Comment by rendaw
3 days ago
When this news first came out it was mind blowing, but at the same time I don't entirely get it.
So the money quote seems to be:
> The literature review heavily criticized studies linking sucrose to heart disease, while ignoring limitations of studies investigating dietary fats.
They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars).
That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar. And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?
I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
> There is now a considerable body of evidence linking added sugars to hypertension and cardiovascular disease
Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients? Edit: Or, is the truth that fat really is the most significant, and sugar plays some role but it's strictly less?
You’re exactly right: This one incident did not shape the entire body of scientific research.
There is a common trick used in contrarian argumentation where a single flaw is used to “debunk” an entire side of the debate. The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one. They don’t want you to apply the same level of rigor and introspection to the opposite side, though.
In the sugar versus saturated fat debate, this incident is used as the lure to get people to blame sugar as the root cause. There is a push to make saturated fat viewed as not only neutral, but healthy and good for you. Yet if you apply the same standards of rigor and inspection of the evidence, excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you.
There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.
I think common sense here can be a guide though. You don't need sugar at all, excluding high levels of anaerobic exercise. Your liver can produce the glucose your body actually needs from other sources (gluconeogenesis) and a lot of your tissues that use glucose also can use fatty acids or ketones. Fructose isn't needed at all. ("low blood sugar" isn't a symptom of not consuming enough sugar, it's a symptom of a disregulated metabolism -- ie insulin resistance or other conditions)
Saturated fats have all sorts of uses biologically.
I would caution that just because your body can make something doesn't mean it will have optimal performance when doing so. People in ketosis do have worse peak performance in sports than those that eat more carbs/sugar.
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That has nothing to do with whether excesses of those nutrients cause cardiovascular disease, though. The general consensus is that the healthiest diet is one with 5-10% of total calories from saturated fat. For most people, it's necessary to restrict saturated fat to land in that range. We also need to distinguish between sugar and carbohydrates. Again, the general consensus is that intake of sugar and refined carbohydrates should be minimized, while 50-75% of total calories should come from sources of complex carbohydrates like vegetables, beans, and whole grains.
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Looks like it's true that low-carb adapted athletes rely more on fat oxidation during exercise but performance suffers nonetheless because of increased oxygen demands that basically cannot be met.
Your entire argument here applies in the other direction as well. You do not need dietary saturated fats, and sugar has all sorts of uses biologically.
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> There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.
Okay but right now we're talking about science getting corrupted by money. Which did happen in this instance, so that companies could hide the damage that sugar does to people.
Sugar does damage and scientists were paid to downplay that fact. It is not the first time. This is concerning when we talk about principles and public trust.
You're right that extrapolating from one flaw to claim wholesale debunking is a common logical fallacy: https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Logic-C....
Where I'd suggest you go too far is implying that saturated fat and sugar are similarly bad. Technically you do hedge the claim with "excess", which is effectively a tautology, so the claim isn't outright false. You also don't qualify whether you mean excess in absolute terms (i.e. caloric intake) or as a proportion of macronutrients.
In practical terms, I don't consider it useful guidance based on the available evidence. As far as I can tell, there's little to no evidence that saturated fat is unhealthy (but lots of bad studies that don't prove what they claim to prove). Meanwhile, the population-wide trial of reducing saturated fat consumption over the past half-century has empirically been an abject failure. Far from improving health outcomes, the McGovern committee may well have triggered the obesity epidemic.
I think the benefits of "low fat" may have been dulled by how literally people took that message, and what companies replaced the fat with.
Most available "low fat" products compensated by adding sugar. Lots of sugar. That way it still tastes nice, but its healthy right?
Just like fruit juice with "no added sugar" (concentration via evaporation doesn't count) is a healthy alternative to soda right?
In truth your body is perfectly happy converting sugar to weight, with the bonus that it messes up the insulin cycle.
At a fundamental level consuming more calories than you burn makes you gain weight. Reducing refined sugar is the simplest way to reduce calories (and solves other health issues.) Reducing carbohydrates is next (since carbs are just sugar, but take a bit longer to digest). The more unprocessed the carb the better.
Reducing fat (for some, by a lot) is next (although reduce not eliminate. )
Both sides want to blame the other. But the current pendulum is very much on the "too much sugar/ carbs" side of things.
