"Trust the science."
NPR published this in 2016. Editorial priorities changed in 2020.
50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat (2016)
21–30 of 86 posts
Re: 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat (2016)
#22It is and will always be wrong to focus upon a singel ingrediens in food and blame it for health problems.
Just eat a balanced diet based upon non processed food and do so in moderation. Then move around a bit
I had a teacher a long time ago who frequently told us to make sure we ate Apples or Bananas or whatever it was, now while it was still healthy / good for you.
She had observed a lot of twists and turns in what science decided was healthy or not over her lifetime.
All hype and fads that has laser focus on a single issue to avoid or pig out on are unhealthy.
I remember having co-workers who were dieting by eating big cubes of (Highly processed) cheese and packets of (highly processed) lunch meat.
Just 4 to 5 packages of plastic wrapped pseudo ham and whatever.
I dont care what it was called or who endorsed it but there is no way in hell that was a healthy idea.
Re: 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat (2016)
#23[2016] This news had a big impact on me, but I was wondering how they actually did it. It's like carbon credits, or the snake breeding or whatever, you can't pay people enough to not do something. Per the article, it sounds like maybe 1. There actually is published research linking sugar to heart health 2. The sugar lobby paid $50k for a single review study that omitted/downplayed 1 and emphasized other papers relate…
> what did they do in the rest of the 50 years? There's a bit at the end about Coca Cola and candy companies continuing to manipulate research. I assume it's been a constant battle, not just a one-time $50k expenditure. But, it must have been worth the money for the sugar producers. >Do journalists only look at review papers? ... Public discourse also completely ignored sugar, somehow. It definitely did not ignore su…
My recollections from before 2016 re sugar were
1. Calories, so people wanted artificial sweetener to lose weight
2. Diabetes
3. Artificial sweeteners may cause cancer
But, like cholesterol coating arteries, these studies I _think_ suggest that sugar is bad beyond the weight gain issue. Like even if you don't gain weight, just replacing other carbs with sugar may have disproportionate health risks. At least, that's my reading.
Re: 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat (2016)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's processed food! Thinking it's sugar, fat, or some other macro/micronutrient is reductionist "nutritionism". Food processing and industrial cooking is the culprit. It took me about 20 years to understand this. Michael Pollan wrote lucidly about it starting ~15 years ago, and he wrote about the marketing patterns that the food industry uses (to this day) to cast blame. And this is being made rigorous, e.g. by the…
> It's processed food! This doesn't mean anything. It's a floating signifier.
There is a group of scientists and policy makers making this rigorous. They are starting to use the label "ultra-processed food" which has a precise definition.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30744710/
Read this article for background on the Brazilian policy and the NIH studies:
https://www.theguardian.com/food/2020/feb/13/how-ultra-proce...
And watch this video by Hall from the NIH, with a 2019 study:
ILSI NA: Ultra-Processed Foods (Kevin Hall) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_im2zAuBmME (mentioned in the article)
He is the one who is described as a physicist by training, and he thought a calorie is a calorie -- whether it's processed or not.
That's the "reductionist hypothesis".
He EASILY disproved it and changed his mind. The study controls for macro- and micro-nutrients and the only difference is PROCESSING.
And his new question is to ask how can we make processed food HEALTHY ! Because it feeds a lot of people. So he's not the typical person who espouses a view against processing. Again read the guardian article for background.
(Personally I will eat unprocessed foods until they answer that question.)
Governments are finally paying attention because their population has been ravaged by processed food in the last ~70 years. Brazil and Mexico have big problems. It corresponds to when processed foods and industrial cooking took over. This is an extremely repeatable experiment -- again read Pollan.
Historically, populations get the set of chronic conditions called "Western diet disease" (obesity, high blood pressure, cancer, etc.) when introduced to processed foods and industrial preparation/cooking.
Re: 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat (2016)
#25Though it was annoying to read, Good Calories, Bad Calories [0] by Gary Taubes made it pretty clear bad science, for myriad reasons, poisoned the data informing US policy on nutrition. Blaming fat for all things bad, resulting in the food pyramid with carbs at the foundation.
