The Sugar Industry Hid The Effects Of Sugar On The Body For 50 Years!

Most doctors will tell their patients to not over consume sugar. The substance has been known to not exactly be a health food, but the sugar industry hid just how bad it actually was for people for 50 years!

A combination of flawed studies, political bias, hidden data, and clever marketing by the food industry led to the demonization of dietary fat and the birth of the low-fat craze – a trend that has lasted decades.

Sugar has detrimental effects on our health, and not just because sweet foods tend to have a lot of calories. Plenty of research has shown that the same calories of sugar versus other foods do very different things to our bodies. And new research shows how the sugar industry has tried to hide those findings.

Over the last fifty or so years, the conventional wisdom has been that dietary fat is the main contributor to heart disease. These assumptions are finally being challenged. It’s not as if the cholesterol you eat from eggs or a steak zips from your stomach into your arteries. And research in the last decade has started solidifying the link between sugar consumption and heart disease.

In the 1960s, scientists researching the causes of heart disease were eyeing sugar as a culprit, and according to a new paper, sugar industry-funded research obscured and buried that connection. One of the researchers behind the new study, Stanton Glantz of the University of California, San Francisco, told NPR, “What the sugar industry successively did is they shifted all of the blame onto fats.”

Glantz and his collaborators’ research, published in the journal PLOS Biology, looks at how the Sugar Research Foundation, tied to the American sugar trade association, funded its own research into the detrimental health effects of sugar, but pulled funding just before the research could be completed and published, because things were not looking good.

In 1967, the Sugar Research Foundation secretly funded a review article that discounted research that was pointing to a link between sugar consumption and heart disease. That article was published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Then, the SRF embarked on its own study, using rats to compare the health effects of consuming sucrose (sugar) versus starch or a rat’s normal diet. –Life Hacker

Glantz’s study is part of its own growing body of research, too—one that shows how industry-funded science tends to find results that benefit the industry (and that research that would harm the industry is often aborted or left unpublished), whether it’s cigarettes, pharmaceuticals and vaccines, or climate change.