It’s called the Sugar Association , and it’s a sort of “consortium” between multinationals that produce sugar-based foods: for example, Coca-Cola and Kellogg are part of it, and in recent days it is under the eye of the storm, because according to a recent investigation that would have had access to unpublished documents so far, this Association would have financed some researchers at Harvard University since the 1960s. 

For what? Well, if you love conspiracies and believe that scientific research is driven by multinationals, well, this news gives you (a little) reason.
In fact, it seems that in 1967 , the Sugar Association, through a project known as ” Project 226 ” gave almost fifty thousand dollars (a lot of money at the time) to a team of Harvard researchers who were studying the correlation between nutrition , diabetes and cardiovascular diseases.
The funders, through Project 226, would have tweaked some data and had access to the research well before its publication: in the study, the researchers established that there was a connection between hypercholesterolemia and foods that contain cholesterol and saturated fats, thus spreading the belief that eggs and fat in the diet would increase the risk of cardiovascular disease.

According to the article that appeared on CBS , researchers at the time would have oversized the data that established a connection between dietary fat and cardiovascular disease, but at the same time they would have significantly reduced the data that instead established a connection between sugars and cardiovascular diseases. same diseases. The documents, including letters that some Project 226 members would have exchanged with the researchers, leave little room for doubt. The article appeared in 1967 in the New England Journal of Medicine , which at the time did not have a clear policy on collaboration and funding between researchers and industry groups that they would make mandatory by the 1980s. 

Asked by CBS, nutrition expert Professor Marion Nestle stressed the gravity of the fact: since that moment the attention of doctors and researchers has focused on the connection between dietary fat and disease, while the industry has continued to selling products rich in sugars to the population, and the “low fat” diet has filled the market with light, skimmed and fat-free products.
All this while gradually taking responsibility for the role that foods containing sugar have played in worsening people’s health.
The current American and government guidelines have only changed course in recent years, stating that there is no remarkable and positive association between foods that contain cholesterol and the onset of heart disease.