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> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader
This is the key part of this. It isn't even about the post or person that is being replied to, it's about the far wider audience who doesn't post but who who reads these interactions.
This clip summarizes the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuaHRN7UhRo
First time ever I get : "The uploader has not made this video available in your country"
The big problem is that "truth tellers" very often leverage media platforms to sell their unscientific and unsupported or lightly supported opinions.
It's relatively simple to ultimately buy airtime to sell a product and have the one air host fawn over it as if what's been sold is the greatest truth of our lifetime. Some of the court documents against infowars placed the price for that sort of airtime at something like $20,000.
The problem comes in that the actual experts have very little want or desire to do the same. We're lucky if we see a few "science communicators" that step up to the plate, but they very rarely end up with the funds to sell the truth.
This a big part of how the "vaccines cause autism" garbage spread. Long before it caught on like it did, Wakefield was going around to conferences and selling his books and doing public speaking events on the dangers.
That pattern is pretty apparent if you look at major fad diets over the years. Selling that "you just have to eat meat" or "You just have to eat raw" or "You just have to eat liver" can make you some big money and may even land you on opera where you can further sell your magic green coffee beans.
Medical reality is generally a lot more boring. Like you point out, CVD is likely influenced by multiple factors. Diet, alcohol intake, exercise (or lack thereof) all contributing factors.
I disagree. Demand is the big problem, not supply.
The general public possesses domain-independent expertise on social pressures, institutional and financial incentives, and other non-epistemological factors that in some cases can support a rational rejection of scientific consensus.
Inadequate gatekeeping—premature or belated consensus or revision—is a failure of a given field of inquiry, not a failure of the general public.
More here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-025-05423-7
> The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one.
See this in the constant "the MSM is imperfect, that's why I trust Joe Rogan or some random `citizen-journalist' on Twitter" nonsense. It's how everything has gotten very stupid very quickly. People note that medical science has changed course on something, therefore they should listen to some wellness influencer / grifter.
> excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you
The submitter of this entry is clearly a keto guy, and it's a bit weird because who is claiming sugar is good or even neutral for you? Like, we all know sugar is bad. It has rightly been a reasonably vilified food for decades. Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar. In the 1980s there was a foolish period where the world went low fat, largely simply because fat is more calorically dense and people were getting fat, ergo less fat = less calories. Which of course is foolish logic and people just ate two boxes of snackwells or whatever instead, but sugar was still not considered ideal.
Someone elsewhere mentioned MAHA, and that's an interesting note because in vilifying HFCS, MAHA is strangely healthwashing sucrose among the "get my info from wellness influencers" crowd. Suddenly that softdrink is "healthy" because of the "all natural sugar".
The 80’s anti fat diet was mostly clogged arteries before we had all these anti cholesterol drugs and research showing how little impact dietary cholesterol has.
US obesity simply wasn’t as common (15% in 1985 vs 40% today) and at the time most research is on even healthier populations because it takes place even earlier. Further many people that recently became obese didn’t have enough time for the health impact to hit and the increase of 2% between 1965 and 1985 just didn’t seem that important. Thus calories alone were less vilified.
Put another way when 15% of the population is obese a large fraction of them recently became obese (last 10 years), where at 40% the obese population tends to be both heavier and have been obese for much longer. Heath impacts of obesity depend both on levels of obesity and how long people were obese.
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> Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar.
That has been kind of a consequence of that though. Low-fat foods tend to taste pretty bland, so sugar is added instead to improve flavor.
The US FDA requires that schools not serve whole milk or any products containing normal and natural saturated fats, and instead serve “low fat” versions which literally remove the fats and replace them with sugar.
You say nobody is doing this, but all the subsidized meals for my kids do this.
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They will however recommend sugar, just by calling it something else.
See "carbohydrates", "complex carbohydrates", "integral grain" and so on.
Quite frankly, plain sugar from fruit is less dangerous than the complex carbs from grains. But fructose is still dangerous, just less so.
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But there is also the fallacy where some people want you to believe basically everything will cause CVD and there is no single thing you could do to change it, so therefore just keep doing whatever you’re doing.
I call this the "Everything in Moderation" fallacy. From what I've heard people who say it, they emphasize the everything part of it. In other words almost everything is bad for you so just eat a little bit of everything and you won't get too much of the bad stuff. It's maddening.
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Even if you can’t change the inevitability of CVD, what you do will absolutely change WHEN you get it.
I've never seen this fallacy.
What I've seen is that the best and most well documented way to prevent CVD is the DASH diet paired with exercise and potentially statins.
If you are an unhealthy weight you are both eating too much and/or not exercising enough. High calorie foods can be fatty, sugary, or both.
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Such "science" should be illegal.
If propaganda was illegal, who would decide what was propaganda and what was simply argumentation made from positions of relative ignorance?
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the greatest travesty of modern science is that fraud is not illegal.
in every other industry that i can imagine, purposely committing fraud has been made illegal. this is not the case in modern science, and in my opinion the primary driver of things like the replication crisis and the root of all the other problems plaguing academia at the moment.
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What, specifically?
Industry funded research? Results that disagree with the current consensus? Nutrition science entirely?
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
People are often surprised when they find out how little people sell out for. The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000.
[0] https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/
> The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000
If that's really the factor that swung the vote, there is more to it than that contribution. There may be a promise of a job after Congress. Or there may be an expectation of continued contributions.
Put another way, if you donate $43,000, you're not going to get a line item in a law. (Counterpoint: I've never donated more than a few thousand in my life, and I've had a hand in multiple state and now three federal laws. A lot of people don't civically engage. If you're the only person calling your elected on a bill they don't care about, and you aren't a nutter, they'll turn you into their de facto staffer on it.)
But buying off a single congressperson is not going to change the worldwide discourse on a topic.
How do you eat an entire elephant? One bite at a time.
How do you corrupt an entire government? One congressperson at a time.
Pick the right one and it might.
Or spend $23,134,000 on all of the House and Senate.
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In theory, to change discourse, you just need one expert and a few magazine articles and the rest is history.
It's really good to ask these questions.
I'm not a medial researcher, but my impression is that many fields find it difficult to produce the robust high-level risk comparisons that you ask about. I.e. if you're looking at blood fats, even there you'll find many complicated contextual factors (age, sex, ethnicity, type of lipids i.e. LDL or lp(a) or ...?). The same might be the case for sugar. So it's not really easy/cheap to combine detailed state-of-the-art measurements of different causes into one randomized controlled trial.
As for the effects of sugar, I think there's some evidence that's not too hard to find, e.g. some meta analyses showing something around 10% increase in dose-dependent risk (RR ~ 1.10) [1,2]. A lot of the literature seems to be focused on beverages, e.g. this comparative cross-national study [3].
[1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08999...
[3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03345-4
But is it the actual sugar, or the habits surrounding consumption of the beverage?
That's pretty easy.
If you have a randomized controlled trial, the sugar dose is varied and other confounding variables are controlled by randomization. So you measure the causal impact of sugar only. There are studies showing that.
With observational studies, if you have a dose-dependent effect, then that's good evidence (although not completely conclusive) of a causal relationship. This is what many studies do.
If you have a meta analysis covering many primary studies, and if those vary a lot of context (i.e. countries, year, composition of the population), and you still get a consistent effect, then that's another piece of support for a causal relationship.
The few studies that I've looked at seem to show a pretty robust picture of sugar being a cause, but there might be selection bias - i.e. we'd need an umbrella / meta meta study (which ideally accounts for publication bias) to get the best estimate possible.
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What are "the habits surrounding consumption of the beverage?" It's been my observation that soda drinkers drink soda all day, no matter what they are doing.
This is just the time that we caught. Who knows how many more times it happened and wasn't caught?
> I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
Perhaps this is more evidence that not everybody has been caught?
It's not like this is some isolated thing, like it's a documented fact that the food pyramid was shaped the way it was due to industry pressure.[1]
1 - Marion Nestle, Food Politics
You're arguing for a pattern based on 1 data point.
I don't know why this was re-posted today (kind of suspicious that this floats again after 10 year just by chance) anyway, there is a full citation-heavy book by Gary Taubes about this, and one of his points was that the sugar industry paid 2 million in 1970's dollars to create the nutrition department of Harvard, which was the first nutrition department in the world. (This was to say that nutrition science itself has been corrupt since its birth).
The department of nutrition at Harvard was founded in 1942.
