11 ms·

When this news first came out it was mind blowing, but at the same time I don't entirely get it. So the money quote seems to be: > The literature review heavi

• apples_oranges 9mo ago
  PR can be a lot of bang for your buck. https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
• uniqueuid 9mo ago
  It's really good to ask these questions. I'm not a medial researcher, but my impression is that many fields find it difficult to produce the robust high-level risk comparisons that you ask about. I.e. if you're looking at blood fats, even there you'll find many complicated contextual factors (age, sex, ethnicity, type of lipids i.e. LDL or lp(a) or ...?). The same might be the case for sugar. So it's not really easy/cheap to combine detailed state-of-the-art measurements of different causes into one randomized controlled trial. As for the effects of sugar, I think there's some evidence that's not too hard to find, e.g. some meta analyses showing something around 10% increase in dose-dependent risk (RR ~ 1.10) [1,2]. A lot of the literature seems to be focused on beverages, e.g. this comparative cross-national study [3]. [1] https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullarticle/1819573 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/fullar... [2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S089990072300062X https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S08999... [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03345-4 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-024-03345-4
  • throwway120385 9mo ago
    But is it the actual sugar, or the habits surrounding consumption of the beverage?
    • astura 9mo ago
      What are "the habits surrounding consumption of the beverage?" It's been my observation that soda drinkers drink soda all day, no matter what they are doing.
    • uniqueuid 9mo ago
      That's pretty easy. If you have a randomized controlled trial, the sugar dose is varied and other confounding variables are controlled by randomization. So you measure the causal impact of sugar only. There are studies showing that. With observational studies, if you have a dose-dependent effect, then that's good evidence (although not completely conclusive) of a causal relationship. This is what many studies do. If you have a meta analysis covering many primary studies, and if those vary a lot of context (i.e. countries, year, composition of the population), and you still get a consistent effect, then that's another piece of support for a causal relationship. The few studies that I've looked at seem to show a pretty robust picture of sugar being a cause, but there might be selection bias - i.e. we'd need an umbrella / meta meta study (which ideally accounts for publication bias) to get the best estimate possible.
      • tfirst 9mo ago
        Observational studies, and meta analyses relying on them, don't resolve the fundamental problem of causal inference. The best you can do without an experiment is a really clean natural experiment, but those are rare. It's hard to credibly establish a causal relationship without a robust experiment.
• stevenwoo 9mo ago
  I am only surprised this came out of UCSF and Robert Lustig's name is not on it, since it's often a topic in his books. Maybe nutrition-health connection is more complex than can be shown by these early studies, and the big lobbying money only needs one study to get congressional support some putative scientific backing, the entire anti science funding arm of Congress uses one factoid about a shrimp treadmill for decades and the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper. https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/shrimp-treadmill-study-cost-misrepresented-2025-02-21/ https://www.reuters.com/fact-check/shrimp-treadmill-study-co... Anyways here's a recent study showing fat/sugar intake and nanoplastic correlation. https://www.inrae.fr/en/news/nanoplastics-have-diet-dependent-impacts-digestive-system-health https://www.inrae.fr/en/news/nanoplastics-have-diet-dependen...
  • logicchains 9mo ago
    >the entire antivax movement is built on that widely discredited Wakefield paper. You're clearly misinformed. The antivax movement is largely a grassroots movement built on the experiences of the parents of vaccine-injured children, and people who've read the literature comparing vaccinated vs unvaccinated outcomes. E.g. the large scale unpublished study conducted by the CDC, https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Entered-into-hearing-record-Impact-of-Childhood-Vaccination-on-Short-and-Long-Term-Chronic-Health-Outcomes-in-Children-A-Birth-Cohort-Study.pdf https://www.hsgac.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/Entered-into... , which showed vaccinated children demonstrating higher rates of developmental disorders. There's not a single large scale study conducted comparing vaccinated with unvaccinated children that shows no greater rate of developmental disorders in the vaccinated group (the above study was supposed to be that, but when the results ended up showing the opposite the CDC decided not to publish it). Ask yourself, if you believe vaccines aren't more dangerous than any other pharmaceutical product, then why not support removing the blanket liability immunity given to vaccine makers, that no other medical product needs?
    • Aloisius 9mo ago
      Sigh. The paper couldn't make it through peer review because of methodology errors. Specifically, the sample groups had vastly different demographics and sizes which make meaningful comparisons between them impossible due to confounding factors. This wasn't some secret CDC plot to bury research. The CDC wasn't even involved. This was just poor research. https://www.henryford.com/news/2025/09/vaccine-study-henry-ford-health https://www.henryford.com/news/2025/09/vaccine-study-henry-f...
• tonyedgecombe 9mo ago
  Or maybe the combination is the problem. I couldn’t consume much sugar on its own nor much cream but put the two together in ice cream and I could eat it all day long.
  • Avshalom 9mo ago
    No no, ice cream is good for you. It's fine.
    • deleted 9mo ago
      [deleted]
  • aldarion 9mo ago
    That is what I came to believe as well. If sugar alone was the problem, vegans would be fat. If fat alone was the problem, ketogenic and carnivore diets wouldn't help people lose weight. It seems to be the combination of two at the same time that causes the issues.
    • christophilus 9mo ago
      It’s the Randall Cycle.
