The Sugar Research Foundation's funded science
In the 1960s a sugar industry trade group paid Harvard nutrition researchers to write a review that shifted blame for heart disease from sugar to saturated fat. The funding was not disclosed. The review shaped dietary guidance for decades.
Why this verdict
Confirmed by internal Sugar Research Foundation correspondence recovered from university archives and published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2016.
- Period
- Region
- Reading time
- Sources
01The claim
That the sugar industry covertly funded and steered nutrition research in order to deflect emerging evidence that sucrose contributed to coronary heart disease, and that this influenced official dietary advice for a generation.
02Where it came from
By the early 1960s two competing hypotheses about coronary heart disease were live: John Yudkin's, which implicated sugar, and Ancel Keys's, which implicated dietary fat. The Sugar Research Foundation understood the stakes commercially. In 1965 it commissioned a literature review — internally designated Project 226 — from three researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health, at a cost of about $6,500, roughly $50,000 today.
03What the record shows
✓ CONFIRMED — It happened. The documents exist.
Cristin Kearns, a dentist turned researcher, located the foundation's internal correspondence in university archives, and the analysis was published in JAMA Internal Medicine in September 2016. The letters show the industry setting the objective in advance, supplying articles for inclusion, and reviewing drafts. The foundation's vice president wrote to one author that 'we are well aware of your particular interest' and would await the outcome with interest; the author replied that the review would cover the material the foundation had in mind.
The resulting two-part review appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, dismissed the sugar studies on methodological grounds while treating fat studies charitably, and disclosed no industry funding — the journal did not require disclosure until 1984. One of its authors, D. Mark Hegsted, went on to help draft the first federal dietary goals in 1977; another became chair of Harvard's nutrition department.
A companion 2017 paper documented that the foundation had also terminated a rat study, Project 259, that was producing results suggesting sucrose affected cardiovascular risk markers, and never published it.
The honest limit: this does not prove that sugar rather than fat causes heart disease, and the paper's authors said so explicitly. It proves the evidence base was corrupted at the point where public advice was formed.
04What it cost
Low-fat dietary guidance dominated American and European public health advice from the late 1970s into the 2000s, and food manufacturers replaced fat with sugar in reformulated products. Disentangling how much of the subsequent rise in obesity and metabolic disease is attributable to that shift is still an active research question. The episode is now a standard case study in conflict-of-interest policy, and is a large part of why nutrition journals require funding disclosure at all.