What the Sugar Industry Paid Scientists to Hide From Americans for 50 Years Is Finally Coming Out
For decades, U.S. nutrition debates centered on fat and cholesterol, even as sugar use stayed deeply woven into the American food supply. That history came back into focus on Sept. 12, 2016, when JAMA Internal Medicine published archival research detailing how the Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard scientists in 1967 to publish a review that downplayed sugar’s role in coronary heart disease.
The 1967 payment and the published review
The best-documented event in this story is the Sugar Research Foundation’s funding of a literature review published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967. According to the 2016 JAMA Internal Medicine paper by researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, the trade group paid Harvard nutrition professor D. Mark Hegsted and a colleague the equivalent of about $50,000 in today’s dollars to review sugar, fat, and heart disease research.
The JAMA paper said Sugar Research Foundation executives set the review’s objective, received drafts, and discussed revisions before publication. At the time, the New England Journal of Medicine did not require authors to disclose funding sources, a policy detail the UCSF researchers said helped keep the industry’s role out of public view in 1967.
That 1967 review did not report the sugar industry’s financial support and emphasized saturated fat and cholesterol as the main dietary drivers of coronary heart disease. The Sugar Association, which succeeded the earlier trade group, said after the 2016 paper that the industry should have used more transparency in the 1960s, while also stating that it was difficult to critique events from nearly 50 years earlier by today’s standards.
What it meant across the U.S.
This was not a single-state story with a list of affected stores or offices. The confirmed impact was national: the review appeared in one of the country’s leading medical journals in 1967, and the broader debate influenced federal nutrition thinking that reached consumers in all 50 states through public health messaging, food labeling, and diet advice over the following decades.
What remains unclear is the exact degree to which that one review changed any specific U.S. policy on its own. The 2016 JAMA paper did not say the sugar industry single-handedly wrote federal guidelines, and public records do not show a single national rule directly traced to the 1967 article alone.
Still, the issue resonated because it touched ordinary buying habits in supermarkets from California to New York. By 2016, Americans were already seeing added-sugar disclosures move closer to Nutrition Facts labels, and the Food and Drug Administration finalized new label rules that year requiring an “Added Sugars” line, a separate policy move that reflected a broader reexamination of sugar’s health effects.
Why the story resurfaced and what comes next
The reason this history resurfaced in 2016 was not a new court case or a newly announced settlement. It returned because UCSF researchers reviewed internal sugar industry documents and compared them with the published 1967 review, concluding that the trade group had shaped the scientific conversation at a key moment in the heart-disease debate.
The larger context is that nutrition science changed substantially after 1967. In 2015, the World Health Organization recommended limiting free sugars to less than 10% of daily energy intake, and in 2020 the Dietary Guidelines for Americans advised limiting added sugars to less than 10% of calories per day, showing how official guidance moved as evidence expanded.
For readers, the practical takeaway is straightforward and current. The 1967 review is now part of the public record, the funding arrangement has been documented in a peer-reviewed 2016 paper, and modern journals and universities generally require stronger conflict-of-interest disclosures than they did 50 years ago. The underlying debate over sugar, fat, and chronic disease has not disappeared, but the paper trail behind this episode is no longer hidden.
