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"Sugar Papers" Reveal Industry Role in 1970s Dental Program

By SugarScience Editor

A newly discovered cache of industry documents reveals that the sugar industry worked closely with the National Institutes of Health in the 1960s and ‘70s to develop a federal research program focused on approaches other than sugar reduction to prevent tooth decay in American children.

An analysis of those papers by researchers at UC San Francisco appears in the open-source scientific journal, PLoS Medicine.

The archive of 319 industry documents, which were uncovered in a public collection at the University of Illinois, revealed that a sugar industry trade organization representing 30 international members had accepted the fact that sugar caused tooth decay as early as 1950, and adopted a strategy aimed at identifying alternative approaches to reducing tooth decay.

Meanwhile, the National Institutes of Health had come to the conclusion in1969 that focusing on reducing consumption of sucrose, “while theoretically possible,” was not practical as a public health measure.

Thus aligned, the sugar industry trade organization and the NIH worked in parallel and ultimately together on developing alternative research approaches, with a substantial portion of the trade organization’s own research priorities – 78 percent – directly incorporated into the 1971 National Caries Program’s first request for research proposals from scientists.

“The dental community has always known that preventing tooth decay required restricting sugar intake,” said first author Cristin Kearns, DDS, MBA, a UCSF postdoctoral scholar who discovered the archives. “It was disappointing to learn that the policies we are debating today could have been addressed more than forty years ago.”

While tooth decay is largely preventable, it remains the leading chronic disease among U.S. children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The CDC estimates that more than half of American children and teens have cavities in their adult teeth, and 15.6 percent of children age 6 to 19 have untreated tooth decay, which can lead to tooth loss, infections and abscesses.

Kearns discovered the papers in a collection that was left to the University of Illinois library by the late Roger Adams, a professor emeritus of organic chemistry who served on the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) and the scientific advisory board of the International Sugar Research Foundation (ISRF), which became the World Sugar Research Organization.

They include 1,551 pages of correspondence among sugar industry executives, meeting minutes and other relevant reports from between 1959 and 1971. Kearns and UCSF co-authors Stanton A. Glantz, PhD, and Laura A. Schmidt, PhD, analyzed the papers against documents from the National Institute of Dental Research (NIDR) to explore how the sugar industry may have influenced the research policies of the 1971 National Caries (Tooth Decay) Program.

The analysis showed that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the sugar industry funded research in collaboration with allied food industries on enzymes to break up dental plaque and a vaccine against tooth decay. It also shows they cultivated relationships with the NIDR and that a sugar industry expert panel overlapped by all but one member with the NIDR panel that influenced the priorities for the NIH tooth decay program. The majority of the research priorities and initial projects largely failed to produce results on a large scale, the authors found.

“These tactics are strikingly similar to what we saw in the tobacco industry in the same era,” said Glantz, whose similar discovery in the 1990s of tobacco industry papers led to massive settlements between the industry and every U.S. state, and to the Department of Justice’s successful prosecution of the major tobacco companies and their research organizations under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The Legacy Tobacco Documents Library at UCSF now contains 14 million of those documents.

“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,” Glantz added.

While the authors recognize that the Adams papers provide a narrow window into the activities of one sugar industry trade association, they noted that the sugar industry’s current position remains that public health should focus on fluoride toothpaste, dental sealants and other ways to reduce the harm of sugar, rather than reducing consumption. They concluded that industry opposition to current policy proposals – including the World Health Organization’s newly released guidelines to reduce added sugar to less than 10% of daily caloric intake ) – should not be allowed to block this prudent public health standard.

“There is robust evidence now linking excess sugar consumption with heart disease, diabetes and liver disease, in addition to tooth decay,” said Schmidt, who also is principal investigator on the UCSF-led SugarScience initiative. “Times have definitely changed since that era, but this is a stark lesson in what can happen if we are not careful about maintaining scientific integrity.”

NEWS SOURCE: UCSF

READ THE PUBLICATION: PLOS Medicine

MEDIA COVERAGE: KQED, TIME, SF ExaminerLe Monde (in French) 

World Health Organization

The World Health Organization (WHO) is the directing and coordinating authority for health within the United Nations system. It is responsible for providing leadership on global health matters, shaping the health research agenda, setting norms and standards, articulating evidence-based policy options, providing technical support to countries and monitoring and assessing health trends. Website: http://www.who.int

SugarScience Glossary

Heart disease

A broad term for a group of chronic diseases of the heart, these diseases include problems with blood supply to heart muscle, problems with heart valves and the electrical system of the heart. Another term you will see used to mean the same thing is cardiovascular disease.

SugarScience Glossary

Liver disease

A broad term meaning any bodily process in which the liver is injured or does not work as it is supposed to. In this website we focus on liver diseases in which the diet hurts the liver

SugarScience Glossary

Added sugar

Any sugar added in preparation of foods, either at the table, in the kitchen or in the processing plant. This may include sucrose, high fructose corn syrup and others.

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Diabetes mellitus

Usually shortened to just diabetes. Sometimes called sugar diabetes. Look at Type 1 Diabetes and Type 2 Diabetes for more information

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Sucrose

Also called table sugar. Your body breaks sucrose into glucose and fructose to use them as fuel.

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