PhotoThe sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to downplay the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show. The documents show that a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, known today as the Sugar Association, paid three Harvard scientists the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to publish a 1967 review of sugar, fat and heart research. The industry “should have exercised greater transparency in all of its research activities,” the Sugar Association statement said. “It was a very smart thing the sugar industry did because review papers, especially if you get them published in a very prominent journal, tend to shape the overall scientific discussion,” he said. The Harvard scientists had dismissed the data on sugar as weak and gave far more credence to the data implicating saturated fat.

Source: New York Times September 12, 2016 15:00 UTC