1960s Report on Coronary Heart Disease Found to be Funded by The Sugar Research Foundation

An ex-dentist turned health researcher has come down on two famous dieticians of the 1960s for a probably false claim in sugar’s role in coronary heart disease. Dr. Cristin Kearns, while riffling through papers from one of the lower levels of a library in Harvard, discovered some letters detailing correspondences between Dr. Fredrick Stare and Mark Hegsted and the Sugar Research Foundations.

The two nutritionists worked at Harvard during their time in the sixties. The paper in question was published in 1968, and details how sugar is not linked with coronary heart disease. They instead pointed to fat and calorie intake as the two leading causes of coronary heart disease. What was not known at the time was the two researchers link to Sugar Research Foundations. An important detail, intoned by Dr. Walter Willett, was that disclosing funding and communications are a relatively new law. Willet was a friend to Stare, and spoke about his upstanding intellect and search for truth, mainly within data. During the time of the research in question, it was not required that scientists disclose who was funding them.

The reason that Willet was reached for comment was because both Hegsted and Stare have both passed. Kearns and Stanton Glantz, another who worked on the report uncovering this situation from the sixties, understand that it is much more difficult to indict these two when they are no longer alive. JAMA Internal Medicine published Monday the report by Kearns. It was also reported that Stare and another colleague received $6,500, about $48,000 in today’s money, to conduct the research, deepening the doubt on this project.  The Sugar Research Foundation responded saying that “it is challenging for us to comment on events that allegedly occurred 60 years ago, and on documents we have never seen.” Today, researchers must uncover any organization that is funding their project, creating a more transparent environment of the dealing between corporations and science.

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