To be true to Taubes, my memory was too approximate. The actual claim was that in 1976 Fred Stare, the director and founder (in 1942) of the Department of Nutrition of the Harvard School of Public Health was exposed by Michael Jacobson having received around 200.000 dollars in the course of the preceding 3 years from Kellogg's, Nabisco e and their foundations, after he had testified before the Congress about the virtues of cereal as a breakfast food. Apparently this discredited Stare as a scientist.
Wikipedia also states that "Kellogg's funded $2 million to set up the Nutrition Foundation at Harvard. The foundation was independent of the university and published a journal Nutrition Reviews that Stare edited for 25 years." But I cannot find this is Taubes's book.
They paid a total of 2 people...
That's not quite what TFA says. Rather:
"The UCSF researchers analyzed more than 340 documents, totaling 1,582 pages of text, between the sugar industry and two individuals...."
That is, this research (into industry influence) focused on the available and reviewed correspondence between the industry group and two specific researchers. There's nothing about this article or the referenced analysis which precludes additional other researchers being similarly influenced.
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars). That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
You would be astonished at how little it takes to bribe, I mean donate, to a politician for example. For as little as $10-20k USD you can get a literal seat at a table with a sitting senator or congresscritter for several hours at a "charity" dinner, with results as expected.
Good comment. Industry influencing research is nothing new (Global Warming, Oxycodone), and the dollar amount is small but it really doesn't take a lot of money to influence anyone. This case was interesting because they diverted attention to another contributor and influenced public policy against savory snacks; I remember the public health campaign against habitual daily consumption chips/crisps, without equally addressing chocolate bars: https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/a-pac... And I'd also comment the ludicrous abstract comparison of drinking oil in a year. I wouldn't want to eat a football field of raw potato either. I do wonder how/why the Savory Snack industry didn't fire back, and why don't we have anything better than: are they both equally bad or is fat or salt worse.
PR can be a lot of bang for your buck.
https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
You could buy a house and a 69 Charger for $25K in the 60's with a tidy sum left over.
$50k in 2016 dollars.
You're correct, but for some reason heavily downed at the moment (Edit: no longer the case!). Relevant excerpt backing this up:
> the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars
I.e. it was something more like 6k-7k in terms of dollars at the time of payment.
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Ah missed that.
$25,000 in 1969 has the same buying power as approximately $220,000 to $226,000 today
In terms of 2016, from gemini:
> In 2016, $25,000 from 1969 was worth approximately $163,490.
> Based on the Consumer Price Index (CPI), $1 in 1969 had the same purchasing power as $6.54 in 2016. This represents a total inflation increase of roughly 554% over that 47-year period
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I doubt that the 50k was given to the research as personal pay. It was likely a “research grant” that was used to fund the research and/or get swallowed up as “overhead” by the university
And you probably earned under $10k/yr.
take me back
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Or maybe the combination is the problem. I couldn’t consume much sugar on its own nor much cream but put the two together in ice cream and I could eat it all day long.
That is what I came to believe as well. If sugar alone was the problem, vegans would be fat. If fat alone was the problem, ketogenic and carnivore diets wouldn't help people lose weight.
It seems to be the combination of two at the same time that causes the issues.
>That is what I came to believe as well. If sugar alone was the problem, vegans would be fat. If fat alone was the problem, ketogenic and carnivore diets wouldn't help people lose weight.
This logic is faulty because both vegans and keto/carnivore people are selected for adherence to diets. If you can stick to either dietary restrictions, you can probably also not pig out on pop tarts or whatever.
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It’s the Randall Cycle.
Nobody cares about fat, except as it influences how well they look. They care about good health. There are many people who would be happy to sit in a wheelchair all day (they probably don't know how uncomfortable that is and would demand extra comfort, but the idea). People don't want to exercise (in general). They want to eat good tasting food. They want to drink, smoke, and do other drugs. They want whatever their religion says is good.
Because these are often in conflict they must compromise something. If you find a way to be fat while: looking good, living a long life, and being able to do the other things in life you want through life people would be happy.
Of course being fat correlates strongly with things people don't like about living a long healthy life and so we try to lose weight, but that is only a proxy.
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No no, ice cream is good for you. It's fine.
"Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients?"
Depends on the type of fat, I think. From what I have found out myself, it is trans fats > sugars / simple carbohydrates > polyunsaturated fats > complex carbohydrates > monounsaturated fats > saturated fats.
Obesity really exploded when consumption shifted from butter towards margarine and vegetable oils: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-US-fat-consump...
