For more than 50 years we’ve been sold the lie that fat, not sugar, is the greatest risk to our longevity. Amid seismic revelations that the sugar industry has had its sticky fingers in decades of scientific research, MH asks what the biggest deceit in nutritional history means for our nation’s health.
ONE MORNING IN MAY 1994, an anti-smoking campaigner named Stanton Glantz received a strange delivery. Sent by a ‘Mr Butts’ to his office at the University of California, the boxes contained 4000 pages of confidential documents that laid bare how the tobacco industry had for decades suppressed research proving cigarettes were deadly. A national scandal ensued and so-called Big Tobacco’s rep never fully recovered from the revelations of what came to be known as ‘The Cigarette Papers’.
Today, the sugar industry – Big Sugar, if you will – is having a similar moment. Cristin Kearns, a doctoral research student working out of the same university as Glantz, has spent years collating thousands of pages of documents on its dealings. The resulting ‘Sugar Papers’, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in September 2016 and reported on worldwide, expose how a powerful industry with close government connections spent years denying mounting evidence that its main product is – undeniably, inarguably – toxic to humans.
In devastating detail, the papers reveal how a trade body called the Sugar Association began, from the early 60s, to fund “research and information and legislative programs” that would encourage the public to consume more sugar. The sticking point was a 1967 review published in the New England Journal of Medicine that argued definitively that it was high cholesterol and fat – not sugar – that were putting our health at risk of everything from cardiovascular disease to stroke. Not only did the review ignore strong evidence implicating sugar as another cause, it failed to disclose who had paid for the research. In a single paper we were sold the beginnings of a deception that would influence our eating habits and line the pockets of Big Sugar for decades to come.
This story is from the March 2017 edition of Men's Health UK.
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This story is from the March 2017 edition of Men's Health UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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