In 1965, the Sugar Research Foundation -- the industry's trade association -- initiated what it internally called Project 226. The project's purpose was to review the scientific literature on dietary causes of heart disease and publish the results in a prestigious medical journal. The review would be written by scientists at the Harvard School of Public Health. The SRF would fund it, review drafts, and shape its conclusions. The review was published in two parts in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967. It emphasized saturated fat as the primary dietary cause of heart disease and downplayed the role of sugar. The SRF's role in funding and directing the work was not disclosed. For fifty years, the sugar industry's investment paid dividends that no stock market could match. The Deal The Sugar Research Foundation paid $6,500 to two Harvard researchers: D. Mark Hegsted and Robert McGandy, working under the supervision of Fredrick Stare, the founder and chair of Harvard's Department of Nutrition. Adjusted for inflation, that is roughly $49,000 in 2026 dollars. Internal SRF documents, uncovered by researcher Cristin Kearns in the Harvard and University of Illinois archives and published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2016, revealed the extent of the arrangement: The SRF set the review's objectives and scope The SRF received and commented on draft manuscripts The SRF's vice president, John Hickson, explicitly urged the authors to emphasize fat and minimize sugar Hickson wrote in a 1965 memo: "Our particular interest had to do with the [sugar] industry's part in the problem" None of this was disclosed in the published papers. The NEJM did not require financial disclosure at the time -- a gap the industry exploited fully. The Scientific Landscape The 1960s were a period of genuine scientific debate about the dietary causes of heart disease. Two competing hypotheses existed: The fat hypothesis, championed by University of Minnesota researcher Ancel Keys, argued that saturated fat drove heart disease. Keys' Seven Countries Study, which found correlations between fat consumption and heart disease across selected nations, was enormously influential. The sugar hypothesis, championed by British physiologist John Yudkin, argued that sugar was the primary culprit. Yudkin's 1972 book Pure, White and Deadly presented evidence linking sugar consumption to heart disease, obesity, and diabetes. The SRF's intervention was not neutral science. It was a deliberate strategy to tip the debate. By funding a review from Harvard -- one of the most prestigious institutions in the world -- and ensuring it reached the NEJM, the sugar industry bought the appearance of scientific consensus. What Happened to John Yudkin Yudkin's fate illustrates how the system punished the correct hypothesis. After Pure, White and Deadly was published, Yudkin was systematically marginalized. Industry-funded researchers attacked his work. His speaking invitations dried up. The British nutrition establishment, heavily influenced by Keys' supporters, dismissed his findings. Yudkin's reputation never recovered during his lifetime. He died in 1995, his warnings about sugar largely forgotten. It would take another two decades before the evidence he cited would be taken seriously again. The Low-Fat Food Industry The 1967 NEJM review, and the dietary guidelines that followed, created the conditions for a massive industrial transformation. If fat was the enemy, the food industry would remove fat and replace it with something else. That something was almost always sugar. The U.S. government's Dietary Guidelines for Americans, first published in 1980, recommended reducing fat intake to 30% of calories and saturated fat to 10%. The guidelines were based heavily on the fat hypothesis that the sugar industry had helped entrench. The result was the "low-fat" food explosion of the 1980s and 1990s. Supermarket shelves filled with products labeled "low-fat," "fat-free," and "lite." The fat was removed. The sugar was added. Yogurt became candy. Salad dressing became syrup. Snack foods became vehicles for refined carbohydrates. During the same period that Americans reduced their fat intake, obesity rates doubled. Diabetes rates tripled. Heart disease remained the leading cause of death. The low-fat experiment failed on its own terms. The 2016 Revelation Cristin Kearns, a dentist turned researcher, discovered the SRF documents while reviewing industry archives at the University of Illinois and the Harvard Medical School library. Her 2016 paper in JAMA Internal Medicine, co-authored with Laura Schmidt and Stanton Glantz, laid out the evidence: The SRF had specifically initiated Project 226 to counter growing evidence linking sugar to heart disease The SRF had selected the researchers, funded the work, and shaped the conclusions The published reviews had deliberately minimized the evidence against sugar while amplifying the case against fat None of the industry involvement had been disclosed The JAMA Internal Medicine paper prompted editorial responses from nutrition scientists across the world. Walter Willett, chair of Harvard's Department of Nutrition at the time, acknowledged that the 1960s review had been heavily influenced by industry funding and called for greater transparency. Why It Still Matters The sugar industry's 1965 intervention did not just produce two flawed papers. It established a paradigm that governed nutrition science, dietary guidelines, and food manufacturing for half a century. That paradigm -- fat is bad, sugar is fine -- became embedded in: Government dietary guidelines (1980-present) Medical school curricula Public health campaigns Food labeling regulations School lunch programs Hundreds of billions of dollars in food industry product development Paradigms are difficult to dislodge even when the evidence turns against them. When the industries that benefit from a paradigm are funding the science, the paradigm becomes nearly impossible to correct. The sugar industry did not just buy a study. They bought fifty years. They didn't ask if we wanted to know that our dietary guidelines were shaped by a check, not by science. The evidence was in the archives all along. _- The Department_