The sugar industry paid Harvard scientists to blame fat for heart disease

The Sugar Research Foundation was the trade association for the U.S. sugar industry. In the 1960s, as evidence mounted linking sugar consumption to coronary heart disease, the foundation launched a campaign to counter the growing scientific concern. SRF executive John Hickson proposed funding research to 'refute our detractors' and hired three Harvard scientists to produce a literature review. The foundation paid $6,500 — about $50,000 in today's dollars — and the project was managed directly by the industry's trade group.

The resulting paper was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967 with no disclosure of the sugar industry's funding. The review minimized the evidence linking sugar to heart disease and instead concluded that reducing fat and cholesterol in the diet was the best way to prevent coronary heart disease. The paper's conclusions aligned perfectly with the industry's commercial interests, and the lack of disclosure meant it appeared to be independent academic research.

The truth emerged in September 2016, when researchers at the University of California, San Francisco published a historical analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine. They had reviewed thousands of pages of internal documents from the SRF archives, uncovering the correspondence between Hickson and the Harvard scientists. The revelation drew widespread coverage and renewed scrutiny of how the sugar industry shaped nutrition science for half a century. One of the Harvard scientists, D. Mark Hegsted, later became head of nutrition at the USDA.