http://nationalpost.com/health/new-report-alleges-big-sugar-tried-to-hide-possible-link-to-cancer-50-years-ago
[Of course we can trust unregulated industry to conduct research for the
benefit of the public. So say the sugar industry, tobacco industry, oil
industry, GMO industry ...]
New report alleges big sugar tried to hide possible link to cancer 50
years ago
According to a new analysis, when a study in rats suggested sucrose
might be associated with heart disease and bladder cancer, the industry
terminated the project
Sharon Kirkey
November 22, 2017
8:41 PM EST
The sugar industry abruptly terminated funding for a study that
suggested a possible link between sugar and bladder cancer nearly 50
years ago, according to a new review of industry documents.
The rat study — known as “Project 259” — was finding that the urine of
rodents fed a high-sucrose (versus high-starch) diet contained higher
levels of an enzyme that had been previously associated with bladder
cancer in rats, according to the authors of the latest analysis of “the
sugar papers” — a cache of internal memos, letters and company reports
unearthed by University of California at San Francisco researchers.
Project 259 also suggested a possible mechanism for how gut bacteria
metabolize sugar to drive up triglycerides, a type of fat circulating in
the blood that increases the risk of heart disease, the researchers report.
But the results of Project 259 were never published. After dismissing
the study’s value as “nil,” the International Sugar Research Foundation
put an end to its funding, according to the new analysis, published this
week in the journal PLOS Biology.
“Let’s say this study had been going the other way and you could have
fed these animals massive amounts of sugar and it didn’t do anything,”
co-author Stanton Glantz, a professor in the division of cardiology at
UCSF, said in an interview. “I’m sure (the sugar industry) would not
have cut off the funding. They would be out there thumping the tub —
‘look, we fed these rats, like, five gazillion pounds of sugar and it
didn’t matter.’”
In a statement, The Sugar Association called the new paper “a collection
of speculations and assumptions about events that happened nearly five
decades ago, ” written and funded by “known critics of the sugar
industry.” It said the study was nixed not because of “potential
research findings,” but because it was behind schedule and over budget.
“There were plans to continue the study with funding from the British
Nutrition foundation, but, for reasons unbeknown to us, this did not occur.”
Association president and CEO Courtney Gaine said she could find nothing
in a search of the archived project reports about a possible link with
bladder cancer. Last year, The Sugar Association issued a press release
downplaying results of a University of Texas mouse study linking sugar
to cancer, saying, “no credible link between ingested sugars and cancer
has been established.”
“Cancer is serious and consumers care about what they eat,” she said.
“What is the point in scaring the public into thinking sugar causes cancer?”
The new analysis, however, suggests the industry cut off funding because
the animal study was teasing out a possible link.
“The kind of manipulation of research is similar (to) what the tobacco
industry does,” Glantz alleged in a statement released with the study.
(In 1994, Glantz took delivery of thousands of pages of internal
documents from a tobacco company leaked by a secret source named “Mr.
Butts.” Glantz turned the documents into the book The Cigarette Papers.)
“The sugar industry has stayed on top of, and in many cases ahead of,
the scientific community and worked very hard to shape the discussion in
ways that would protect their economic interests,” he said.
In an earlier analysis of the sugar papers published last year, the UCSF
team reported that the industry bankrolled a review article published in
1967 by Harvard scientists that downplayed sugar’s role in heart disease
— in part by pointing the finger squarely at saturated fat.
Researchers report that the next year, what was then known as the Sugar
Research Foundation launched Project 259 in rats. This time, they chose
Walter Pover, a biochemist at the University of Birmingham who was paid
roughly US$188,000 in today’s dollars to lead the study between 1968 and
1970.
Pover set out to test the effects of different carbohydrates on
triglycerides in two groups of rats — one germ-free, the other normal
rats with gut bacteria.
In a progress update he gave to his funders in August 1970, Pover
reported that the results, so far obtained, “seem very interesting
indeed.” When germ-free rats were fed sugar, their triglyceride levels
didn’t rise.
The results suggested that triglycerides form when microbes in our gut
ferment sucrose, said first author Cristin Kearns, a finding Pover
reported to his funders as “highly significant.”
Rats fed sucrose also showed higher levels of beta-glucuronidase, an
enzyme Kearns says had previously been associated with bladder cancer in
humans. But she and her co-authors cite only two studies, from 1955 and
1968, suggesting an association between elevated levels of the enzymes
in urine and bladder cancer.
Pover said he needed 12 more weeks to complete his experiments. Instead,
his money was pulled. The Sugar Association said the study had already
been extended a year. But Kearns said that, if confirmed, the finding
would have bolstered the argument at the time that sucrose increased the
risk of heart disease.
The sugar industry “has consistently denied that sucrose has any
metabolic effects related to chronic disease beyond its caloric
effects,” the authors write in PLOS Biology.
But, how bad is sugar? It’s still hard to say.
In August, in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, U.S. researchers
said added sugars have produced “drug-like” effects in animals,
including binging, cravings, tolerance and withdrawal. “Sugar produces
effects similar to that of cocaine,” they wrote, a charge critics called
“absurd.”