If memory serves one of the main players responsible was Ansel Keys [1], who manipulated/filtered the data of studies backing his fat-is-fattening theories.
Elsewhere I heard a plausible claim, I believe it was from Taubes in a talk he gave, that much of this behavior stemmed from post-war anti-german sentiments in the medical and nutrition science communities (which I think were more or less the same group back then). The Germans at the time happened to be at the forefront of nutrition science. When the US joined the war against the nazis, in the scientific domains German papers were apparently often suppressed, as a way to harm those researchers' careers. A side effect was their science, good or not, became blacklisted in a way. The US research, right or wrong, was championed. It was a form of patriotism, and it seems public health has been paying the price ever since.
TFA strikes me as a minor footnote in this larger story.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Calories,_Bad_Calories
Re: 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat (2016)
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on personal observations I find it very hard to believe sugar consumption has decreased across the US population in the last 13 years. There's a near constant line out every Starbucks drive-thru I pass. Whenever I go in one to work while caffeinated, those definitely aren't unsweetened beverages being prepared for the masses. Supposedly the whole reason Starbucks espresso is so bitter is so it works well with t…
I was thinking similar, but I think its plastic contaminants and byproducts.
They're not mutually exclusive.
How fructose is metabolized is so well understood at this point it's clearly a major factor in obesity and diabetes. It's the primary cause of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease AIUI.
And it hasn't been removed from the US diet. That's very unlikely to occur until corn subsidies go away. Even once that occurs it'll take awhile for such a huge industry to evolve away from such a mature supply chain. It strikes me as a problem resembling pivoting from fossil fuels. It won't happen quickly, and we haven't even started yet w/fructose.
Which is why I don't think the graph at that twitter link above is even plausibly true. Furthermore there's massive business interest in convincing the public sugar isn't the problem, so don't bother stopping consuming it. That's what all the sugar addicts certainly want to hear anyways.
Re: 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat (2016)
#27It is and will always be wrong to focus upon a singel ingrediens in food and blame it for health problems. Just eat a balanced diet based upon non processed food and do so in moderation. Then move around a bit I had a teacher a long time ago who frequently told us to make sure we ate Apples or Bananas or whatever it was, now while it was still healthy / good for you. She had observed a lot of twists and turns in what…
>Just eat a balanced diet based upon non processed food and do so in moderation.
But our notion of a balanced diet is wrong, which is the whole point of this. Who knows what a balanced diet really is now?
Re: 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat (2016)
#28[deleted]
Re: 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat (2016)
#29It is and will always be wrong to focus upon a singel ingrediens in food and blame it for health problems. Just eat a balanced diet based upon non processed food and do so in moderation. Then move around a bit I had a teacher a long time ago who frequently told us to make sure we ate Apples or Bananas or whatever it was, now while it was still healthy / good for you. She had observed a lot of twists and turns in what…
>Just eat a balanced diet based upon non processed food and do so in moderation. But our notion of a balanced diet is wrong, which is the whole point of this. Who knows what a balanced diet really is now?
Really? My guess is the opposite. Everyone knows what they are supposed to eat but doesn’t. I don’t believe anyone on this site couldn’t recommend a healthy diet.
Re: 50 Years Ago, Sugar Industry Quietly Paid Scientists to Point Blame at Fat (2016)
#30And now, 13 years after Lustig's "Sugar: the Bitter Truth" totally convinced me it was sugar and not fat, and sugar consumption has decreased while obesity has increased, I'm unconvinced it's sugar either. It's some environmental contaminant. https://twitter.com/mold_time/status/1414242490404720648
Agreed - all of the things said below, plus: depression; less activity due to cars, sitting at desks all day, and other non-active activities; the absolute contant confusion about what foods are healthy and aren't; the complete confusion over what "food" actually is (Michael Pollan has done some great writing there). It's a combination of all of these - and many other - variables, which have different influences on d…
You forgot another one: portion sizes. Seriously, just focusing on this would help a lot IMO.