Sugar industry won PR award for getting FDA to blame fat

Long gone are the days when the average consumer felt the need to research the safety of the food and medicines they receive or the reputations of their producers. 

Government take over

Since the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, expanding the role of the USDA Bureau of Chemistry (predecessor to today’s FDA), the great majority of the public depends on, and trusts, the government to properly screen what goes into their bodies, often with unfavorable results. Nonetheless, private food inspection is so marginalized that every organization listed in Wikipedia’s international list of food safety organizations is either a government agency or a multinational group of government representatives. 

Less safe

Trusting the FDA to keep dangerous foods off the shelves, and knowing their tax dollars are already funding the FDA’s activities, little interest exists today in the private sector’s ability to provide food safety guidance. The predominant feeling is, “If it's on the shelf, it was checked out.” This becomes problematic for the consumer when the government officials they trust to keep poisonous items (both the ones that work quickly and the ones that take years to cause damage) off the shelves turn out to have something in mind besides the safety of the consumer.

Less Freedom

Each new law and regulation requires a government agency to enforce it, leading to a greater bureaucracy.  Big government means less freedom. Add to that the potential for criminal penalties for violating new rules. Bans on unpasteurized milk, for example, though such milk is considered by many to be safe and beneficial, can land grocers in jail for not properly policing their store shelves. And if they do keep it out of their stores, they, in any case, have forfeited the freedom to stock what they may consider a healthy item.

How it was

Before the industrial revolution, people often got to know the farmers they would see selling their wares on Market Days, if they weren’t eating food they made themselves or purchased from neighbors. 

The International Association for Food Protection (IAFP) was founded in 1911, when urbanization meant that a great percentage of children were no longer getting milk from their own or a neighbor’s cow, even as residential refrigerators were yet to be introduced. Many cities and states did not have government mandated milk inspections then and, in those areas which did, corruption was often rampant. According to the IAFP,

Milk inspectors included some men who had been appointed to the office purely as a reward for loyalty to the political party currently in power; some had obtained their positions despite having “absolutely no practical or theoretical knowledge of the fundamental principles of milk production, transportation or distribution.” [Emphasis added].

Without friends in the mass media to shift the blame to a lack of social distancing or other causes unrelated to milk, citizens became aware that a lack of cleanliness in milk production, transportation and storage was leading to high infant mortality rates. And they looked beyond government for a solution, relying, for example, on seeing non-governmental seals like, the Welded Wire Seal, endorsed by private food protection agencies:

Non-governmental certifications today

Such consumer led “checking” of food products is limited today to a tiny minority of consumers looking, for example, for non-GMO certification or Kosher certification.

A Google search reveals that there are actually multiple organizations providing non-GMO certification, sometimes by merely listing them on their website. Likewise there is a healthy competition between different kosher certification organizations. All these organizations are non-governmental, and all rely on their published standards and word-of-mouth reputations.

Government bias today

Unlike non-governmental inspectors, FDA staff have no competition and do not answer to a private owner concerned with the reputation of the organization. On the contrary, the political appointee who heads that government agency may expect to soon switch over to the very private industries they are politically appointed to supervise, meaning their profit incentive may not lead them to protect the FDA’s image, but to protect their future employment potential. Such was reported by Science in FDA's revolving door: Companies often hire agency staffers who managed their successful drug reviews.

This is quite different from the original milk inspectors who may have been incompetent but lacked any interest in ceritifying dangerous milk. 

“Give that kid a coke” - Coca-Cola and Sugar refiners say it’s safe

In 2016, National Public Radio (NPR) reported the results of a study entitled, Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research, published in JAMA Internal Medicine. As NPR revealed in its headline, the study found that 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat. The authors were able to obtain internal documents showing that corporate sugar growers and refiners created the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF, today the Sugar Association) with one goal, according NPR:

. . . to “refute" concerns about sugar's possible role in heart disease. The SRF then sponsored research by Harvard scientists that did just that. The result was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, with no disclosure of the sugar industry funding. 

The sugar-funded project in question was a literature review, examining a variety of studies and experiments. It suggested there were major problems with all the studies that implicated sugar [as a cause of coronary heart disease], and concluded that cutting fat out of American diets was the best way to address coronary heart disease. [Emphases added].

In a stunning conflict of interest beyond the undisclosed funding, the report found that,

One of the researchers was the chairman of Harvard's Public Health Nutrition Department — and an ad hoc member of SRF's board.  [Emphases added].

This conflict played out as may be expected, with one of the authors of the new study, Cristin Kearns, explaining,

“. . . the authors [of the SFR study] applied a different standard" to different studies — looking very critically at research that implicated sugar, and ignoring problems with studies that found dangers in fat.

In shocking examples of study bias, 

One study that found a health benefit when people ate less sugar and more vegetables was dismissed because that dietary change was not feasible.

Another study, in which rats were given a diet low in fat and high in sugar, was rejected because "such diets are rarely consumed by man."