If anything, consumption of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats is the issue: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3...
But of course, you also have to consider nature of food. In nature, you would consume either carbohydrates or fats - either plants or meat. But processed foods include a lot of fats and a lot of carbs in a single package. And that is the actual killer. Fats aren't an issue, carbs aren't that much of an issue, isssue is the nature of fats and carbs consumed, and issue is the way we consume them.
You'll find many people claiming almost the exact opposite, just as confidently. Plant fats are generally seen as much healthier, especially olive oil and similar fats. This idea that the combination of macronutrients that a food contains also seems highly suspect - generally people tend to think that macronutrients work independently of each other.
The reality is, of course, that we just don't know. Nutrition "science" is almost entirely bogus (the only real part of it is the discovery of the nature and functioning of the various vitamins, and thus the elimination of scurvy and similar diseases - plus a few other extremes). Even the existence and importance of dietary fiber in many foods was a very recent discovery (resistant starch and oligosaccharides were only identified as dietary fiber in the 2000s, for example) - meaning that even the base caloric contents of many foods were wrongly measured as late as the 2000s (and who knows what else we're missing here).
"generally people tend to think that macronutrients work independently of each other"
Well, that is obviously the wrong idea. Even basic logic speaks against it: people lose weight on keto diet, people lose weight on vegan diet... so neither protein, fat nor carbs can be causing obesity. But what do foods that we know are obesogenic have in common? 1) They are highly processed and/or 2) they combine fats and carbs into single package.
But it is true that we don't know for certain. What we do know is that this dietary experiment we have had going since 1970s at the latest has failed completely. As I tend to say: paleo diet should be the basis of any diet, and then you further adjust it based on how your body responds.
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This. The amount of faith in nutrition "science" indicates severe science illiteracy in the public.
In general there are way too many confounds, and measurement is far too poor and unreliable (self-report that is wrong in quality and quantity; you can't track enough people for the amount of time where supposed effects would manifest), there is almost zero control over what people eat (diets and available foods even considerably over a decade for whole countries, never mind within individuals), and much of the things being measured lack even face/content validity in the first place (e.g. "fat" is not a valid category, and even "saturated vs. unsaturated" is a matter of degree, and each again with different kinds in each category).
We are missing so much of the basics of what are required for a real science here I think it is far more reasonable to view almost all long-term nutritional claims as pseudoscience, unless the effect is clear and massive (e.g. consumption of large amounts of alcohol, or extremely unique / restrictive diets that have strong effects, or the rare results of natural experiments / famines), or so extremely general that it catches a sort of primary factor (too much calories is generally harmful, regardless of the source of those calories).
Maybe it'll become actual science one day, but that won't be for decades.
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000.
In this specific case.
Oh yeah, that was another question I had. So was this the only time the sugar industry influenced things? Was there an investigation? Either there was no investigation (why) or it didn't find anything else (?)
When this came out I was expecting it to be the tip of the iceberg.
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars).
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
A contradictory example where this does occur is in propaganda. Technology can be applied to maximize the reach and influence of otherwise inferior arguments at a fraction of the cost. A relatively small sequence of "shows" or "films" can disproportionately affect the world view of billions.
edit: The adoption of cigarettes across the world was affected by a significantly much smaller investment in ad placement compared to its global adoption and affects due to the reach and amplification "of technology".
> And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss?
They did. But Ancel Keys, one of the bribed researchers, author of the infamous seven countries study that laid the groundwork against fat made it his life’s mission to discredit anyone who researched sugar. He effectively made the topic academic suicide. His primary target, that served as a warning example for others was his contemporary in the U.K. John Yudkin.
> I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD.
Decades - not 10 years. The payment was made in the 1960's.
Ah sorry, 10 years since the revelation about the funding. But yes, decades (over 50 years?) since the single (?) literature review.
I believe they're talking about this UCSF report of a "newly discovered cache of industry documents", which came out in 2016.
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
Check out the story of Andrew Wakefield. One financially motivated lie can spark wildfire.
You're right to be skeptical, but:
> They paid a total of 2 people $50,000.
That's over half a million, in today's dollars.
With inflation, and whatnot, we get numb to what money was, back when.
Other way around. To quote the article:
> To conduct the literature review, the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars [...]
So it was actually about ~$5,000 in 1965 dollars.
