The sugar industry secretly funded research to shift blame for heart disease from sugar onto dietary fat
Where the evidence lands: SupportedThat in the mid-1960s the Sugar Research Foundation covertly funded and directed a review of the science on diet and heart disease, written by prominent Harvard nutritionists and published in a leading medical journal, in order to steer blame for coronary heart disease toward saturated fat and away from sugar; that the industry concealed its sponsorship and its role in setting the review's aims and selecting the studies it addressed; that it later funded and then buried animal research suggesting sucrose might be harmful; and that this influence helped shape decades of dietary guidance that treated fat, not sugar, as the primary dietary villain.
Believed by: Widely accepted among nutrition scientists, public-health researchers, and mainstream journalists after the 2016 and 2017 papers; invoked broadly online as shorthand for corporate capture of science, sometimes well past what the record supports
The full story
What the Sugar Papers actually show
The case rests on paper, and the paper is the sugar industry's own. In the 2000s and 2010s, a Colorado dentist turned researcher named Cristin Kearns began combing library and university archives for the internal records of the sugar trade, eventually assembling a collection that became known as the “Sugar Papers.” Among them were the files of the Sugar Research Foundation(SRF), the forerunner of today's Sugar Association, from the crucial years of the 1960s.
What those files documented, as Kearns, Laura Schmidt, and Stanton Glantz of UC San Francisco laid out in JAMA Internal Medicine in September 2016, was a deliberate effort to shape the science. At the time, heart disease was surging and researchers disagreed sharply about the cause. One camp, led by Ancel Keys, blamed saturated fat and cholesterol. Another, led by the British physiologist John Yudkin, blamed sugar. The question was open, and for the sugar industry it was a threat.
The foundation's response, the documents show, was to commission a review of the literature that would answer the threat. Designated Project 226, it was assigned to three nutrition scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health: Robert McGandy, D. Mark Hegsted, and the department's chairman, Frederick Stare. SRF vice president John Hicksonset the review's objective, sent the authors articles unfavorable to sugar for them to rebut, and received drafts as the work progressed. The agreed payment was about $6,500, roughly $48,000 to $50,000 in 2016 dollars.
The result, a two-part review titled Dietary Fats, Carbohydrates and Atherosclerotic Vascular Disease, ran in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967. It concluded that the one dietary change that mattered for preventing heart disease was cutting fat and cholesterol, and it worked to discredit the studies pointing at sugar. Nowhere did it disclose that the sugar industry had paid for it, chosen its target, or shaped its scope. The journal did not require such disclosure until 1984, so the omission broke no rule of the day; it simply left readers, and the decades of researchers who cited the review, unaware of who had commissioned it and why.
The study that pointed the wrong way
The 2016 paper established the funding of a review. A second paper, in PLOS Biology in 2017, added a sharper detail: an instance where the industry appears to have funded original research and then walked away from it when the early results looked bad for sugar.
The study was Project 259, an animal experiment led by W. F. R. Pover at the University of Birmingham between 1967 and 1971, comparing what happened when rats were fed sucrose versus starch. According to the documents, the early findings were unwelcome: sucrose appeared to raise blood lipids, and there was a signal, through an enzyme called beta-glucuronidase, that it might be connected to bladder cancer. When the researchers sought funding to continue, an SRF official described the project's value to the foundation as “nil,” the money was not renewed, and the results were never published.
It is worth being careful about what this does and does not prove. Terminating an inconclusive animal study is, on its own, an ordinary thing to do, and a rat model is not a finding about human disease. What makes Project 259 land is the timing and the pattern: the foundation dropped a study it had paid for at the moment its results turned against sugar, having elsewhere paid to steer a review toward fat. Read beside Project 226, it looks less like a routine budget decision and more like a consistent posture toward evidence, keep what helps, shelve what hurts.
Why the story travels so far, so fast
Part of what makes the sugar story so sticky is that it slots into a template the public already trusts. We now know, from court cases and document troves, that the tobacco industry funded science to obscure the harms of smoking, that lead and chemical companies did similar, and that fossil-fuel firms worked to manufacture doubt about climate change. Against that backdrop, a sugar version of the same playbook does not sound outlandish. It sounds expected.
It also answers a real and frustrating question. For decades Americans were told to fear fat, filled their carts with low-fat products that were frequently loaded with added sugar, and did not get healthier. When the advice keeps changing and the outcomes keep disappointing, a single dishonest industry is a far more satisfying culprit than the truth, which is that nutrition science in the 1960s was genuinely uncertain and that dietary guidance is shaped by many hands at once.
A trade group paid scientists, hid the money, and steered the conclusion. That much is not a theory; it is in their own files.
And the documented core really is strong. This is not a case built on insinuation or a suggestive coincidence. It is built on the industry's own correspondence, showing intent, payment, and concealment in black and white. That solidity is exactly why the story deserves to be told plainly, and also why it is worth resisting the temptation to inflate it into more than the records can bear.
The historians' pushback, and what survives it
In 2018, two historians of medicine, David Merritt Johns and Gerald Oppenheimer, published a pointed challenge in Science. Their argument was not that the funding never happened; it was that the popular framing, a “sugar conspiracy,” distorts the history. There was, they wrote, “no smoking gun” and no conspiracy they could identify. The SRF, on their reading, funded mainstream, respected scientists whose conclusions largely matched the best evidence of the era, and Hegsted in particular was a “very data-driven” researcher who was known, when funded by other industries, to reach conclusions his sponsors disliked.
The point cuts at a specific overreach. If the Harvard scientists already believed, on the science, that saturated fat and cholesterol were the main dietary culprits, and much of the field did, then it is genuinely hard to prove that the sugar money changed the conclusion rather than simply flowing to people who were going to say it anyway. The 1967 review's emphasis on fat was not invented from nothing; saturated fat is, by modern understanding, a real cardiovascular risk factor. So the claim that the review was pure fabrication, or that it alone bent the entire trajectory of nutrition policy, does not hold.
Kearns, Glantz, and allies such as NYU nutrition scientist Marion Nestleanswer that this misses the institutional point. Whether or not any individual scientist was sincere, an industry identified a threat, paid to shape the literature addressing it, concealed its role, and elsewhere buried research that cut the other way. That is the manufactured-doubt pattern regardless of anyone's private convictions, and it operated on a live public-health question.
Both of those things can be true at once, and that is the honest resolution. The pushback defeats the maximal claim (a lone conspiracy that rewrote nutrition science and drove the obesity epidemic). It does not touch the documented core (secret funding, a steered review, hidden sponsorship, and a quietly abandoned study). What survives the pushback is precisely what this file rates as substantiated.
Where the evidence lands
The precise finding is narrower than the headline and stronger for it. It is substantiated, on the sugar industry's own records, that in the mid-1960s the Sugar Research Foundation secretly paid Harvard nutrition scientists to produce a review that played down sugar and emphasized fat as a cause of heart disease, that it set the review's aim and supplied the studies to rebut, that the resulting 1967 paper hid its funding, and that the foundation separately dropped an animal study once its results pointed to possible harms from sucrose. None of that is a theory. It is documented conduct.
What is notsubstantiated is the version that has traveled furthest: that this one paid review single-handedly redirected nutrition science, that it is why guidelines demonized fat for decades, or that the sugar lobby thereby caused the modern obesity crisis. The fat-and-cholesterol view had its own powerful, independent momentum; the review's conclusion was defensible for its time; and serious historians dispute how much the money changed anything the scientists would not have written regardless. Those are real limits, and honesty requires stating them alongside the finding.
The concealed funding is proven. The claim that it rewrote nutrition science by itself is not. The honest verdict holds both.
So the case earns a substantiated verdict, carefully scoped: to the secret sponsorship and the documented intent to influence the debate, not to the sweeping causal story often built on top of them. It is a real and instructive episode in how commercial money can shape science, and it is more persuasive, not less, when it is not oversold.
What's still unexplained
- How much the concealed funding actually changed what the 1967 review said is genuinely unresolved. The authors, especially Hegsted, held sincere pro-fat views that were mainstream at the time, so it is hard to separate 'the industry bought a conclusion' from 'the industry funded scientists who already believed this.' Historians on both sides read the same documents differently, and the record does not settle it.
- Whether industry influence meaningfully shaped later national dietary guidelines, as opposed to those guidelines emerging from the broader fat-cholesterol consensus, is debated. The 1967 review was cited and influential, but tracing a direct causal line from it to specific policy decades later is more assertion than proof.
- The framing of Project 259's abandonment is disputed. Critics note that terminating an inconclusive or costly animal study is common and not necessarily sinister, while Kearns and colleagues read the timing (dropping it just as results turned unfavorable) as telling. What the surviving records cannot show is the unwritten reasoning inside the foundation.
- How representative these episodes are of the industry's conduct overall is unknown. Two documented cases establish that it happened at least twice; they do not, by themselves, prove a systematic decades-long campaign, which is how the story is often told.
