# The sugar industry secretly funded research to shift blame for heart disease from sugar onto dietary fat

**Verdict: Proven.** 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.

Category: Science, Space & Technology · Era: 1960s–2020s · First circulated: The underlying conduct dates to 1965–1967; the documented account reached the public in September 2016, when Cristin Kearns, Laura Schmidt, and Stanton Glantz published their analysis of the archived 'Sugar Papers' in JAMA Internal Medicine · 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
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/sugar-industry-heart-disease

## Summary
In September 2016 a paper in JAMA Internal Medicine turned a long-running suspicion into a documented case. Working from internal industry records she had found in library archives, UCSF researcher Cristin Kearns and colleagues showed that the Sugar Research Foundation, the sugar industry's trade group, had secretly paid three Harvard nutrition scientists in 1965 to produce a literature review that downplayed sugar as a cause of coronary heart disease and pointed the finger at dietary fat and cholesterol. The review appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967 with no mention of its funding or of the industry's hand in shaping it. A follow-up in 2017 documented a buried industry-funded animal study whose early results pointed the wrong way for sugar. This case file lays out what the documents establish and, just as important, what they do not. The secret funding and the intent to influence are real. The sweeping claim that the sugar lobby alone rewrote nutrition science, or caused the modern obesity crisis, goes well beyond the record, and reputable historians have pushed back on it. The verdict is substantiated, scoped to the documented conduct.

## The claim
That 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.

## Origin and timeline
- 1950s–1960s: Rates 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.
- 1964: Internal 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.
- 1965: The 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).
- 1967: The 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.
- 1967–1971: The 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–2000s: US 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.
- 2016: Cristin 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.
- 2017: Kearns 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.
- 2018: In 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.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: The sugar industry secretly paid scientists to write the 1967 review.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: The industry did not just fund the review, it shaped what it said.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: The industry also buried research when its own study pointed the wrong way.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: This one paper single-handedly redirected nutrition science onto fat.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: The 1967 review's pro-fat conclusion was simply wrong, invented to sell sugar.
  Evidence: 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.
- Claim: The proof is a 'smoking gun' showing the industry corrupted the findings.
  Evidence: 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 verdict is scoped to the concealment and intent, not to a proven corruption of the science itself.

## Why people believe it
- The core of it is documented and the documents are the industry's own. A trade group secretly paid scientists, hid the funding, and shaped a review to protect its product: that is not a rumor but a paper trail, and a paper trail is persuasive precisely because it is hard to wave away.
- It fits a pattern the public has learned to expect. Tobacco, lead, and fossil-fuel companies really did fund science to manufacture doubt, so a sugar version of the same playbook sounds not just plausible but familiar, and the familiarity makes people quick to accept the broadest version.
- It offers a clean villain for a painful, complicated story. Decades of confusing and reversing dietary advice, low-fat foods that did not make people healthier, rising obesity: it is easier and more satisfying to blame a single lying industry than to sit with the messy reality that the science was genuinely uncertain and evolving.
- The 'they hid a study that pointed the other way' detail lands hard. Project 259 gives the story a buried-evidence beat that feels like proof of guilty knowledge, and that emotional weight tends to carry the wider claim along with it.

## Open questions
- 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.

## Sources
- Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents, Kearns CE, Schmidt LA, Glantz SA, JAMA Internal Medicine (2016): https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/2548255
- 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): https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2003460
- Sugar Papers Reveal Industry Role in Shifting National Heart Disease Focus to Saturated Fat, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) (2016): https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2016/09/404081/sugar-papers-reveal-industry-role-shifting-national-heart-disease-focus
- Sugar Industry Suppressed Evidence of Health Risks of Sucrose, University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) (2017): https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2017/11/409116/sugar-industry-suppressed-evidence-health-risks-sucrose
- Sugar industry secretly paid for favorable Harvard research, STAT News (2016): https://www.statnews.com/2016/09/12/sugar-industry-harvard-research/
- 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists To Point Blame At Fat, NPR (2016): https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/09/13/493739074/50-years-ago-sugar-industry-quietly-paid-scientists-to-point-blame-at-fat
- Dietary Fats, Carbohydrates and Atherosclerotic Vascular Disease, McGandy RB, Hegsted DM, Stare FJ, New England Journal of Medicine (the SRF-funded 1967 review) (1967): https://www.nejm.org/doi/abs/10.1056/NEJM196707272770405
- Was there ever really a “sugar conspiracy”?, Johns DM, Oppenheimer GM, Science (2018): https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aaq1618
- An industry-funded attempt to cast doubt on science-based sugar guidelines?, The Nutrition Source, Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (2016): https://nutritionsource.hsph.harvard.edu/2016/12/22/attempt-to-cast-doubt-on-science-based-sugar-guidelines/

Rated by The Conspiratory, a neutral, sourced encyclopedia of conspiracy theories. Full page: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/sugar-industry-heart-disease