The Sugar Racket

In 1964, a string of studies began linking high sucrose consumption to heart disease. For the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) — the trade group for the US sugar industry, later renamed the Sugar Association — they were a commercial threat.

The industry's response, documented in 31 pages of internal correspondence uncovered by UCSF researcher Dr. Cristin Kearns from Harvard library boxes in 2016, was straightforward: commission a literature review that would shift the scientific conversation from sugar to dietary fat.

The SRF initiated Project 226 and paid Harvard University nutritionists D. Mark Hegsted and Fredrick Stare the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars. SRF set the review's objective, contributed the articles to be included, reviewed drafts, and approved the final product. The funding was not disclosed.

The resulting review — published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967 — criticized studies linking sucrose to heart disease while ignoring limitations in studies implicating dietary fat. It concluded that blood cholesterol was the only significant dietary risk factor for coronary heart disease, effectively insulating sugar from scrutiny. Having two major reviews in the New England Journal of Medicine helped shift the entire field's emphasis away from sugar and onto fat.

Hegsted later became head of nutrition at the US Department of Agriculture and, in 1977, helped author the Dietary Goals for the United States — the first official federal nutrition guidelines. The same scientist the sugar industry paid in 1965 was writing national dietary policy twelve years later.

Dr. Kearns's findings were published in JAMA Internal Medicine in September 2016. The journal's editor called the industry documents "a chilling record of corporate manipulation of science." By then, the corrupted science had been in place for fifty years.

In January 1977, Senator George McGovern's Select Committee on Nutrition published the first federal dietary guidelines for Americans. The recommendations emphasized reducing dietary fat — particularly saturated fat — as the primary intervention against heart disease. Reducing sugar was a secondary concern, addressed in softer language.

The framing reflected two decades of industry-shaped science. D. Mark Hegsted, whose 1967 Harvard review had been funded by the Sugar Research Foundation without disclosure, was a USDA nutrition official involved in translating the committee's work into federal guidance. The academic ecosystem around fat-as-villain — built in part with sugar industry money — provided the committee's scientific baseline.

When the committee's original language included stronger recommendations to reduce sugar, the sugar lobby applied sustained pressure. The final 1977 guidelines softened the sugar language. The anti-fat emphasis remained.

The commercial consequence was immediate: food manufacturers reformulated thousands of products to carry "low-fat" or "heart-healthy" labels. To maintain palatability after removing fat, they replaced it with refined sugar and high-fructose corn syrup. Snackwell's cookies. Low-fat yogurt. Reduced-fat salad dressings loaded with sugar. Skim milk marketed as the healthy choice while whole milk was demonized. The US food supply shifted toward high-carbohydrate, high-sugar products — precisely what the suppressed science had warned against.

From 1980 to 2000, US obesity rates more than doubled. Type 2 diabetes tracked the rise in sugar consumption — not fat consumption. The low-fat dietary era, officially underwritten by federal guidelines shaped partly by purchased science, coincided precisely with the beginning of the chronic disease epidemic the country is still inside.

In August 2015, the New York Times revealed that Coca-Cola had paid $1.5 million to launch the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN) — a scientific nonprofit promoting the message that exercise, not diet, was the solution to the obesity epidemic. The "energy balance" framing diverted attention from what Americans were drinking: specifically, that liquid sugar from soft drinks is processed differently by the body than whole food calories.

The two lead academics behind GEBN received nearly $4 million in Coca-Cola funding. Steven Blair (University of South Carolina) received $3.5 million from the company since 2008. Gregory Hand (West Virginia University) received $806,500 for an "energy flux" study.

Internal emails showed that Coca-Cola's vice president of global science and health had told Blair the company wanted GEBN to "publish something that will help us refocus attention" on physical activity rather than diet. The company's role as funder was not disclosed on the GEBN website — until the Times called for comment, after which GEBN added a "Health Sciences Sponsors" tab listing Coca-Cola.

Following the exposé, Coca-Cola disclosed a list of 96 scientists and 96 institutions it had funded between 2010 and 2015. The disclosures covered only those years. What preceded 2010 and what followed 2015 is not public.

GEBN dissolved in November 2015, two months after the story broke. Neither Coca-Cola nor any individual researcher faced regulatory action. The "energy balance" framing — industry-funded, academically credentialed, distributed by press release — had already circulated for years in policy documents, nutrition education materials, and public health curricula worldwide.

The US Dietary Guidelines for Americans are updated every five years by an advisory committee appointed by the Departments of Agriculture and Health and Human Services. These guidelines determine what is served in school lunches (30 million children daily), military facilities, federal food assistance programs, and hospital nutritional protocols. They set the baseline for what Americans are officially told to eat.

A 2020 analysis found that 95% of advisory committee members — 19 of 20 — had at least one connection to the food or pharmaceutical industries. The committee that shaped the 2020–2025 guidelines was not primarily composed of independent scientists. It was primarily composed of people whose careers had been funded, employed, or credentialed by the industries whose products the guidelines evaluate.

The mechanism is legal and structural. Industry trade groups — the Sugar Association, the National Dairy Council, the American Meat Institute, the Grocery Manufacturers Association — nominate candidates to the committee. They fund university nutrition departments. They endow professorships. The nominee who best represents "mainstream nutrition science" is also, often, the nominee whose career was built inside the industry's funding ecosystem.

In 2024, Big Food spent $29.5 million on federal lobbying and employed 327 lobbyists — 65% of whom were revolving-door former government officials. When the 2015 advisory committee recommended that the guidelines address the environmental sustainability of food, the meat and dairy industry lobbied Congress. The USDA and Department of Health and Human Services determined sustainability was "outside the scope" of the guidelines. The recommendation was excised.

The body count: 40.1 million Americans have diagnosed or undiagnosed diabetes — 90–95% of it Type 2, the metabolic disease most directly linked to dietary patterns and excess sugar consumption. Diabetes appears on 399,342 death certificates per year. Annual economic cost: $412.9 billion. People with diabetes spend 2.6 times more on medical care than those without it. The industry that helped manufacture the epidemic absorbed its research costs as a tax-deductible business expense, faced no reparations, and continues to populate the committee that sets what Americans eat.