Low-Carb on Trial (Galileo Had It Easy)

A recent exposé in the New York Times[1] revealed massive and pervasive fraud and collusion between the sugar industry and certain medical authorities in the 1960’s designed to erroneously promote saturated fat as the culprit behind heart disease. Effectively diverting attention from the real source of the problem (the increasing consumption of dietary sugar), the food industry conspired with key authorities within the medical establishment to serve their own best interests at the expense of public health.  Historic documents showed that they were intentionally concealing the fact that sugar, instead of fat, was knowingly to blame.  These historic documents were discovered by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco and were recently published in the journal, JAMA Internal Medicine this year. 

The researchers who evaluated the data concluded that, “Together with other recent analyses of sugar industry documents, our findings suggest the industry sponsored a research program in the 1960’s and 1970’s that successfully cast doubt about the hazards of sucrose while promoting fat as the dietary culprit in CHD [coronary heart disease].”[2]  In the NY Times piece, one of the study’s authors, Stanton Glantz, professor of medicine at The University of California San Francisco was quoted as saying, “They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades.”  The fact is that government dietary policies throughout the industrialized world are still being influenced by this fraud. It is far from over.

By the way…am I the only one who thinks this should qualify as a prosecutable offense? The fact that the criminal behavior of the sugar industry executives concealing the even then known dangers of their own products, which have resulted in the deaths of countless millions since, has now finally been exposed in no way implies that the global mainstream medical or dietetic establishment is any wiser or even inclined to alter their stale and disproven dietary recommendations. The fact that this is all coming out now leads many to complacently believe that such nefarious scandals and clandestine activities are somehow a thing of the past.  A mere historic footnote, as it were...