The “Science” Behind A Sugary Lie You Grew Up Believing
Fourteen months ago I wrote an article on a mysterious happening that occured almost six decades ago known as Projects 226 & Project 259 (HERE). These are the long-buried archives that pertained to the way that the sugar industry paid big money for their research (homegrown research is more accurate) to be published in prestigious medical journals by prestigious institutions — namely NEJM and Harvard. Check out the first two sentences of the abstract from the brand new study we are discussing today.
“In 1965, the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) secretly funded a review in the New England Journal of Medicine that discounted evidence linking sucrose consumption to [increased] blood lipid levels and hence coronary heart disease (CHD). SRF subsequently funded animal research to evaluate sucrose’s CHD risks.”
Here’s how the scam worked.
For a very long time I have told you that your level of GUT HEALTH is critically important to almost every function (and pathology) of your body, including your IMMUNE SYSTEM FUNCTION and your WEIGHT — it all pertains to the bacteria that live in, or at least should be living, in your gut. What’s interesting is that Project 259 initially revealed that rats fed a diet high in sucrose (white table sugar) actually had lower levels of blood triglycerides (fat) than rats fed a conventional diet of “cereal meals, soybean meals, whitefish meal, and dried yeast, fortified with a balanced vitamin supplement and trace element mixture.”
What their research did not initially reveal is that these mice were raised and kept “germ free” (sometimes lab animals are purposely grown and then kept in an environment that makes sure there are no microbes either inside of them or outside of them). What did these conflicting results and hidden information really mean?
The authors of this study that came out in yesterday’s issue of PLoS Biology (Sugar Industry Sponsorship of Germ-Free Rodent Studies Linking Sucrose to Hyperlipidemia and Cancer: An Historical Analysis of Internal Documents) realized the bait and switch, concluding that these “results suggested to SRF that gut microbiota have a causal role in carbohydrate-induced hypertriglyceridemia.” In other words, the high sugar diet was fouling the MICROBIOME of certain mice in the study, causing them to gain weight (obviously via inflammatory pathways — a process known as “DYSBIOSIS“).
So, like any other huge corporation with huge amounts of money at stake, Big Sugar pulled the plug and, “terminated Project 259 without publishing the results.” In the immortal words of SNL’s “Church Lady” character, ‘Isn’t that special?‘ This, folks, is what’s known throughout the scientific medical community as INVISIBLE & ABANDONED RESEARCH, and unfortunately accounts for about half of all biomedical studies (that would be all as in all). Don’t like what you’re seeing? Just bail on the whole mess and figure out a better way to set up the study so as to get the results those signing your paychecks are looking for.
Oh, I forgot to mention that SRF also determined, just like our old friend and Nobel Prize-winner DR. OTTO WARBURG had done forty-five years earlier in the early 1900’s, that these increased amounts of dietary sugar also happened to be associated with increased incidence of certain cancers. Here is a quote taken directly from the Sugar Association’s study, “No credible link between ingested sugars and cancer has been established.” Which is exactly what the biggest cancer treatment facilities in the United States are doing today (HERE).
Realizing they had stumbled onto the mother lode of BS, the researchers for this PLoS Biology study, all from the University of California San Francisco (they work with DR. ROBERT LUSTIG and all have rather impressive credentials), concluded that (ahem, if listening to corporate lies makes you sick, I strongly suggest you have a certified barf-bag or triple-bagged trashcan handy for the RESULTANT SPEW)……
“The Sugar Association, a United States sucrose industry trade association (which has organizational ties to SRF, the International Sugar Research Foundation, and ISRF’s successor, the World Sugar Research Organisation), has consistently denied that sucrose has any metabolic effects related to chronic disease beyond its caloric effects. On January 5, 2016, the Sugar Association issued a press release criticizing findings from a study published in Cancer Research using multiple mouse models that suggested that dietary sugar induces increased tumor growth and metastasis when compared to a non-sugar starch diet.
Our study contributes to a wider body of literature documenting industry manipulation of science. Industries seeking to influence regulation have a history of funding research resulting in industry-favorable interpretations of controversial evidence related to health effects of smoking, therapeutic effects of pharmaceutical drugs, the relationship between sugar-sweetened beverage consumption and weight gain or obesity….”
All I can say is thank God that at least a little bit of this fraudulent research is finally coming to light. Finally.
If you want to learn more about the academic battle that led to these studies — the battle between DR. ANCEL KEYS and DR. JOHN YUDKIN — in relationship to what the medical community has been telling us we should be eating for the past fifty years, just follow the links. And for those of you looking to get off the medical merry-go-round, take ten minutes to READ THIS. Oh, if you liked today’s post, you might enjoy my regular column on oxymoronically-named EVIDENCE-BASED MEDICINE.
