The Great Sugar Conspiracy

October 03, 2016

The Great Sugar Conspiracy

 

 Reference: JAMA Inter Med Sept 2016,    


If you are an average American, you are getting roughly 10-15% of your calories from sugar. Hmmm. Of 800,000 foods in America found by Lustig's graduate students team, 600,000 of them have sugar added to them. When you go to the grocery store, you find cheerful markers on most food items claiming they are "LOW FAT" and hence, meant to be good for you. But low fat almost always means, high sugar. 


Where did this all come from? It came from a remarkably successful PR campaign waged by the sugar lobby back in the 1960s. That's what this week's article details. The remarkable influence of the sugar lobby on the leading nutritional experts of the day. In the 1960s there were two leading nutritionists who held opposing views on how coronary artery disease wreaked its havoc. Ancel Keys (The K in K-rations) was highly regarded because of his prominent role in Army nutrition. He advocated that fat was the enemy.


  John Yudkin believed it was sugar. He was off in England and what did those English know anyways! Now, 60 years later, letters written between scientists and public policy folks are in library archives and open for the public. When these letters were unearthed and examined, the authors of this review find a terribly inconvenient truth. Rojer Adams, a professor at the University of Illinois, was on the Sugar Research Foundation's scientific advisory council. His letter, written to Mark Hegsted, professor of nutrition at Harvard, asking him to write a review article on the mechanisms and risks of sugar versus fat is the smoking gun. Hegsted was also on the Sugar Research Foundations research council. He agreed to write a review article downplaying the risky components of sugar and emphasizing the problems with cholesterol and fat. 


 Ancel Keys rose in time to greater and greater prominence, and he carried the torch forward. He was a bully in public and at meetings of anyone who disagreed with him, and literally hounded any opposing opinion off of the agenda of national meetings. High fat was his bugaboo. As chair of the NIH funding committee for research, you crossed Ancel Keys at your peril. Early research suggested that sugar was in fact, the enemy. The Sugar Foundation swung into action and started Project 226, essentially to pay Hegsted and his boss, Stare, at the Harvard School of public health to write that infamous review article downplaying sugar and pointing the to fat as the cause of "becoming fat" and getting coronary artery disease.


That article was written, and published in the New England Journal of Medicine without mentioning its Sugar industry sponsorship. Hegsted got paid. From there, it's all history. It was the 1980s and food guidelines came out recommending lowering dietary fat, which means more sugar of one kind or another. Over the next 20 years, every food in America became low fat and consequently higher in carbohydrates and sugar. Ancel Keys ruled at the NIH and no-one question the hegemony of Hegsted and Keys. You gained 20 pounds. 


 This was the biggest public health policy disaster in American History. We didn't let good science be conducted because secret, behind the scenes, payments led to the corruption of our medical research process. It took 20-30 years to fully correct that error. We are still struggling with it today. 


 WWW.What Will Work for me? It's a struggle to avoid sugar. It tastes good and all of us are vulnerable to its effects. You eat sugar, you want more and you eat more. I'm so aware of my own sugar sensitivity. If I eat regular peanut butter on a spoon, I stop at one spoon and feel full. If I eat a brand name that has sugar in it, I can have 4-5 spoonfuls before I stop. But the science is now solid. Avoid sugar. If you want to escape the damage of heart disease and Alzheimer's. 


 Pop Quiz


1. Sugar isn't as harmful as people make out? T or F?            Answer:  False. It's the core enemy of metabolic problems. MUCH worse than fat. 

 ‪2. Our belief that cholesterol is the problem is the result of a carefully crafted PR campaign based on bribery to key doctors, paid for by the Sugar Industry. T or F?               Answer:   Spot on. ‪

3. Our food guidelines followed the outcome of the PR guidelines, and suggested we eat a ceiling of 35% fat. T or F?                    Answer:  True. That's how we got there. 

 ‪4. 35% fat should be the floor of our eating, with encouragement to go higher - aka, to 50% or the Mediterranean Diet. T or F?                          Answer:  Again, true. ‪

5. It's critical for all published research to have openness as to funding sources. T or F?               Answer:  True. (Same idea would be good for politics, don't you think?)

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