Researchers at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF) have uncovered long-hidden truths that manufacturers of sugary foodstuffs would prefer us to ignore. An analysis of internal sugar industry documents has exposed what executives really knew about the health hazards of sugar and their unscrupulous plans to get it down our throats at any cost.
In an article titled “Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents,” authors Stanton Glantz, Laura Schmidt, and Cristin Kearns expose how sugar industry execs buried the truth about the risks of sugar consumption in an effort to push their product on an unsuspecting public.
Authors of the analysis, published in September 2016’s JAMA Internal Medicine, combed public archives to uncover the trove of nearly 1,600 pages of internal sugar industry communications referred to as the “sugar papers.” The documents expose a sinister scheme to boost sales of sugar during a time in our collective history when public health was facing unprecedented risks – risks that spotlighted an increasingly unhealthy American diet.
In the mid-1950s, the medical research community began to link sugar consumption with high blood cholesterol and triglyceride levels – two of the primary risk factors for coronary heart disease (CHD). The sugar papers reveal that executives at Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), an international sugar industry trade organization, were aware of the link between sugar and CHD. Heart disease was the leading cause of death in the United States, a distinction it still holds today, and public concern about preventing CHD was growing.This dangerous association did not deter SRFs plans to grow nationwide sugar consumption, a harmful mandate that we know in retrospect was staggeringly successful. Since the 1950s, Americans’ sugar intake has increased three-fold. It is estimated that an average American now consumes between 120-170 pounds of sugar each year....read more>>>...