Welcome to Debate Club! Please be aware that this is a space for respectful debate, and that your ideas will be challenged here. Please remember to critique the argument, not the author.

How the Sugar Industry Shaped Heart Disease Research

Options
Crisseyda
Crisseyda Posts: 532 Member
in Debate Club
It's great to see info like this in the New York Times! I've heard Dr. Henry Lustig say, "sugar is the new tobacco." He wasn't off base. Sugar is far more detrimental to our health than the benign "empty calories" that industry would like you to believe it is.

http://time.com/4485710/sugar-industry-heart-disease-research/?xid=tcoshare

The JAMA article it references: http://archinte.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=2548255

In 1954, the Sugar Research Foundation "identified a strategic opportunity for the sugar industry: increase sugar’s market share by getting Americans to eat a lower-fat diet." That worked out much better for Big Sugar than for the rest of us.
«13

Replies

  • stevencloser
    stevencloser Posts: 8,911 Member
    Options
    What a waste of time reading this whole study if you can even call it that. In the limitations they basically say "All evidence presented here is circumstantial, so any conclusions drawn from it are nothing but speculation."
  • chapiano
    chapiano Posts: 331 Member
    Options
    I have read similar articles and couldn't agree more. Just ignore all the abuse you will receive posting this (learnt my lesson posting about sugar myself!)
  • Hornsby
    Hornsby Posts: 10,322 Member
    Options
    Who's Henry Lustig?
  • richln
    richln Posts: 809 Member
    Options
    castlerobber wrote: »
    richln wrote: »
    What are we debating today?
    Do lobbies try to influence people that influence others?
    Or: Is sugar is an addictive drug (Part 42)?
    Maybe: Why hasn't there been any sugar research since 1954?
    How about: Did Big Sugar fail in its goal to get Americans to eat low-fat?

    - There's a difference between "lobbying" and "secretly paying off unethical researchers to write skewed papers"
    Where is the evidence that the researchers were unethical? Where is the evidence that the payments were secrets or that any misconduct was involved? Where is the evidence that the money skewed the papers? It is not in the links provided. From the first link:
    "In an editorial published alongside new study, Marion Nestle, a professor in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at NYU, writes that the Harvard professors who conducted the review knew what the funders wanted and provided those findings. “Whether they did this deliberately, unconsciously, or because they genuinely believed saturated fat to be the greater threat is unknown,” Nestle writes."

    From the second link:
    "This historical account of industry efforts demonstrates the importance of having reviews written by people without conflicts of interest and the need for financial disclosure. Scientific reviews shape policy debates, subsequent investigations, and the funding priorities of federal agencies.52 The NEJM has required authors to disclose all conflicts of interest since 1984,53 and conflict of interest disclosure policies have been widely implemented since the sugar industry launched its CHD research program."
    and ...
    "The Roger Adams papers and other documents used in this research provide a narrow window into the activities of 1 sugar industry trade association; therefore, it is difficult to validate that the documents gathered are representative of the entirety of SRF internal materials related to Project 226 from the 1950s and 1960s or that the proper weight was given to each data source. There is no direct evidence that the sugar industry wrote or changed the NEJM review manuscript; the evidence that the industry shaped the review’s conclusions is circumstantial. We did not analyze the role of other organizations, nutrition leaders, or food industries that advocated that saturated fat and dietary cholesterol were the main dietary cause of CHD. We could not interview key actors involved in this historical episode because they have died."

    So the researchers did not violate any standards at the time, and there is no proof that their work was influenced by the sugar industry. Your accusations here seem to be pure speculation. If your narrative is that sugar leads to CHD, then where is the modern evidence of that? A lot of money from that era was going to CHD research, and a lot of initial leads did not pan out. From the second link: "Although the contribution of dietary sugars to CHD is still debated", as in, it has not been proven as of 2016.
    castlerobber wrote: »
    - Is sugar addictive? It hits the same reward centers as drugs, and is very hard for most people to give up eating. Call it what you like.
    I like to call drug addiction "drug addiction," and normal biological response to common everyday stimuli "normal biological response."
    castlerobber wrote: »
    - ?
    Again, my question was: "Why hasn't there been any sugar research since 1954?"
    castlerobber wrote: »
    - Eating low-fat wasn't Big Sugar's goal. Eating more sugar was. CICO is all most people know. If you add more sugar to the diet, you have to take something out. Protein is generally recognized as being good, so that left fat. And wow, fat is 9 calories per gram, sugar is only 4, fat must be more fattening. :-O And, you know, dietary cholesterol kinda looks like atherosclerotic plaque, so it must be going straight to the arteries. We'll just run a quick study to "prove" it...and if it doesn't come out like we want, we'll just hide or (deliberately) misinterpret it...

