cast doubts on scientific proofs. How many millions of deaths are the result of this corporate greed? Remember that a corporation has only one mandate- to provide profits for the shareholders.
I'm one of those addicts. As I sit thinking how good a potato chip might be, or a tortilla chip; I settle for peanuts and the lesser satisfaction they give. It's 9PM and I avoid beer in favor of vodka with lemon water (no sugar). My diabetes is somewhat controlled, but when will I ever have a Ben & Jerry's ice cream again? I'm not happy about it because I grew up watching millions of advertisements promoting carbohydrates (and saying fat is bad). Turns out that's 100% backwards.
...omphaloskepsis often...
We all remember the incredibly eye-opening lecture named "Sugar: the bitter truth" from almost a decade ago. Robert Lustig, the presenter, is an Emeritus Professor at surprise surprise UCSF!
The Sugar Association is full of it when blaming the researchers of bias.
Eating processed food isn't as much the problem as eating food that has been turned into little more than a flavored slurry that was then remodeled into something palpable. It's the OVERprocessing that should be avoided. Eating bread with some ham on top is ok. Eating something that looks like bread with a texture of potatoe chips that tastes like meat is not.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... 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."
Not sure I can take her seriously...
And he studies nutrition and writes about sugar containing sweets and chocolates ?
This, dear friends, is the theory of nominative inevitability at work.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
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.
You are postulating that we knew how to cook food before our brain developed
We developed fire as a technology, used it for cooking and it has been a key factor in the CONTINUED growth of our brain. You misunderstand the argument completely. Modern humans look quite different than humans from around the time we started cooking food. Our brains had already evolved to the point we could figure out how to utilize fire. Cooking food created evolutionary pressures which accelerated certain aspects of our development as a species.
It wasn't that we started cooking food and BAM our brains suddenly developed any more than we developed antibiotics and our brains suddenly improved. The evolutionary effects took place over long periods of time. Nor was it the case that we developed our current big brains and only then learned how to cook food. Fire was a technology we learned to harness and it's evolutionary pressures have revealed themselves over millennia.
The way to fix this is to make importing sugar easier. Poor Caribbean farmers get more money, consumers get cheaper goods, the sugar lobby goes away. Everybody wins!
Unless you mean "falsified" instead of "verified."
You don't know what that means. I mean "falsified". Google: "Scientific method".
Even the IPCC now admits that the Hockey Stick was bogus.
No. Categorically no. They have not. The most recent research on the hockey stick of any notability is Marcott et al in 2013, using an even broader data set and again, just like every other time, the hockey stick is still there.
Well I'll be sure to tell my collegues at work they can bin their PhDs because random internet guy just owned them! I'm sure when they stop laughing they'll be sure to revise a century and a half of physics because internet.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
The blame for low-fat dietary recommendations pretty much exclusively fall on government: no matter how much the sugar industry paid for scientific spin, there has never been any objective evidence that sugar is harmless or that low-fat diets work. In fact, the government "bought off" scientists to push a low-fat agenda just as much as the sugar industry, selectively funding studies and preferring results that supported existing government dietary guidelines. To add injury to insult, not only has the US government pushed bad dietary guidelines, it has also manipulated the US sugar market to keep prices high, protect US sugar producers, and position HFCS as a common sweetener.
The US government should simply not get involved in even suggesting to people what they should eat, let alone fixing or manipulating prices for foods. Yes, government can, in principle, some good when it gets nutrituional information right, but the risk of getting it wrong is simply too high. And these manipulations and scientific errors have persisted for decades, through every Congress and administration.
And lest you think this doesn't matter much, millions of Americans died horrible deaths unnecessarily because of bad government dietary guidelines, which don't exhaust themselves in bad recommendations, but influence labeling and the kinds of foods both kids and adults are fed in institutional settings.
HFCS used in sodas is a 55% fructose + 42% glucose mix.
I.e. 55 parts of "fat making sugar" and 42 parts of "blood sugar level" sugar.
Brain only understands glucose and will keep demanding more until the desired glucose level is reached.
Sucrose is 50-50.
Thus, for every two units of sugar you ingest, trying to satisfy your brain's desire for glucose with sucrose you get something like this:
[F][F][F][F][F]-[F][F][F][F][F]
[G][G][G][G][G]-[G][G][G][G][G]
10 units of fructose + 10 units of glucose.
With HFCS (55-42), for every two units of HFCS you're getting this:
[F][F][F][F][F]-[F][F][F][F][F]
[G][G][G][G]-[G][G][G][G]
20% less glucose, i.e. 20% lower blood sugar level, i.e. your brain will ask for at least 20% MORE of that sugary drink before reaching its desired blood sugar level.
Getting even more fructose along with it.
Looking at those same numbers from a BSL angle, taking that desired BSL as some individual 100% glucose level...
For 100% glucose satiety (i.e. reaching BSL desired by your brain) by ingesting HFCS, with your glucose you must also ingest 130.9% of fructose you'd be ingesting with sucrose.
I.e. HFCS makes you ingest 30% more fructose, which goes directly into triglycerides as by that time you already have plenty of glycogen.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
With HFCS (55-42), for every two units of HFCS you're getting this:
[F][F][F][F][F]-[F][F][F][F][F]-[F]
[G][G][G][G]-[G][G][G][G]
So it's 26% less glucose, i.e. 26% lower blood sugar level etc. etc.
Serves me right for copy/pasting my old posts while being late for something else.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The problem for the food industry is that you have to keep slowly increasing the amount of sugar. If your competitor makes things slightly sweeter than you, then they taste a lot nicer to someone who is used to your product so you have to add more sugar to retain your customers. The downside of this (from the food maker's perspective) is that someone who is not accustomed to that level of sugar finds it disgusting. I haven't been able to eat mass produced cakes for a few years, because I only ever ate them occasionally and they're now so sweet that I find they taste horrible. In the last year, I've heard more people complaining about the same thing. Unless children grow up eating them, they'll find it hard to start in later life.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It is sugar + PUFAs
They have also been protecting the vegetable oil industry - concentrated vegetable oils are not human food. Around 1960 they started selling veg oils to replace lard - it was also around that time that Americans started getting fat. We now know that eating PUFAs messes with the insulin system ( main source is LA linoleic acid ).
It will be 10 years or more before the public becomes aware - people warned about sugar in the 1960's were ignored. only 50 years later is it common knowledge.
https://wiki.xtronics.com/inde...
The usual mantra is that PUFAs are good for you as they reduce cholesterol levels - but if we look at all cause mortality - this falls apart. PUFAs reduce cholesterol by making people ever fatter.
They use Windows.
It's cause most of the soft beverages served in restaurants are mixed at the spot - and those formulas use HFCS 65.
http://goranlab.com/pdf/Ventur...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens