Corporate Hijinks Cost Millions of Lives
Recent evidence found in library archives proves that, in the Sixties, the sugar industry paid top-ranking nutrition experts at Harvard Medical School, to do an exhaustive literature review and prove that sugar had nothing to do with heart disease. The experts did as they were paid and the review was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967.
This review swayed the entire research community away from sugar and toward fats as the culprit. So, for the last fifty years, cardiovascular research has focused almost exclusively on the role of fats and cholesterol on the development of hardening of the arteries; and the pharmaceutical industry has focused on fat and cholesterol lowering drugs.
The food industry, meanwhile, has focused on low fat foods, often replacing the fat with sugar. Just what the sugar industry wanted.
So, now we have an epidemic of diabetes while heart disease is still the number one killer in our society with strokes, also caused by hardening of the arteries, running at third. (All cancers put together is second.)
Back in the Sixties, studies linking sugar to heart disease were starting to accumulate, that was what had the sugar industry worried. Their hijinks put off the truth for fifty years, but science, when done correctly, is self-correcting, and, finally, the truth about sugar is coming out.
What we now know is that it is the rate of change of sugar levels in your blood stream that causes the initial harm to the membrane that lines the inside of your arteries. Once injured, fats do get deposited under the membrane which then go on to form the arterial plaques. So it is easy to understand how fats could have been blamed, since they are what make up the plaque. But if the arterial lining doesn’t get injured in the first place, the plaques don’t form, no matter the cholesterol level.
Most integrative physicians and naturopaths have known about the sugar connection all along and now the conventional medical system is catching up. Many diabetes clinics now treat pre-diabetes and type II diabetes with a no GPS diet. That stands for no Grains, Potatoes, and Sugar diet. Those are the foods most likely to cause rapid swings in the level of blood sugar. They recommend filling in those lost calories with, you guessed it…fat. And they’re getting great results.
Think about all the people who developed heart disease and strokes over the past fifty year who maybe didn’t need to. Those kinds of corporate hijinks are still going on; some say more than ever. As government funding for research continues to get cut, private special interests are funding the research more and more. And they like to get what they pay for.
So, as a medical consumer, how can you protect yourself? After all, research is important. Researchers are required to reveal sources of research funding, but this is small protection. If the results of the research flies in the face of common sense, like the large study funded by General Mills that “proved” that sugar consumption has no influence on children’s behavior at school, or contradicts the ways of nature, you might be suspicious of it. You can always check in with your own deep inner knowing and trust what is right for you, no matter what the “experts” say. Research has shown that the people who do that are the ones who get better.