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The sugar industry funded animal research in the 1960s that looked into the effects of sugar consumption on cardiovascular health — and then buried the data when it suggested that sugar could be harmful, according to newly released historical documents. The internal industry documents were uncovered by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, and described in a new report in the journal PLOS Biology on Tuesday. (O'Connor, 11/21)

Back in the 1960s, the fact that our diets influence the risk of heart disease was still a new idea. And there was a debate about the role of fats and the role of sugar. The sugar industry got involved in efforts to influence this debate. "What the sugar industry successively did," argues Stanton Glantz of the University of California, San Francisco, "is they shifted all of the blame onto fats." (Aubrey, 11/21)

The University of California, San Francisco researchers, Cristin Kearns, Dorie Apollonio, and Stanton Glantz, published a paper Tuesday in the journal PLOS Biology critical of the industry’s decision to shut down the study of sucrose, the substance in common table sugar, which was launched in 1968. The sugar industry fired back, saying the paper was based on “speculations and assumptions” about long-ago events and saying the paper was written and funded by “known critics of the sugar industry.” (Finucane, 11/21)

“The sugar industry has maintained a very sophisticated program of manipulating scientific discussion around their product to steer discussion away from adverse health effects and to make it as easy as possible for them to continue their position that all calories are equal and there’s nothing particularly bad about sugar,” said Stanton A. Glantz of the University of California at San Francisco, one of the PLOS Biology study’s authors. (Shanker, 11/21)