Point by point
The claim: The sugar industry secretly paid scientists to write the 1967 review.
What the record shows: Confirmed by the industry's own records. The 2016 JAMA Internal Medicine analysis reproduces Sugar Research Foundation correspondence showing the SRF commissioned the review as 'Project 226' and paid McGandy and Hegsted, overseen by Stare, about $6,500. The New England Journal of Medicine review disclosed none of this. At the time the journal did not require conflict-of-interest disclosure, which is part of why it went unremarked for decades, but the payment and its concealment are not in dispute.
The claim: The industry did not just fund the review, it shaped what it said.
What the record shows: Supported by the documents. Vice president John Hickson set the review's objective, sent the Harvard authors articles that were unfavorable to sugar for them to address, and received and commented on drafts. Hickson's stated aim, in the records quoted by Kearns and colleagues, was a review of 'the several papers which find some special metabolic peril in sucrose.' The scope and framing were steered toward exonerating sugar, though how much the authors' own scientific views already aligned with that aim is a separate question the documents cannot fully settle.
The claim: The industry also buried research when its own study pointed the wrong way.
What the record shows: Documented in the 2017 PLOS Biology paper. The SRF funded Project 259, an animal study comparing sucrose and starch. When early results suggested sucrose raised blood lipids and might be linked to bladder cancer, the foundation described the project's continued value as 'nil', declined further funding, and the findings were never published. This is a second, independent instance of the same pattern: sponsor research, then quietly drop it when the results are inconvenient.
The claim: This one paper single-handedly redirected nutrition science onto fat.
What the record shows: Not established, and this is where the popular version overreaches. The saturated-fat-and-cholesterol view of heart disease had powerful independent champions (notably Ancel Keys) and a large body of contemporary research behind it; it did not depend on a single industry-funded review. The 1967 review was influential, but attributing decades of fat-focused dietary guidance to it alone ignores the wider scientific and political currents that produced those guidelines. The documents show intent to influence, not proof of a science-wide takeover.
The claim: The 1967 review's pro-fat conclusion was simply wrong, invented to sell sugar.
What the record shows: Only partly, and the distinction matters. Saturated fat and cholesterol are, by modern understanding, genuine contributors to cardiovascular risk, so the review's emphasis on them was not fabricated nonsense; it reflected a real and mainstream scientific position of the era. The documented fault is narrower and specific: the concealed sponsorship, and the deliberate downplaying of sugar's possible role at a moment when that role was an open scientific question. The review was slanted and its funding hidden; that is different from every word of it being false.
The claim: The proof is a 'smoking gun' showing the industry corrupted the findings.
What the record shows: Contested by historians. In a 2018 Science article, David Merritt Johns and Gerald Oppenheimer argued there was 'no smoking gun' and 'no sugar conspiracy', at least none they could identify: the SRF funded respected, data-driven scientists whose conclusions often tracked the evidence, and Hegsted in particular was known to publish findings that cut against his sponsors' interests. Kearns, Glantz, and supporters such as NYU's Marion Nestle maintain the funding and intent are compelling and damning. The dispute is real, and it is why the honest verdict is scoped to the concealment and intent, not to a proven corruption of the science itself.
Other readings
Angles that don't fit neatly into the claim or its rebuttal, laid out and weighed, not endorsed.
The 'no conspiracy, just ordinary bias' reading
Johns and Oppenheimer's position is not that the funding did not happen, but that calling it a 'conspiracy' distorts the past. On this view the SRF did what many interests did in an era of lax disclosure: it funded credible scientists whose existing views were congenial to it. The scientists were not bought puppets, the fat-cholesterol conclusion was defensible for its time, and reading the episode as a smoking-gun plot flatters a modern anti-sugar narrative while obscuring how genuinely uncertain the science was. This is a serious argument from working historians, and taking it seriously is part of getting the verdict right rather than overselling it.
The 'this is the tobacco playbook' reading
The opposing emphasis, associated with Kearns, Glantz, and Nestle, is that focusing on whether the individual scientists were sincere misses the institutional point. An industry identified a threat to its product, funded and steered research to blunt it, concealed its hand, and dropped inconvenient results: that is the manufactured-doubt template regardless of any one researcher's beliefs, and it had real influence on a public-health debate. Both readings can be partly right, which is why the file rates the documented conduct as substantiated while declining to endorse the maximal causal claims layered on top of it.