    If you tell a lie big enough, and often enough, people will eventually come to believe it.
    OP stated that "In 1954, the Sugar Research Foundation "identified a strategic opportunity for the sugar industry: increase sugar’s market share by getting Americans to eat a lower-fat diet."" I don't doubt that their interests were both promoting low-fat diet, and eating more sugar. Again, you are implying that the science from the era was intentionally misrepresented on a vast scale. Does this conspiracy theory involve all researchers since the 1950s up through today? In the end, bad science is replaced with good science. I'm still waiting on the evidence that shows that sugar leads to CHD.

  • johnnylakis
    johnnylakis Posts: 812 Member
    Options
    Not all sugar is bad, especially if it comes off of a tree
  • zamphir66
    zamphir66 Posts: 582 Member
    Options
    The urge to find the "silver bullet" for weight management / health and wellness is powerful. At this moment in time, it seems everyone's loading sugar into the gun. I wonder what it will be in 10, 20, 30 years. Something new, certainly. While the common sense advice is and always will be sensible: eat less and moderate certain things, move more, and don't obsess.
  • The_Enginerd
    The_Enginerd Posts: 3,982 Member
    Options
    zamphir66 wrote: »
    The urge to find the "silver bullet" for weight management / health and wellness is powerful. At this moment in time, it seems everyone's loading sugar into the gun. I wonder what it will be in 10, 20, 30 years. Something new, certainly. While the common sense advice is and always will be sensible: eat less and moderate certain things, move more, and don't obsess.
    Well, protein is the big thing now. And countries which have a higher percentage of their intake from protein weigh more and have higher rates of cancer. Of course, it's correlation only since those countries are typically more affluent and therefore have more access to food period and live long enough to develop cancer, but someone, somewhere, will turn this into it being the next big thing. Of course, Freelee exists, so maybe it's already out there.
  • J72FIT
    J72FIT Posts: 5,948 Member
    Options
    Zzzzzzzzzzz........
  • Hornsby
    Hornsby Posts: 10,322 Member
    Options
    J72FIT wrote: »
    Zzzzzzzzzzz........

    So bunk most of MFP doesn't even want to respond. That's my guess.
  • Christine_72
    Christine_72 Posts: 16,049 Member
    Options
    I think many people are sick of the 20 page sugar *kitten* fights, where neither side will back down and ultimately doesn't get anyone anywhere..
  • NorthCascades
    NorthCascades Posts: 10,970 Member
    Options
    So how many calories do you burn posting "sugar is not poison?"
  • cwolfman13
    cwolfman13 Posts: 41,874 Member
    Options
    auddii wrote: »
    chapiano wrote: »
    I have read similar articles and couldn't agree more. Just ignore all the abuse you will receive posting this (learnt my lesson posting about sugar myself!)

    There has been no abuse in this thread, and it was posted in the debate forum.

    And I'd actually disagree that no one picked up the low fat = healthy claim. The FDA has recently issued cease and desist letters to companies who include the word "healthy" on their label because the products were too high in fat (Kind bars specifically come to mind). The current FDA definition of healthy has fat restrictions on the use of the term. The restrictions of the term relate to fat, saturated fat, sodium, cholesterol, vitamins, and fortification. There was discussion that they were reconsidering the definition of the term.

    That said, I feel like there is an opposite claim now. People are eschewing sugar and carbs and heavily promoting the increase of fats.

    The author of the linked paper was interviewed on NPR yesterday, and she mentioned at the time that there was research showing fat was linked to heart disease, research showing sugar was linked to heart disease, and research that both are linked to heart disease. She then made her conclusion that the sugar industry influenced how those results were interpreted.

    I'm more inclined to believe that both sugar and fat are linked, and a moderate and balanced overall diet will increase health.

    But you know industries, they're going to push to sell their products, so um, long live high fat diets?

    Yes...I don't, and never will understand the black and white thinking that leads to these kinds of pendulum swings. It's like people have never heard of balance...

Categories