A new study shows that the Sugar Association (formerly the Sugar Research Foundation) paid three Harvard scientists in the 1960s, to publish a literature review discrediting studies that linked sugar to heart disease.

According to a paper published in Jamal Internal Medicine, internal documents revealed that back in the 1960s, scientists were studying the possible dietary causes of the increasing death rates in American men due to coronary heart disease. Physiologist John Yudkin suggested in his study that sugar was to blame. But Ancel Keys, in his study, suggested that dietary cholesterol and saturated fat was the cause.

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During that period, the Sugar Association was planning a campaign to address people's negative attitudes toward sugar, so they decided to fund a study to discredit Yudkin's findings. A year later, the association launched "Project 226" which involved hiring Harvard researchers to supply materials that would only point to saturated fat as the main cause of heart disease.

The resulting article, which cost them an equivalent of $48,900 today, was published by the New England Journal of Medicine. It falsely concluded that the only dietary intervention needed to reduce the risk of heart disease was to reduce cholesterol and saturated fat intake.  So over the past decades, scientists and health professionals shifted their focus away from sugar as a cause of heart diseases.

The decision of the Sugar Association to lie about the negative effects of sugar had an impact the entire research community at that time. Funding research is ethical, but bribing scientists to produce evidence is a different thing. Back in the days, funding disclosures and transparency standards were not prioritized, but instances of fraud have led to changes in the norms.

It is unsurprising that now, the people involved in the tainted research from the Sugar Association do not have anything to say about it.

In an interview with Reuters, the Sugar Association said that "It is challenging for us to comment on events that allegedly occurred 60 years ago, and on documents we have never seen."