The sugar industry influenced research by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in an effort to encourage the agency to recommend methods, other than reduction of sugar intake, to prevent tooth decay.
The "sugar papers" are 319 documents developed by the sugar industry examined by researchers at the University of California San Francisco. They revealed the industry pushed the NIH to create a federal research program that would not harm their profits.
Investigators found that an international group of 30 corporations and other organizations involved in selling sugar determined, as early as 1950, that the sweetener leads to tooth decay. Despite this knowledge, they actively pressed the agency not to recommend parents reduce their children's sugar intake.
In 1969, the NIH determined that although reducing sucrose was possible, carrying out such a change in the United States was impractical.
The trade association then worked in conjunction with the NIH to push efforts towards research supporting alternative methods to fight tooth decay, without reducing sugar intake.
"The dental community has always known that preventing tooth decay required restricting sugar intake. It was disappointing to learn that the policies we are debating today could have been addressed more than forty years ago," Cristin Kearns, a researcher who first uncovered the documents, said.
The sugar papers were discovered in a series of documents bequeathed, by the late Roger Adams, to the University of Illinois library. Adams was an organic chemist who once served as an adviser for the International Sugar Research Foundation (ISRF), which later morphed into the World Sugar Research Organization.
These documents include meeting minutes, messages between leaders in the sugar industry, and other papers. The 1,551 pages of documents, covering the years 1959 to 1971, were then compared to research policies announced by the NIH, including the National Caries Program, recommendations about tooth decay, announced in 1971.
Tooth decay is the most common chronic disease among children in the United States. Over half of American youth have cavities in adult teeth, and 15.6 percent have untreated tooth decay, which can lead to infections, abscesses and tooth loss, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
Throughout the 1960's and 70's, the sugar industry funded research into a vaccine against tooth decay, as well as an enzyme capable of breaking up dental plaque, the papers reveal.
"These tactics are strikingly similar to what we saw in the tobacco industry in the same era. Our findings are a wake-up call for government officials charged with protecting the public health, as well as public health advocates, to understand that the sugar industry, like the tobacco industry, seeks to protect profits over public health," Stanton Glantz, who helped analyze the papers, told the press.
Announcement and analysis of the Sugar Papers was detailed in the journal PLOS Medicine.
Photo: Uwe Hermann | Flickr
