Did the sugar industry pay Harvard scientists to blame fat?

It paid them, and nobody disclosed it. On the evidence of the industry's own documents, a sugar trade group funded and steered a review by Harvard scientists that put the blame for heart disease on fat and cholesterol. Whether the money changed what they concluded is less certain, and the researchers who found the papers say so themselves. Their 2016 analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine, by Cristin Kearns, Laura Schmidt and Stanton Glantz, concerns the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), founded in 1943 by members of the US sugar industry and later renamed the Sugar Association.

In 1962 the SRF became concerned by evidence that a low-fat diet high in sugar could raise cholesterol. In December 1964 its director of research, John Hickson, proposed that the SRF could embark on a major program to counter the British physiologist John Yudkin and other negative attitudes toward sugar.

In July 1965 the SRF approved Project 226, a literature review by D. Mark Hegsted, a Harvard professor of nutrition, and Robert McGandy, overseen by Frederick Stare. The SRF eventually paid Hegsted and McGandy $6,500. It set the review's objective, contributed articles, and received drafts. Hickson told Hegsted the SRF's particular interest was the claim that sugar made an inordinate contribution to problems blamed on fat, and Hegsted replied that they would cover it as well as they could.

The review appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967. It concluded there was no doubt that the only dietary change needed to prevent heart disease was to cut dietary cholesterol and swap saturated for polyunsaturated fat. The authors' other research funding was disclosed; the SRF's money and role were not.

The 2016 authors are explicit about the limits: there is no direct evidence the industry wrote or changed the manuscript, and the evidence that it shaped the conclusions is circumstantial. The Sugar Association replied that disclosure standards were non-existent or less stringent in the 1960s.