An old study is now shedding new light on the sugar industry's controversial past, and its secrets are being revealed in a new paper.
The 1960s study, which suggests a link between a high-sugar diet and high blood cholesterol levels and cancer in rats, was sponsored by the sugar industry, according to the perspective paper published in the journal PLOS Biology on Tuesday.
Yet the study itself was never published and has been forgotten until now.
"All we know is that the plug got pulled and nothing got published," said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco and a co-author of the new paper.
"Whether the investigator didn't bother to try or whether he tried and failed, we don't know. Or whether there was some kind of clause in his agreement with the sugar people that precluded him from publishing, we don't know," he said.
This enigmatic study seems to provide evidence of the harmful health impacts of eating too much sugar. It also suggests that a group then called the Sugar Research Foundation might have manipulated scientific research in its favor, according to the new paper.
The authors of the new paper previously conducted a separate historical analysis of sugar industry-related documents and studies.
That analysis, published last year in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggested that the Sugar Research Foundation sponsored a research program that successfully cast doubt about the health hazards of a high-sugar diet and rather promoted fat "as the dietary culprit" in health concerns such as heart disease.
"The kind of science manipulation that the tobacco industry engaged in is exactly the same kind of behavior that we've documented in these papers from the sugar industry," said Glantz, who has also studied the tobacco industry. .... http://edition.cnn.com/2017/11/21/health/sugar-industry-cancer-history-study/index.html
Replies