How the Sugar Industry Bought Harvard Scientists in 1967 - The Bribe That Made us Fat (Project 226)

Look at a photograph of a beach in the 1970s. You will notice something immediately, almost everyone is thin. There are no gym memberships, there are no fitbits, there are no calorie tracking apps. People ate white bread, they ate butter, they drank whole milk, they smoked cigarettes; and yet obesity was rare. Type two diabetes was a disease for the elderly. Now, look around today. We have the most advanced medical system in history. We have thousands of diet books, we have low fat yogurt, we have skim milk, we have white egg omelets, we have been obsessed with health for forty years; and yet we are the sickest we have ever been.

Obesity rates have tripled, diabetes is an epidemic, heart disease is still the number one killer. For decades we’ve blamed ourselves. We thought we were just lazy, we thought we just lacked willpower. We thought we were eating too much fat. But what if I told you that it wasn’t your fault, what if I told you that the advice you followed for your entire life was a lie. And it wasn’t just a mistake, it wasn’t just bad science, it was a crime.

A specific crime committed by specific people in a specific room in nineteen sixty-seven. This is the story of how the sugar industry bought the most prestigious scientists in the world, it is the story of how they paid a bribe that killed millions of people. And it is the story of how they got away with it for fifty years.

To understand this crime, we have to go back to nineteen fifty-five. The president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower was playing golf in Denver. Suddenly he felt a crushing pain in his chest, he was having a massive heart attack. The news shocked the world, Eisenhower was a war hero, he was a symbol of American strength, and suddenly he was vulnerable. It triggered a national panic. Americans realized that a silent killer was stalking them, men were dropping dead in their forties and fifties. Heart disease had become the leading cause of death and nobody knew why. Was it stress, was it smoking, was it the food?

The scientific community was divided into two camps. In one corner there was Ancel Keys, he was a charismatic and aggressive scientist from the University of Minnesota. He had a theory called the Diet Heart Hypothesis. He believed that saturated fat was the enemy. He believed that meat, butter and cheese raised your cholesterol and clogged your arteries like sludge in a pipe.

In the other corner there was a British professor named John Yudkin. He noticed something else. He looked at the data and saw that heart disease rose in perfect lockstep with the consumption of sugar. He pointed out that for thousands of years, humans ate meat and butter and they didn’t have heart attacks. But in the last hundred years our sugar intake had skyrocketed. We went from eating a few pounds a year to eating a hundred pounds a year.

Yudkin argued that sugar was the toxin. He said it messed with our insulin, he said that it inflamed our arteries. It was a battle of ideas. Fat versus sugar. And for a while it looked like sugar was going to lose.

By the mid nineteen sixties, the evidence against sugar was piling up. Studies were showing that sugar raised triglycerides in the blood. Other studies showed that sugar caused heart disease in animals.

The executives at the Sugar Research Foundation were terrified. They were a trade group representing the biggest sugar companies in America. They saw the writing on the wall. If the public believed that sugar caused heart disease, the government would regulate it. Sales would crash, the empire would crumble; they needed a plan.

In 1965, a man named John Hickson took over as the Vice President of the Sugar Research Foundation. John Hickson was not a scientist, he was a fixer. He looked at the threat from John Yudkin and the anti-sugar researchers and he decided to fight back. But he didn’t fight back with better science, he fought back with a checkbook. We know this because fifty years later a researcher named Cristin Kearns found his private letters in a dusty archive at a university library. In one letter, Hickson wrote that they needed to embark on a major program to counter the negative attitudes toward sugar. He wrote that the best way to do this was to fund their own research. He said they needed to publish data that would refute their detractors, but they couldn’t just publish a study from the Sugar Association; nobody would believe it, it would look like propaganda. They needed a mask, they needed the most trusted name in science to tell their lie for them. They needed Harvard.

At the time, the Harvard School of Public Health was the Vatican of nutrition science. The department was run by doctor Fredrick Stare. He was the most famous nutritionist in America.

Working with him was Dr. Mark Hegsted. He was a brilliant researcher who would later go on to draft the dietary guidelines for the United States government. These men were the gods of their field, what they said became truth. John Hickson approached them, he had a proposition, he wanted them to write a review article. A review article is a study of studies, it looks at all the existing research and summarizes it for other doctors. He wanted them to review science on sugar and fat and heart disease.

