In 1954, Roger Adams, a chemist at the University of Illinois and past president of the American Chemical Society, was hired by the Sugar Research Foundation to write a report concluding that cyclamate sweeteners were unsafe. The evidence he used was selective, the conclusion was predetermined, and the report was used to successfully delay FDA approval of cyclamates for years. Adams didn’t disclose his funding.

This is one of the earlier documented examples of a practice that turns out to have shaped American nutritional policy for decades.

The Sugar Research Foundation

The Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) was established in 1943 by the major US sugar producers and importers. Its stated purpose was to fund scientific research promoting sugar consumption. From its founding, it operated on the model later documented in tobacco research: identify scientific threats to the industry, fund research to counter those threats, place that research in credentialed academic journals, and use the published papers to influence regulatory and public health decisions.

By the 1950s, the SRF had identified three major threats: research suggesting sugar was related to heart disease, research connecting sugar to dental caries, and the development of artificial sweeteners that could replace sugar in food products.

The Harvard Payments

The most consequential known SRF intervention involved two Harvard researchers: Fredrick Stare, founder of Harvard’s Department of Nutrition, and D. Mark Hegsted.

In 1965, SRF approached Harvard to commission a review of research on sugar, fat, and heart disease. The industry representatives reviewed the list of papers to be included and the general conclusions before the review was published. The SRF paid the researchers an amount equivalent to approximately $50,000 in 2016 dollars.

The resulting paper appeared in 1967 in the New England Journal of Medicine. One of the highest-prestige medical journals in the world. It concluded that dietary fat was the primary dietary cause of heart disease and that sugar’s contribution was negligible. Papers implicating sugar were dismissed; papers supporting the fat hypothesis were treated as definitive.

Neither Hegsted nor Stare disclosed their funding in the paper. In 1967, disclosure requirements for academic conflicts of interest didn’t exist.

This paper contributed significantly to the dietary consensus that drove 30 years of low-fat nutritional guidance in the United States.

The payments only became known in 2016, when Cristin Kearns, a researcher at UCSF, found the internal SRF documents in the archived papers of deceased scientists at universities including Harvard, Illinois, and the University of Minnesota.

Regulatory Battles

Cyclamate: Cyclamates were the first major artificial sweetener threat to sugar. They were 30 times sweeter than sugar and significantly cheaper. After the SRF-funded Adams report raised safety concerns, cyclamates were eventually banned by the FDA in 1969 after a study showed bladder cancer in rats given enormous doses. The cyclamate ban was more defensible than the SRF’s earlier efforts, though the history of industry interference complicated the scientific context around the decision.

Saccharin: The sugar industry actively lobbied against saccharin at multiple points in its history. When the FDA proposed banning saccharin in 1977 after rat studies, public and congressional backlash was intense enough to require Congress to explicitly override the FDA’s ban via legislation. The saccharin warning label instead of a ban. The industry supported the ban; consumer groups opposed it.

The dietary fat narrative: Hegsted, the Harvard researcher who had received SRF funding, later became the primary author of the first Dietary Goals for the United States in 1977, which recommended Americans reduce fat consumption. The document shaped USDA dietary guidelines for decades. Hegsted was not a corrupt scientist in any simple sense, he may have genuinely believed in the low-fat model, but his career was substantially shaped by sugar industry funding.

The Project 259 Documents

The 2016 UCSF paper by Kearns, Schmidt, and Glantz also revealed a second SRF program: Project 259, initiated in 1968. This was a study of rats fed either sucrose or starch. The preliminary findings showed that sucrose-fed rats had elevated triglycerides and enlarged bladders — findings consistent with sugar having specific cardiovascular and metabolic effects. The SRF terminated funding for the project before it could be completed or published.

The decision to cut funding for unfavorable research is standard in industry-funded science and is arguably more damaging than publishing biased papers, because it leaves no record.

The Broader Pattern

The sugar industry’s tactics were not unique. The tobacco industry used similar methods, funding favorable research, placing it in credible journals, and using it to forestall regulation, for decades. Internal tobacco documents released in litigation in the 1990s became a template for researchers studying industry influence in other sectors.

Marion Nestle at NYU systematically analyzed industry-funded nutrition studies and found that studies funded by food and beverage companies showed favorable results for the funding company’s product approximately 80% of the time, compared to approximately 50% for independently funded studies. The effect isn’t primarily due to fraud — it operates through study design choices, which outcomes are measured, and the decision of what to publish.

After the Documents

Following the 2016 publication, the SRF (by then renamed the Sugar Association) issued a statement acknowledging the payments but defending the 1967 review as meeting the scientific standards of its time. The statement noted that disclosure requirements didn’t exist in 1967, which is accurate. It did not address the question of whether the industry directed the conclusions before the research was done.

In 2017, researchers at the University of San Francisco found a second set of documents showing that the sugar industry had also funded rat studies in the 1960s and 1970s designed to investigate sugar’s role in bladder cancer and heart disease. And had selectively ended studies that produced unfavorable results before they could be published.

The Kearns et al. JAMA paper was downloaded more than 100,000 times in the month after publication. It prompted editorials in the BMJ, JAMA, and The Lancet calling for stricter conflict-of-interest disclosure requirements in nutrition research.

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