Timeline
- 1950s–1960sRates of coronary heart disease climb in the United States and rival explanations compete. One camp, associated with Ancel Keys, blames saturated fat and cholesterol; another, associated with British physiologist John Yudkin, argues that dietary sugar is a major driver. The science is genuinely unsettled at the time.
- 1964Internal Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) documents record concern that the emerging focus on sugar threatens the industry. SRF vice president John Hickson discusses countering 'negative attitudes toward sugar' by funding research and shaping the scientific literature.
- 1965The SRF commissions 'Project 226', a literature review on diet and coronary heart disease, from nutrition scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health: Robert McGandy, D. Mark Hegsted, and department chair Frederick Stare. Hickson sets the objective, supplies articles to address, and reviews drafts. The scientists are paid about $6,500 (roughly $48,000–50,000 in 2016 dollars).
- 1967The two-part review, 'Dietary Fats, Carbohydrates and Atherosclerotic Vascular Disease', appears in the New England Journal of Medicine. It concludes that reducing dietary fat and cholesterol is the key to preventing heart disease and it dismisses studies implicating sugar. It carries no disclosure of the SRF's funding or involvement; the journal did not require such disclosure until 1984.
- 1967–1971The SRF funds 'Project 259', an animal study led by W. F. R. Pover at the University of Birmingham examining sucrose versus starch. Early results suggest sucrose raises blood lipids and may be linked, via an enzyme called beta-glucuronidase, to bladder cancer. The foundation declines further funding, and the results are not published.
- 1980s–2000sUS and other dietary guidance emphasizes cutting fat, and low-fat products proliferate, often with added sugar. Whether industry influence helped entrench this fat-first framing, or whether it simply matched the mainstream science of the era, remains debated.
- 2016Cristin Kearns, Laura Schmidt, and Stanton Glantz of UC San Francisco publish a historical analysis in JAMA Internal Medicine, built on the archived 'Sugar Papers', documenting the SRF's secret funding and direction of the 1967 review. Coverage follows in the New York Times, NPR, STAT, and elsewhere.
- 2017Kearns and colleagues publish in PLOS Biology on Project 259, reporting that the SRF ended an animal study after early findings pointed to possible harms from sucrose, without publishing the results.
- 2018In the journal Science, historians David Merritt Johns and Gerald Oppenheimer publish a rebuttal arguing there was no true 'sugar conspiracy': the industry funded mainstream scientists whose conclusions largely tracked the evidence of the time, and the narrative, they contend, overstates the case.
Supported. The concealed funding is documented, and so is the intent. Internal Sugar Research Foundation records, analyzed by UCSF researchers in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2016, show the trade group paid Harvard nutrition scientists in 1965 to write a review that played down sugar's role in coronary heart disease and emphasized fat and cholesterol, then published it in 1967 without disclosing who paid for it or that the industry had set its objective and supplied studies to critique. A 2017 PLOS Biology paper documents a second case: an industry-funded animal study, Project 259, that pointed to possible harms from sucrose and was ended without publication. What is substantiated is narrow and serious: the secret sponsorship and the effort to shape the debate. What is not established is the popular overreach, that this one review single-handedly redirected nutrition science or caused the obesity epidemic; the review's pro-fat conclusion also matched mainstream science of its day, and historians dispute how much the funding actually changed the findings. Rated substantiated for the documented conduct, with that scope kept firmly in view.
Reviewed by The Conspiratory Editors · Last reviewed July 18, 2026 · How we rate
Sources
- 1.Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents, Kearns CE, Schmidt LA, Glantz SA, JAMA Internal Medicine (2016)
- 2.Sugar industry sponsorship of germ-free rodent studies linking sucrose to hyperlipidemia and cancer: An historical analysis of internal documents, Kearns CE, Apollonio D, Glantz SA, PLOS Biology (2017)
- 3.Sugar Papers Reveal Industry Role in Shifting National Heart Disease Focus to Saturated Fat, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) (2016)
- 4.Sugar Industry Suppressed Evidence of Health Risks of Sucrose, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) (2017)
- 5.Sugar industry secretly paid for favorable Harvard research, STAT News (2016)
- 6.50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat, NPR (2016)
- 7.Dietary Fats, Carbohydrates and Atherosclerotic Vascular Disease, McGandy RB, Hegsted DM, Stare FJ, New England Journal of Medicine (the SRF-funded 1967 review) (1967)
- 8.Was there ever really a “sugar conspiracy”?, Johns DM, Oppenheimer GM, Science (2018)
- 9.An industry-funded attempt to cast doubt on science-based sugar guidelines?, The Nutrition Source, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2016)
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