October 10, 2016 – Sugar Data

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Anchor lead: How has the sugar industry influenced dietary recommendations? Elizabeth Tracey reports

Over fifty years ago the sugar industry paid researchers at Harvard to downplay the negative effects of consuming sugar, implicating fats for their role in heart disease instead, a recent study revealed.  Now the implications of this revelation are being felt worldwide.  Patricia Davidson, dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing, comments.

Davidson: The data that was analyzed was analyzed in the 1960s, and it really calls into questions much of the data that supports our dietary recommendations. Certainly people thought that eating more carbohydrates because they’re less calories than fat was actually a good thing. What we’ve seen are substitutions of fats with sugars. That kind of change in dietary behaviors has contributed to this global epidemic of diabetes. :28

Substitution of sugars for fats is also implicated in our global obesity epidemic.  Davidson says academia is now much more independent of industry so current data are more trustworthy. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.