The Biggest Con Job by the Food Industry

 *Excerpts from my book Reversing Time: My Journey to a Younger Self

By the 1960s, increasing evidence was linking dietary sugar to the rise in heart disease. For food companies depending on sugar, this posed an existential threat. Therefore, they did what powerful industries often do when feeling threatened: they shifted the narrative, making fat the villain. In 2016, JAMA Internal Medicine published a landmark exposé revealing that the Sugar Research Foundation secretly funded Harvard scientists in the 1960s to downplay the dangers of sugar and shift blame to fat. The scientists, among the most respected public health experts of their time, were paid about $50,000 in today’s money to write a series of articles claiming saturated fat was the true culprit behind heart disease. Their papers appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine, the most prestigious of medical journals.

Kearns CE, Schmidt LA, Glantz SA. Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents. JAMA Intern Med. 2016 Nov 1;176(11):1680-1685