The sugar industry funded studies that masked the link between sugar and heart disease. The papers show that the Sugar Research Foundation (now called the Sugar Association), paid large sums of money to researchers in the 1960s and 1970s who conducted studies on behalf of the foundation. US policymakers relied, in part, on these studies to enact policies that pointed to fat, not sugar, as the primary cause of heart disease. “Our findings are a wake-up call…that the sugary industry, like the tobacco industry, seeks to protect profits over public health,” one of the authors notes. Both papers in JAMA argue that the sugar industry continues to engage in similar deception.
