Document Dive: What's Inside The Sugar Industry's Filing Cabinets?

Internal papers reveal a strategy to safeguard sugar from "opportunists," "pseudoscientists," and "enemies."

Gary Taubes and Cristin Kearns Couzens relied on more than 1,500 pages of internal sugar industry documents for their exposé "Big Sugar's Sweet Little Lies." The piece pulls back the veil on Big Sugar's decades-long campaign to bury any scientific evidence suggesting that its product plays a role in what one industry honcho called the "death-dealing diseases." Their story links directly to many of the primary documents, but we've highlighted a few here. Also read Couzens' account of how she quit her job as a dental administrator to research sugar industry influence, and eventually hit the mother lode.

How it all began: This 1942 document encouraged sugar cane and sugar beet producers to create a joint research foundation to counter the "ignorance" the industry was facing. In addition to government "anti-sugar propaganda" sparked by wartime rationing, "diet faddists" were convincing weight-conscious women to forgo sweets. 

A "supreme scientific politician": In the 1960s, hoping to stem the rise of diet soda, the sugar industry's research arm spent more than $600,000 (a good chunk of change back then) to study every conceivable health impact of cyclamate sweeteners. As John Hickson, then vice president and research director of the International Sugar Research Foundation (ISRF) explained, "If anyone can undersell you nine cents out of 10, you'd better find some brickbat you can throw at him." The FDA banned cyclamates in 1969, based on "shaky" evidence, according to a tobacco memo—and when Hickson moved on to the tobacco sector, his reputation preceded him.