In The Case Against Sugar, author Gary Taubes (who, for the new paper,
provided funding for Kearns to travel to the Harvard Medical Library)
prosecutes sugar as the root cause of the things statistically most
likely to kill us, “or at least accelerate our demise, in the
twenty-first century.”
Yet he also acknowledged that the science, as it stands now, hasn’t
unequivocally proven sugar to be “uniquely harmful — a toxin that does
its damage over the decades. The evidence is not as clear with sugar as
it is with tobacco.”
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, meanwhile, has instructed his health
minister, among other mandated top priorities, to improve food labels to
include more information on added sugars.
New York University nutrition professor Marion Nestle said that large
amounts of sugar are strongly associated with obesity, Type 2 diabetes
and metabolic abnormalities “leading to fatty liver and the like.”
However, she’s not aware of evidence for an association with bladder cancer.
“The point is that the research generated a disturbing hypotheses that
deserved further investigation, but did not get it at the time,” she said.
Three years ago, the Heart and Stroke Foundation issued a new position
statement recommending Canadian adults and children limit their
consumption of added or “free” sugars to no more than 10 per cent of
their total daily caloric intake and, ideally, less than five per cent —
recommendations that align with the World Health Organization’s sugar
targets.
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https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/11/21/565766988/what-the-industry-knew-about-sugars-health-effects-but-didnt-tell-us
[links in on-line article]
What The Industry Knew About Sugar's Health Effects, But Didn't Tell Us
November 21, 20174:29 PM ET
Allison Aubrey
Back in the 1960s, the fact that our diets influence the risk of heart
disease was still a new idea. And there was a debate about the role of
fats and the role of sugar.
The sugar industry got involved in efforts to influence this debate.
"What the sugar industry successively did," argues Stanton Glantz of the
University of California, San Francisco, "is they shifted all of the
blame onto fats."
The industry's strategies were sophisticated, Glantz says, and are
similar to those of the tobacco industry. For instance, in 1965 an
industry group, the Sugar Research Foundation, secretly funded a
scientific review that downplayed the evidence that linked sugar
consumption to blood fat levels. The review was published in the New
England Journal of Medicine.
Now, what's come to light in an investigation published Tuesday in the
journal PLOS Biology is that the industry funded its own research
project, but never disclosed the findings.
Glantz and his collaborators, including Cristin Kearns, an assistant
professor at UCSF, evaluated a bunch of sugar industry internal
documents. Here's what they found:
Back in 1968, the Sugar Research Foundation, a predecessor to the
International Sugar Research Foundation, paid a researcher to lead a
study with lab animals.
Initial results showed that a high-sugar diet increased the animals'
triglyceride levels, a type of fat in the blood, through effects on the
gut bacteria. In people, high triglycerides can increase the risk of
heart attacks and strokes. The study also found that animals fed sugar
had higher levels of an enzyme associated with bladder cancer in their
urine.
The study was halted before it was completed. Glantz says the researcher
asked for more time to continue the study, but the Sugar Research
Foundation pulled the plug on the project.
The Sugar Association, a trade group based in Washington, D.C., that has
organizational ties to the Sugar Research Foundation, released a
statement on this new investigation.
"The study in question ended for three reasons, none of which involved
potential research findings," the association says. The statement goes
on to explain that the study was over budget and delayed. "The delay
overlapped with an organizational restructuring with the Sugar Research
Foundation becoming a new entity, the International Sugar Research
Foundation," the statement says.
The trade group says sugar consumed in moderation is part of a balanced
lifestyle, and in its statement the group says "we remain committed to
supporting research to further understand the role sugar plays in
consumers' evolving eating habits."
But critics argue that the industry is still trying to slow down the
consensus on the health risks linked to sugar consumption. In the PLOS
Biology paper, Glantz and his co-authors argue that the ongoing
controversy surrounding sugar in our diets "may be rooted in more than
60 years of food and beverage industry manipulation of science."
In recent years, new evidence has emerged that links sugary diets to
heart disease. But could we have gotten the message sooner?
UCSF's Kearns argues that if the sugar industry had published its
findings decades ago, it would have added to a growing body of evidence.
"Had this information been made public, there would have been a lot more
research scrutiny of sugar," Kearns told us.
Kearns says the sugar industry has "a lot of money and influence" and
still uses its influence to cast doubt on the recommendation to limit
added sugars to no more than 10 percent of daily calories.
In a trade association publication last year, the president and CEO of
the Sugar Association described this recommended limit on sugar, which
is part of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, as "scientifically out
of bounds."
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
2015 PLOS Paper:
http://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.1001798
Sugar Industry Influence on the Scientific Agenda of the National
Institute of Dental Research’s 1971 National Caries Program: A
Historical Analysis of Internal Documents
2017 PLOS Paper:
http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.2003460
Sugar industry sponsorship of germ-free rodent studies linking sucrose
to hyperlipidemia and cancer: An historical analysis of internal documents