… it's $68,404 in today's dollars, according to BLS's inflation calc.
(…your figure works out to a 26% per annum inflation rate. The $50k figure is in 2016 dollars — "the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars".)
The $50k is already adjusted for inflation.
Ah. My bad, then.
No, that's already inflation adjusted.
communication before the internet was very slow.
Hype or getting viral is not necessarily science so its not clear when and how and why one paper suddenly becomes very known.
We know what sugar and others do, people are probably ignorant or not but its not billions are dead directly, people struggle a little bit more, the statistics number goes up. Now talk to anyone who likes to drink and eat that stuff everyday, do you think they care? no they do not.
Then you have the wrong people sponsoring this.
Fraud etc.
This is one of those where you need to be able to discern nuances in your brain as multiple things are happening.
First, identifying cause and effect of CVD is super hard, and there are lots of studies with various level of indications and in reality we're still far from understanding most of it. Even just the effects of fat and sugar on it isn't clear, and our understanding of fat itself, and all its types, and of sugars and all its types, even that's incomplete. And this makes it a perfect battle ground for grift and financial interests, because you can paint various narratives and cleverly build a case for it, since in reality so many possibilities are still on the table.
I think the conclusions that are on the stronger side are those that relate to medication and surgery. Blood pressure pills, statins, antiplatelet, coronary artery bypass, aortic valve replacement, etc.
When it comes to nutrition and other lifestyle changes, things are muddy. So instead you have "school of thoughts" and belief systems forms that often tie up with personal identity.
Second, you have financial interests meddling with research and messaging. A financial interest might want to mingle even if the research supports them, just not to take any chances. And if we found two cases of it, that's just those that were caught and proven, it's likely there's many more mingling then just that. Even if it doesn't end up proving things their way, you can assume all this mingling slows things down and makes figuring out the truth much harder and slower, which maintains the state of uncertainty for longer and that state is good for financial interests.
Lastly, it's not that we know nothing at all, and everything is just beliefs. There are a few things that have strong evidence repeatedly. We know that smoking, high blood pressure, plaque buildup, high lifetime LDL, clots, and diabetes/insulin resistance are all bad and lead to increase risks of CVD. And avoiding or lowering those, no matter how, helps reduce that risk. But it's not enough for most people that want to feel in control and believe they're living in a way that CVD won't happen to them. Which makes them vulnerable to grifters and various influencers.
Correction: they paid at least 2 people, at least $50,000.
Assuming this is true, it's a lower bound. What else has been tried?
I am only surprised this came out of UCSF and Robert Lustig's name is not on it, since it's often a topic in his books.
Maybe nutrition-health connection is more complex than can be shown by these early studies, and the big lobbying money only needs one study to get congressional support some putative scientific backing, the entire anti science funding arm of Congress uses one factoid about a shrimp treadmill for decades and the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper. https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/shrimp-treadmill-study-co...
Anyways here's a recent study showing fat/sugar intake and nanoplastic correlation. https://www.inrae.fr/en/news/nanoplastics-have-diet-dependen...
>the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper.
You're clearly misinformed. The antivax movement is largely a grassroots movement built on the experiences of the parents of vaccine-injured children, and people who've read the literature comparing vaccinated vs unvaccinated outcomes. E.g. the large scale unpublished study conducted by the CDC, https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Entered-into... , which showed vaccinated children demonstrating higher rates of developmental disorders. There's not a single large scale study conducted comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children that shows no greater rate of developmental disorders in the vaccinated group (the above study was supposed to be that, but when the results ended up showing the opposite the CDC decided not to publish it).
Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?
> Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?
Because vaccines aren't all that profitable compared to other pharmaceuticals but produce disproportionate public good.
Sigh.
The paper couldn't make it through peer review because of methodology errors.
Specifically, the sample groups had vastly different demographics and sizes which make meaningful comparisons between them impossible due to confounding factors.
This wasn't some secret CDC plot to bury research. The CDC wasn't even involved. This was just poor research.
https://www.henryford.com/news/2025/09/vaccine-study-henry-f...
> That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar.
IDK, see the "BLOTS ON A FIELD?" by Science ("A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease") or "The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped COVID Kill" by Wired (regarding the anti-scientific refusal to acknowledge it as airborne) for a couple of recent examples. Once underlying assumptions stop getting questioned, I think anything is at least possible.
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