In contrast, studies that examined risks of fat, with similar designs, were accepted:

Citing "few study characteristics and no quantitative results," the authors concluded that cutting out fat was "no doubt" the best dietary intervention to prevent coronary heart disease.

NPR concludes that the problem of misleading industry backed research certainly did not end with this 1967 study.

The documents in question are five decades old, but the larger issue is of the moment, as Marion Nestle notes in a commentary in the same issue of JAMA Internal Medicine:

"Is it really true that food companies deliberately set out to manipulate research in their favor? Yes, it is, and the practice continues. In 2015, the New York Times obtained emails revealing Coca-Cola's cozy relationships with sponsored researchers who were conducting studies aimed at minimizing the effects of sugary drinks on obesity. Even more recently, the Associated Press obtained emails showing how a candy trade association funded and influenced studies to show that children who eat sweets have healthier body weights than those who do not."

PR Campaign

Together with its funding of research claiming sugar to be safe, Dixie Crystals, Domino, and other sugar industry giants financed a public relations campaign to combat growing public awareness of the links between sugar, and obesity and diabetes. They paid six physicians and two dentists to defend sugar as part of a new Food & Nutrition Advisory Council. The council produced a white paper in 1975 which was accompanied by a press release declaring, “Scientists dispel sugar fears.” In an exposè entitled, Big Sugar’s Sweet Little Lies, How the industry kept scientists from asking: Does sugar kill?, Mother Jones reports that the press release, like the scientific paper described above, “neglected to mention that it was funded by the sugar industry.”

PR Award!

Incredibly, the year after the sugar industry's PR campaign, the executives applied for and won an award for influencing the public!

. . . executives from the Sugar Association stepped up to the podium of a Chicago ballroom to accept the Oscar of the public relations world, the Silver Anvil award for excellence in “the forging of public opinion.”

The executives even promoted themselves for the award, writing in their entry form that their PR work,

. . . contributed to a “highly supportive” FDA ruling, which … made it “unlikely that sugar will be subject to legislative restriction in coming years.” 

Displaying some level of self-awareness, though, the executives did not boast to the Silver Anvil Awards committee that the FDA committee reviewing whether sugar was to receive its GRAS (generally recognized as safe) designation, was loaded with their representatives.

[The safety committee] was led by biochemist George W. Irving Jr., who had previously served two years as chairman of the scientific advisory board of the International Sugar Research Foundation [and] committee member, Samuel Fomon, had received sugar-industry funding for three of the five years prior to the sugar review. 

Aftermath

What was the result of the sugar industry’s “research,” PR and placement of its paid scientists on FDA review boards?

In January 1976, the GRAS committee published its preliminary conclusions, noting that while sugar probably contributed to tooth decay, it was not a “hazard to the public.” 

The draft review dismissed the diabetes link as “circumstantial” and called the connection to cardiovascular disease “less than clear,” with fat playing a greater role.  

Initially, the USDA, which had been doing its own sugar research, opposed the designation of sugar as safe, and its Carbohydrate Nutrition Laboratory presented the FDA with “. . . abundant evidence that sucrose is one of the dietary factors responsible for obesity, diabetes, and heart disease.”

After the FDA report defending sugar, though, the USDA followed the FDA’s lead. In its 1985 dietary guidelines, the USDA retained its previous recommendation to avoid an excess of sugar but clarified that, “too much sugar in your diet does not cause diabetes.”

Even the US surgeon general followed suit, downplaying the harm of added sugar then and even now,  despite boasting on their website that:

The U.S. Surgeon General is the Nation’s Doctor, providing Americans with the best scientific information available on how to improve their health and reduce the risk of illness and injury. The Surgeon General oversees the U.S. Public Health Service (USPHS) Commissioned Corps, an elite group of over 6,000 uniformed officers who are public health professionals. The USPHS mission is to protect, promote, and advance the health of our nation.

But instead of offering a specific warning against high sugar-foods as the cause of diabetes or heart disease, the surgeon general merely warns that obesity leads to illness and emphasizes that there are many causes of obesity:

Obesity in early life has been found to increase the risk for various diseases in adulthood, including diabetes and heart disease, in part because obese children are likely to become obese adults …

In addition to consuming too many calories and not getting enough physical activity, genes, metabolism, behavior, environment, and culture can also play a role in causing people to be overweight and obese….

A healthy diet is also important … Stress is another contributing factor to overweight and obesity. [Emphases added].

Just calories?

Is the problem of sweetened food just the added calories? Is there something dangerous about refined sugar that goes beyond the energy content? If there is, the FDA, USDA and surgeon general failed to warn us, even as the government closed gyms, told us to stay home for our health (often surrounded by kitchen cabinets stacked with factory foods with sugar as a top ingredient), and childhood obesity worsened during the COVID-19 pandemic, as did adult obesity.

Join us for our continuation of this series as we take a closer look at:

• The role of refined sugar in metabolic syndrome
• The effect of removing fat from items like frozen yogurt (and replacing it with sugar)
• The authorities receiving our tax dollars, ostensibly, to determine food safety