But, he didn’t want an honest review. In the internal documents found decades later, Hickson was very clear about what he wanted. He told the Harvard scientists that their job was to discount the evidence against sugar and emphasize the evidence against fat. He literally wrote the conclusion for them, before they had even started the work. He said he wanted to assure them that this was quite what we had in mind.

Dr. Hegsted replied, he said: “we are well aware of your particular interest and we’ll cover this as well as we can”. It was a transaction, pure and simple. The Sugar Foundation paid the three Harvard scientists a sum of 6,500 dollars. That might not sound like a lot of money today, but in 1967 it was a significant sum. In today’s money it is equivalent to about 50,000 dollars. For fifty thousand dollars, the most respected scientists in America agreed to betray the public trust. They got to work, they named the operation Project 226.

Over the next few months, the Harvard scientists worked closely with the sugar executives. They sent them drafts of the paper. Think about that for a second. These were independent academic researchers, but they were letting a corporate lobbyist edit their scientific paper. Hickson made notes, and told them where to be stronger, he told them what to leave out. And the scientists listened, the way they manipulated the data was clever, it was subtle.

When they looked at studies that showed that sugar was bad, they used a magnifying glass to find flaws; they said the studies were too small, they said the methodology was weak, they argued that animal studies didn’t count because humans are not rats.

They dismissed every single piece of evidence that made sugar look dangerous, but when they looked at the studies on saturated fat they used a completely different standard. They accepted weak studies, they accepted animal studies, they ignored flaws in the data. They set up a rigged game where fat was guilty until proven innocent and sugar was innocent even when proved guilty.

Finally, in 1967 the paper was ready. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. This is the most prestigious medical journal in the world. If it is in the New England Journal, it is considered gospel. The title of the paper was Dietary Fats, Carbohydrates and Atherosclerotic Disease.

It sounded dry, it sounded academic, it sounded authoritative. And nowhere in the paper did it say that the authors were paid by the sugar industry. The disclosure rules were different back then. They didn’t have to tell anyone, so to the doctors reading it in 1967 it looked like an unbiased analysis from Harvard. The conclusion of the paper was a bombshell. It stated that there was no doubt that the only dietary intervention required to prevent heart disease was to reduce cholesterol and saturated fat. It exonerated sugar completely.

It told the world that sugar was harmless empty calories. It might rot in your teeth but it wouldn’t kill you. Fat was the killer, butter was the killer, steak was the killer. The impact of this single paper was catastrophic because it came from Harvard and it silenced the debate. John Yudkin and the anti-sugar camp were ridiculed, they were pushed to the margins. Yudkin was treated like a conspiracy theorist, his funding dried up, his reputation was ruined.

Ancel Keys and the anti-fat camp took victory, but the damage didn’t stop in the medical journals. It moved to Washington DC in the 1970s the US government decided to get involved in the American diet. Senator George McGovern led a committee to create the first Dietary Goals for the United States.

Mc Govern had good intentions. He wanted to make Americans healthier, but who did he turn for advice? He turned to the experts. He turned to Harvard. Dr. Mark Hegsted, the very man who had taken the bribe from the sugar industry became the head of nutrition at the United States Department of Agriculture. He was the man holding the pen when the government wrote the rules on what Americans should eat. It is like letting the fox build the henhouse. In 1977, the McGovern Report was released. It officially recommended that Americans should eat less fat and more carbohydrates. It told us to replace meat and milk with grains and sugar. The food pyramid was born. And the base of that pyramid was born and the base of that pyramid was a massive slab of bread, pasta and cereal.

This was the signal the food industry was waiting for. If the government said fat was bad, then the industry would give the people what they wanted. The 1980s became the era of Low Fat Walk down the supermarket aisle in 1985. Everything was labeled low fat cookies, low fat salad dressing, low fat yogurt. But there is a problem with low fat food.

When you take the fat out of food, it tastes like cardboard. Fat provides flavor, it provides texture, it makes you feel full. So how do you make a low fat cookie taste good? You add sugar, and you don’t just add a little bit; you add a mountain of it.

