Nearly 50 years of scientific research on the complicated relationship between nutrition and heart disease may have been shaped by the sugar industry to shift the focus away from sugar and toward saturated fat instead, according to internal industry documents released today in a leading peer-reviewed medical journal.
The reason, the researchers wrote in JAMA Internal Medicine, is that the sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to downplay links between sugar and heart disease, and instead play up the emerging science about saturated fat as a more likely contributor to heart disease problems than sugar.
