Sugar is the one making your food sweet. It is used by your body as a source of energy. However, too much of it can cause harmful effects on your health as it is now known to be a driving force in the epidemic of obesity and diet-related disease plaguing the Western world.

The sugar’s true nature has long been suppressed by a greedy, profit-driven industry. Studies have found that dietary fat has been the main reasons for conditions like diabetes and heart diseases. It has been wrongly demonized for long enough.

Supermarket shelves are lined with foods labeled to be “fat-free” and “low fat.” Consumers think that these are the “healthier” alternatives to fat-containing foods. The truth is, these products are typically loaded up with sugar, high fructose corn syrup, or some other alternative that is far worse than fat. The food industry doesn’t want you to know this. For instance, reduced fat peanut butter actually contains about the same number of calories as regular peanut butter — and all the fats taken out is replaced with sugar and cornstarch. But the tricky sugar industry didn’t start with clever marketing; it all started with fraud.

Sugar Industry Fakes The Science

The truth about excessive sugar consumption’s effect on the body has been kept as a secret by the sugar industry since the 1960s when industry leaders paid off scientists to produce studies with certain results in mind. What the industry wants to ensure is that fat, and not sugar, was identified as a key contributor to the onset of heart disease.

As Natural Health 365 reports:

“A group called the Sugar Research Foundation (today known as the Sugar Association) paid off three Harvard scientists around $50,000 (adjusted for inflation) in 1967 to skew their research about fat, sugar and heart disease.”

“The resultant article, published in New England Journal of Medicine, minimized sugar’s negative health impacts and cast saturated fat as the main villain.”

An article recently published in JAMA Internal Medicine unveils the sordid truth of times past:

“The Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) was used by the industry to quietly sponsor research on sugar for decades. And as the study authors note, industry-funded research should not be given much (if any) credence in policy-making decisions on the sugar frontier.”

It was in 1954 that the sugar industry first became aware of how profitable the “right” science could be. The then-president of SRF gave a speech wherein it was declared that Americans could be convinced to follow a low-fat diet, and those lost calories would have to come from something else. And if those calories came from sugar, consumption (and presumably, profits) of sugar could go up by about 30%.

Then the news suddenly came that sugar was not really good for people.

One SRF document, which was suddenly on the horizon, notes like this:

“flowing reports that sugar is a less desirable dietary source of calories than other carbohydrates”

And today, we know that sugar is actually a primary cause of disease.

Armed with fake science and propaganda to push, SRF just set out to make sure that sugar secured its place at the top of the food chain. Aside from encouraging Harvard scientists to produce the results they wanted to see, SRF also manipulated data that conflicted with the desired outcome as it was dismissed for any number of arbitrary reasons.

NPR notes that:

“A study that found a health benefit when people ate less sugar and more vegetables was dismissed because that dietary change was not feasible.”

There is no surprise that as of today, the Sugar Association has been hesitant to denounce the activities of SRF from decades ago. The association only stated that “standards” of the 1960s were different than they are today. These statements only show that it was easier to get away with fraud fifty years ago than it is today.