Yogurt became a dessert, it had as much sugar as a candy bar; salad dressing became a syrup; bread became cake. Americans did exactly what they were told. We were obedient. Remember the days we stopped eating butter and switched to margarine? We traded our morning eggs for bowls of cereal and whole milk for skimmed milk.

We were told to cut our fat intake, and we listened. We did everything we were supposed to do.

But what happened? Did heart disease vanish? Did we all get thinner?

No!

In fact, the complete opposite happened. Take a look at any graph of obesity rates in America. For decades, the line is almost perfectly flat. Then, right around 1980 it shoots straight up like a rocket. This explosion in obesity lines up perfectly with the introduction of the official low fat dietary guidelines. It turns out, we replaced a nutrient that makes us feel full fat with one that makes us perpetually hungry sugar.

When you eat fat, your body produces a hormone called leptin, which is the signal that tells you to stop eating. But when you eat sugar, your insulin spikes, your blood sugar crashes, and just an hour later, you are starving again.

We became a nation of sugar addicts, and it was all fueled by government advice. While we were getting sicker, the sugar industry was making trillions of dollars. They had pulled off the perfect crime. They had successfully shifted the blame for their lethal product onto a harmless essential nutrient. And for decades, nobody had a clue.

The scientists who took the bribe were celebrated as heroes. Dr. Frederick Stare founded the prestigious Department of Nutrition at Harvard. Dr. Mark Hegsted went on to influence national dietary policy for years. They died as celebrated figures in public health; their secret buried deep in the archives. It wasn’t until 2016 that the truth finally saw the light of day.

A dentist turned researcher named Cristin Kearns was digging through the library archives at the University of California. There, she stumbled upon boxes of old letters from an organization called the Sugar Research Foundation. She found the receipts, she found the notes from a sugar executive named John Hickson; she found the smoking gun. She published her earth-shattering findings in the JMA Internal Medicine journal.

The world was shocked. The New York Times ran it as a front-page headline. The medical community was forced to reckon with its own corrupted past. But for millions, it was too late. The damage was done.

Two entire generations of Americans had been effectively poisoned, all while believing they were eating a healthy diet. Fathers died thinking they were doing the right thing by choosing margarine over butter. Mothers passed away thinking their low-fat yogurt breakfast was the key to good health.

We are still living in the wreckage of what the sugar industry called Project 226. Just look at the school lunches we feed our children today. Pizza, chocolate milk, sugary cereals It’s a sugar delivery system designed by the very guidelines born out of that 1970s deception. Look at the food we give to sick people in hospitals. Jell-O, juice, toast. We are literally feeding the disease to the patients.

And the sugar industry?

They’re still as powerful as ever. They continue to fund studies. Their lobbyists still sit on the government, advisory boards. Right now, they are fighting tooth and nail to prevent labels from clearly showing added sugar. They are fighting soda taxes, they are fighting to keep the truth hidden, just like they did 50 years ago.

But the wall of silence is finally starting to crack. New, independent science is finally vindicating the work of scientists like John Yudkin, who warned us about sugar decades ago. We know now that sugar is a primary driver of metabolic disease, we know that it causes fatty liver disease, we know that it leads to insulin resistance; and we know that saturated fat, the villain of the story, was largely innocent all along. The butter didn’t kill us, the bread did.

So, what can we learn from this chapter in our history?

We learn that science is not a religion. It’s a human endeavor. And like all human endeavors, it can be corrupted by money and influence.

The next time you see a scientists speaking on television, ask yourself who funded their study. When a government gives you health advice, ask yourself, who lobbied for that advice?

In this day and age we have to become our own detectives, we have to take control of our own health, because 50 thousand dollars was all it took to sell out the health of the entire world. And nobody is going to give you a refund for the years of life you might have lost.

The next time you’re in a supermarket and see a box of sugary cereal with a “Heart Healthy” sticker on it, I want you to remember Project 226. Remember John Hickson, remember the bribe, and realize that the most dangerous thing in that store isn’t the fat, it’s the lie. The lie that told us to fear the very thing that nourished us and to embrace the very thing that killed us.

It is without a doubt, the deadliest lie in modern history, and it is time we all stopped believing it.

The sugar industry wanted us to look away. They wanted us to blame ourselves for our failing health. But now, we know the truth. We didn’t fail the diet; the diet failed us.