Science How the Sugar Industry Shifted Blame to Fat

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/13/well/eat/how-the-sugar-industry-shifted-blame-to-fat.html?_r=0

The sugar industry paid scientists in the 1960s to play down the link between sugar and heart disease and promote saturated fat as the culprit instead, newly released historical documents show.

The internal sugar industry documents, recently discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, and published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, suggest that five decades of research into the role of nutrition and heart disease, including many of today’s dietary recommendations, may have been largely shaped by the sugar industry.

“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and an author of the JAMA Internal Medicine paper.

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 research on sugar, fat and heart disease. The studies used in the review were handpicked by the sugar group, and the article, which was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, minimized the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat.

Even though the influence-peddling revealed in the documents dates back nearly 50 years, more recent reports show that the food industry has continued to influence nutrition science.

 

One of the scientists who was paid by the sugar industry was D. Mark Hegsted, who went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where in 1977 he helped draft the forerunner to the federal government’s dietary guidelines.

 

One of the leading researchers and practicing MDs who is reversing this horrible error is David Ludwig, of Harvard. A Harvard guy reversing the previous Harvard guy.

The politicization of public policy and quest for science to support these politically originated policy proposals does not promote good science. Whether it's health policy or ecology or energy, etc.

In 1980, the government produced the first dietary recommendations. It was developed by a committee run by George McGovern. As people and food producers complied with the recommendations, an obesity epidemic grew with serious consequences. People are getting sick from associated metabolic damages from too much sugar in the diet and this, in turn, ups our collective health care costs.

It's true we eat about 380 kcal more per day on average than in 1980. Almost all that increase is sugar.

Sugar and carbohydrates are addicting. Consumption of them as the majority of our diet creates hunger pangs and urges to eat more sugar/carbs. The same pleasure centers in the brain that respond to cocaine, gambling, and similar addictive behaviors react to sugar identically.

Consumption of large amounts of sugar leads to obesity, no doubt. It raises insulin levels to the point where people become resistant to insulin and the body has to make more so the hormone's signals can get through. More insulin drives more fat storage. Higher insulin also leads to type 2 diabetes and cardiovascular disease, and there are even links to alzheimer's and other epidemics that arise at the same time as the obesity one.

This is the government's food pyramid:



The bottom two rows are almost pure sugar and carbohydrates. That is what the government recommends we eat. That is what the sugar industry corrupted.

The pyramid is upside down. Our diet should be primarily fats and oils, and we should sparingly be eating most vegetables, fruits, and maybe no bread/cereal/rice/pasta at all.

There are four macronutrients that make up all the food we consume (aside from water and fiber). Alcohol, Carbohydrates, Protein, and Fat. Of these, there is zero intake or health requirements for alcohol and carbohydrates. That is, humans are perfectly healthy on diets of nothing but fat and protein. Whatever glucose the body needs (e.g. the brain and muscles) is synthesized from protein via gluconogenesis.

Overconsumption of sugar leads to non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. It is the same disease that alcoholics develop over long term alcohol abuse. There are some who think it is a reasonable thing to treat alcohol and sugar identically when it comes to health policy.

FWIW

 

I talked my wife into eating 100g carbs or less and she's dropped 30 lbs. She's not counting calories or anything.

 

If you do ketosis diet right, no never go off it. There's no reason to.

 

You just need more salt. When you first start, your body flushes out all the water in your cells and with it goes the sodium. If you don't replace the sodium, the body uses potassium instead and that makes you feel like you have the flu. Plus, you are going through carb withdrawal.

I've been doing it 3 years now, and I have no trouble staying at ~5lbs below my original goal weight. I love to eat and I love to cook. I have no problems eating this way. I even make a kick ass pizza (both deep dish and regular). Nothing to miss.

 

Saw this elsewhere:

The scary part is that this is the tip of the iceberg. Depending on the field, 50 percent or more of the studies draw incorrect conclusions for a variety of reasons. This includes outright bribery and fraud.

Myth: "Truth in science will almost always prevail due to replication studies." Fact: Reproducibility in science is not very sexy. Because our scientific culture generally rewards innovation over cautiousness, replicating a study conducted by others will not get a researcher a publication in a high-end journal, a splashy headline in a newspaper, or a large funding grant from the government. Only an estimated 0.15% of all published results are direct replications of previous studies.

Myth: "If you are reading a published scientific study, there is a very high chance that the material is accurate." Fact: Fraud, conflicts of interest, cherry picking, and statistical "errors" are very common in science. This is backed up by numerous lines of evidence.

• Why Most Published Research Findings Are False- John P. A. Ioannidis

And more recently...

• Richard Horton, editor in chief of The Lancet, recently wrote: “Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness. As one participant put it, “poor methods get results”.
  
  
• In 2009, Dr. Marcia Angell of the New England Journal of Medicine wrote: “It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.”
  
  
• "I can't tell you exactly what percentage of the trials are flawed, but I think the problem is far bigger than you imagine, and getting worse...it is so easy to manipulate data, conceal it or fabricate it...there is almost a code of silence not to speak about it." -Whistleblower Dr. Peter Wilmshurst
  
  
• Silencing the Scientist: Tyrone Hayes on Being Targeted by Herbicide Firm Syngenta
  
  
• Nature: More than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to reproduce another scientist's experiments, and more than half have failed to reproduce their own experiments. 40 percent of scientists admit that fraud always or often contributes to irreproducible findings.
  
  
• "The neuroscientific community needs to challenge the current scientific model driven by dysfunctional research practices tacitly encouraged by the 'publish or perish' doctrine, which is precisely leading to the low reliability and the high discrepancy of results."
  
  
• Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science (Ninety-seven percent of original studies had significant results (P < .05). Thirty-six percent of replications had significant results)
  

 

Sugar rots teeth, too.