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Harvard researchers got hefty sums to downplay role of sweets in heart disease.
Back in the 1960s, a sugar industry executive wrote fat checks to a group of Harvard researchers so that they’d downplay the links between sugar and heart disease in a prominent medical journal—and the researchers did it, according to historical documents reported Monday in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
One of those Harvard researchers went on to become the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture, where he set the stage for the federal government’s current dietary guidelines.
All in all, the corrupted researchers and skewed scientific literature successfully helped draw attention away from the health risks of sweets and shift the blame solely to fats—for nearly five decades. The low-fat, high-sugar diets that health experts subsequently encouraged are now seen as a main driver of the current obesity epidemic.
They convinced doctors, by a huge campaign that cholesterol was found in the wall of arteries that were developing atherosclerosis, and since you could lower the cholesterol in the blood, they argued that you would lower the cholesterol in the wall of the artery and that would prevent heart disease. Ravenschoff much later showed that none of those arguments had any evidence to support them. Atherosclerosis didn’t have a direct connection to heart disease, mortality, cholesterol in the blood didn’t have a connection directly with the formation of atherosclerosis and dietary fats, saturated fats didn’t create the cholesterol in the blood. But there was a slight back sliding in the ability to sell doctors on the ideas of eating unsaturated fats to lower cholesterol. There was a study with veterans in which putting them on the liquid oil diet eliminating saturated fats caused more of them to die of heart disease, and a lot more of them to die of cancer. There was some problem with that lipid theory already in the 1960s and John Udkin came out, he had been doing research since the mid 50s, 1972 he published this book arguing that sugar caused heart disease because it increased cholesterol! Already since I knew that cholesterol didn’t have anything to do with heart disease, except protecting against it to some extent. That was when I realised that he was right on the issue that sugar would increase cholesterol in some people.
Int: But didn’t the Japanese come out with a study, just recently too that showed that when they took off an atherosclerostic plaque it had a cholesterol bandage over oxidised rancid vegetable oil?
RP: Yeah cholesterol protects every cell. It is increased in the location that is being injured, especially. It is necessary for healthy cell division, DNA replication, nerve function, and learning. It’s our most basic anti-stress protective substance.
RP: That Lustig professor at the University of California, San Francisco, in his famous lecture uses the words, ‘toxic’, ‘poison’ and ‘evil’, someone counted 18 times in an hour and a half lecture.
Int: And he was referring to fructose?
RP: Fructose yeah.
Int: Fructose? The sugar that is found in fruit is toxic, deadly and evil?
RP: But since sucrose is 50% fructose, he was implying it to sucrose too, or the high fructose corn syrup, which is almost 50% fructose. He was saying that it’s just like alcohol in being toxic to the liver, but that’s one of the weirdest thing he said, because for many years, people have been showing that it detoxifies many things that injure the liver, including alcohol. It can increase almost double the rate of destruction of alcohol and prevent liver damage in the process, but many other toxins are detoxified in the presence of fructose.
Int: Our engineer just said, what about honey? Honey is mainly fructose?
RP: About half. Honey and more purified fructose have been used to treat diabetes and other things, like stomach ulcers. Sugar has been used to cure wounds, like in emergency situations they found that when they didn’t have antibiotics they could do open heart surgery and pack the wound with pure white sucrose and prevent scarring and promote healing better than the fancy antibiotics. Honey was used for thousands of years that way to cure wounds.
https://raypeatforum.com/community/threads/sugar-myths-1-sugar-and-the-link-between-cholesterol-kmud-2011.5454/
RP: The same thing that Burr demonstrated: His diet, most of the energy was from plain sucrose and his animal respired fifty percent faster than animals on a normal diet. That’s been seen over and over. Fructose in particular, even a small amount of fructose added to a standard diet will catalyse the oxidation of other substances, glucose and fat both, but mostly it will catalyse the use of glucose turning it into carbon dioxide.
Int: So it helps your cells use oxygen more efficiently, helps the cell respire which is, y’know, basically function better.
RP: Yeah and that increase is just about 30 – 50% in all of the publications where they have looked at it.
Int: And the increase in CO2 is also beneficial and that is another erroneous belief or misconception that CO2 is actually bad and oxygen is good but it’s actually the other way around right?
RP: Yeah and experimenters who have given a fructose supplement to diabetics see that they respond just as well or better than people without diabetes to the ability to oxidise fructose and produce energy. One group happened to look at the fructose that is normally present in everyone’s blood stream and compared it to diabetics and saw that diabetics are deficient in fructose. There is almost no fructose circulating in their blood stream, so naturally it would be therapeutic to restore a normal level, but since they aren’t able to metabolise glucose that’s apparently why they metabolise fructose to get carbon dioxide, even a little faster than healthy people do.
Int: So that’s orange juice and honey for diabetics?