Dr. Shawn Baker on history: what the evidence says · JRE #1050

What the evidence says 01 / RECORD

The claim describes a well-documented episode of sugar-industry influence on nutrition science but misplaces the timeline by roughly a decade. A 2016 JAMA Internal Medicine analysis of internal industry documents (Kearns, Schmidt, and Glantz) found that the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) paid Harvard researchers D. Mark Hegsted and Robert McGandy, overseen by Fredrick Stare, the equivalent of about $48,000-$50,000 in 2016 dollars to produce a literature review minimizing sucrose's role in coronary heart disease and pointing instead to saturated fat and cholesterol. The SRF commissioned this review (Project 226) in 1965, after media attention to studies linking sucrose to heart disease, and the review was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967 without disclosing the industry funding. The 1950s is relevant only as an earlier strategic phase: in 1954 the SRF's president, noting that cutting dietary fat from 40% to 20% of calories would raise per-capita sugar consumption by more than a third, flagged low-fat-diet promotion as a way to grow sugar's market share, and the industry spent roughly $5.3 million (2016 dollars) on related messaging in the years that followed. But no payments to scientists or industry-shaped publications occurred in the 1950s itself. The core allegation, that the sugar industry funded and helped shape undisclosed research shifting blame to saturated fat, is substantially well-supported; the '1950s' framing for when the payments and publication happened is inaccurate, since those events occurred in 1965 and 1967.