LAUSR

Historical documents stored away in library archives can be a trove of information about the role that science has played in public health. Similarly, litigation discovery documents have been a valuable source of knowledge about corporate influence in scientific studies. David Rosner of Columbia University and Gerald Markowitz of John Jay University co-authored Lead Wars benefiting from discovery documents obtained in litigation of lead paint companies. The book detailed the ways that these companies kept lead on the market by influencing scientific studies. Others have written about how tobacco companies funded rogue research centers that produced studies debunking the connection between cigarettes and lung cancer. In a recent study published in JAMA Internal Medicine, Stanton Glantz and colleagues at the University of California at San Francisco explored the archives that contained letters of scientists who studied the causes of heart disease. (Kearns, Schmidt, and Glantz 2016) What they learned from the University of Illinois Archives and documents at the Harvard Medical Library was that the Sugar Research Foundation funded studies that downplayed, ignored, or discredited research that found sugar was a contributor to heart disease. Researchers were paid handsomely to critique studies that found sucrose makes an inordinate contribution to fat metabolism and heart disease leaving only the theory that dietary fat and cholesterol was the primary contributor. An influential review appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) in 1967 titled “Dietary fats, carbohydrates and atherosclerotic vascular disease.” The authors wrote: “Since diets low in fat and high in sugar are rarely taken, we conclude that the practical significance of differences in dietary carbohydrate is minimal in comparison to those related to dietary fat and cholesterol” (McGandy, Hegsted, and Stare 1967). The authors did not mention that they were paid by the Nutrition Foundation (funded by the sugar industry) for the review. They did acknowledge as follows: