Sugar lobby paid scientists to blur sugar's role in heart disease (2016)

When I first visited the US about 30 years ago, I was often surprised about how different things like burgers or pizza tasted from here in Europe. It was like eating candy all the time. These days even over here there&#x27;s sugar in almost everything you can buy.<p>Side note, not related directly: I was also surprised how in some of those &#x27;health&#x27; image supermarkets, the fruits like strawberries looked so perfect, but just had no flavor and tasted just watery. Back here fruits often didn&#x27;t look so &#x27;television commercial quality&#x27;, but exploded with flavors. Again, these days even here you have to go out of your way to find e.g. a decent tomato or grow your own.

Anyone remember Susan Powder in the 90s screaming about how fat was making you fat? Go checkout the documentary Fed Up, it discusses the massive shift to low-fat-high-sugar foods being the norm in our grocery stores.<p>And we wonder why we have such massive preventable disease problems in the US. (and we are exporting obesity and diabetes around the world now)<p>Next time you are at the store, check your labels. Almost everything has sugar in it. There are a dozen names for white sugar now, so check them out.

&gt; Influential research that downplayed the role of sugar in heart disease in the 1960s was paid for by the sugar industry, according to a report released on Monday. With backing from a sugar lobby, scientists promoted dietary fat as the cause of coronary heart disease instead of sugar, according to a historical document review published in JAMA Internal Medicine.<p>Is this article implying that trans fats have been cleared of the charges against them [0]?<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Trans_fat#Coronary_artery_disease" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Trans_fat#Coronary_artery_dise...</a><p>I think naturally-saturated fats have mostly been vindicated of the charges leveled against them in the 1950&#x27;s and 1960&#x27;s, but the medical guild hasn&#x27;t updated their message.

The corruption is so bad that the sugar industry may have had a hand in writing the import&#x2F;export laws for Canada. High-fat foods like Soylent are illegal to import there.

Science in most cases represents a local maximum... the frontier of our understanding. But having a limited understanding is different from willfully presenting false information.<p>The latter is unethical and should have consequences, especially when the result is loss of life. Consequences not limited to: admitting that the information is false, loss of license, jail, etc.

“Sugar”, like “drugs”, is too general a term to use in a discussion on health. Glucose and fructose, both forms of sugar, are metabolized differently and have different health effects.

Nothing to see here ... move along please. Any industry, anywhere, anytime, that has even the slightest threat to their existence from bad news coming from scientific data being published to the mainstream will always have industry players and their respective lobbying groups making various attempts to block, downplay, twist, blur, and other manipulate the storyline. Why? It&#x27;s simple... if sugar were determined to be a &quot;sinful ingredient&quot; to the health of the masses, the sugar industry would be ruined.<p>We&#x27;ve seen it over and over again in so many industries (not the least of which is tobacco) that its almost expected and in fact, if you merely attempt to look for these kinds of player actions in any industry, you will absolutely find them.

Same report discussed in this post 2 months ago:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15759562" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=15759562</a>

There’s a good doc on Netflix called “Sugar Coated,” that compares the industry to big tobacco.

And what would that role be?

sure, sugar is BAD. but this is the meat industry&#x27;s last diversion before they get scrutinised.