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Food Industry Funding of Nutrition Research
The Relevance of History for Current Debates
Marion Nestle JAMA Intern Med. Published online September 12, 2016
Industry-sponsored nutrition research, like that of research sponsored by the tobacco, chemical, and pharmaceutical industries, almost invariably produces results that confirm the benefits or lack of harm of the sponsor’s products, even when independently sponsored research comes to opposite conclusions. Although considerable evidence demonstrates that those industries deliberately influenced the design, results, and interpretation of the studies they paid for, much less is known about the influence of food-company sponsorship on nutrition research. Typically, the disclosure statements of sponsored nutrition studies state that the funder had no role in their design, conduct, interpretation, writing, or publication. Without a “smoking gun” it is difficult to prove otherwise.
In this issue of JAMA Internal Medicine, Kearns and colleagues report on having found a smoking gun. From a deep dive into archival documents from the 1950s and 1960s, they have produced compelling evidence that a sugar trade association not only paid for but also initiated and influenced research expressly to exonerate sugar as a major risk factor for coronary heart disease (CHD).
Although studies at that time indicated a relationship between high-sugar diets and CHD risk, the sugar association preferred scientists and policymakers to focus on the role of dietary fat and cholesterol. The association paid the equivalent of more than $48 000 in today’s dollars to 3 nutrition professors—at Harvard no less—to publish a research review that would refute evidence linking sugars to CHD.
The sponsored review appeared in 2 parts in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967. Its authors acknowledged support from the industry-funded Nutrition Foundation, but they did not mention the sugar association’s specific funding of their review. Their first article demonstrates a close correlation between sugar and fat “consumption” (actually amounts in the food supply) and mortality in 14 countries.
To minimize the association with sugar, the authors seem to have cherry-picked existing data. Despite their having previously published studies linking both fats and sugars to CHD risk, their review gave far more credence to studies implicating saturated fat than it did to those implicating sugars.