    • gruez 9mo ago
      >That is what I came to believe as well. If sugar alone was the problem, vegans would be fat. If fat alone was the problem, ketogenic and carnivore diets wouldn't help people lose weight. This logic is faulty because both vegans and keto/carnivore people are selected for adherence to diets. If you can stick to either dietary restrictions, you can probably also not pig out on pop tarts or whatever.
      • aldarion 9mo ago
        That is incorrect, actually. I find it relatively easy to adhere to keto diet. But the moment I try to introduce more "diverse" foods, I gain weight. Because processed food diet is IMPOSSIBLE to adhere to without gaining weight. Caloric restriction simply doesn't work - your body wants nutrients, not just calories. Which is to say, your willpower will fail sooner or later, unless you find a way of satisfying nutritional needs without excess caloric intake.
• Haaargio 9mo ago
  communication before the internet was very slow. Hype or getting viral is not necessarily science so its not clear when and how and why one paper suddenly becomes very known. We know what sugar and others do, people are probably ignorant or not but its not billions are dead directly, people struggle a little bit more, the statistics number goes up. Now talk to anyone who likes to drink and eat that stuff everyday, do you think they care? no they do not. Then you have the wrong people sponsoring this. Fraud etc.
• Aurornis 9mo ago
  You’re exactly right: This one incident did not shape the entire body of scientific research. There is a common trick used in contrarian argumentation where a single flaw is used to “debunk” an entire side of the debate. The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one. They don’t want you to apply the same level of rigor and introspection to the opposite side, though. In the sugar versus saturated fat debate, this incident is used as the lure to get people to blame sugar as the root cause. There is a push to make saturated fat viewed as not only neutral, but healthy and good for you. Yet if you apply the same standards of rigor and inspection of the evidence, excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you. There is another fallacy in play where people pushing these debates want you to think that there is only one single cause of CVD or health issues: Either sugar, carbs, fat, or something else. The game they play is to point the finger at one thing and imply that it gets the other thing off the hook. Don’t fall for this game.
  • llm_nerd 9mo ago
    > The next step, often implied rather than explicit, is to push the reader into assuming that the opposite position must therefore be the correct one. See this in the constant "the MSM is imperfect, that's why I trust Joe Rogan or some random `citizen-journalist' on Twitter" nonsense. It's how everything has gotten very stupid very quickly. People note that medical science has changed course on something, therefore they should listen to some wellness influencer / grifter. > excess sugar and excess saturated fat are both not good for you The submitter of this entry is clearly a keto guy, and it's a bit weird because who is claiming sugar is good or even neutral for you? Like, we all know sugar is bad. It has rightly been a reasonably vilified food for decades. Positively no one is saying to replace saturated fats with sugar. In the 1980s there was a foolish period where the world went low fat, largely simply because fat is more calorically dense and people were getting fat, ergo less fat = less calories. Which of course is foolish logic and people just ate two boxes of snackwells or whatever instead, but sugar was still not considered ideal. Someone elsewhere mentioned MAHA, and that's an interesting note because in vilifying HFCS, MAHA is strangely healthwashing sucrose among the "get my info from wellness influencers" crowd. Suddenly that softdrink is "healthy" because of the "all natural sugar".
• CodeWriter23 9mo ago
  You could buy a house and a 69 Charger for $25K in the 60's with a tidy sum left over.
  • ok123456 9mo ago
    take me back
    • ecshafer 9mo ago
      [flagged]
      • tuyiown 9mo ago
        You're really reducing a whole economic situation to a currency issue ?
        • logicchains 9mo ago
          It's not just a currency issue; inflation is by definition a reduction in the purchasing power of a fixed wage, and the issue we're facing is that the purchasing power of people's wages is less. If their wages were denominated in a unit of account that wasn't continuously losing value, they wouldn't be continuously losing purchasing power. The reason you may not know it's an issue is because inflation in our current system isn't just a loss of purchasing power, it's a transfer of purchasing power to those who first receive/spend the newly created money: the banking/financial system. So of course the system invested a lot of money, time and effort in convincing you that it's a good thing to continuously donate a fraction of your purchasing power to the finance industry every year.
          • quercus 9mo ago
            I can't remember a bigger HN blackpill than this getting downvoted.
            • 9mo ago
• BeetleB 9mo ago
  > I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD. Decades - not 10 years. The payment was made in the 1960's.
  • llm_nerd 9mo ago
    I believe they're talking about this UCSF report of a "newly discovered cache of industry documents", which came out in 2016.
  • rendaw 9mo ago
    Ah sorry, 10 years since the revelation about the funding. But yes, decades (over 50 years?) since the single (?) literature review.
• jollyllama 9mo ago
  > That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar. People are often surprised when they find out how little people sell out for. The going rate for a member of congress in 2015 was a little less [0] - about $43,000. [0] https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/ https://truthout.org/articles/you-too-can-buy-a-congressman/
  • astura 9mo ago
    But buying off a single congressperson is not going to change the worldwide discourse on a topic.
    • ceejayoz 9mo ago
      Pick the right one and it might. Or spend $23,134,000 on all of the House and Senate.
      • bluGill 9mo ago
        You probably only need 15% of congress. Some of the unbought ones will follow, some would vote for your side anyway, and there are often unrelated things in the bill that will bring a bunch of those who otherwise don't care about this issue with.
    • jollyllama 9mo ago
      In theory, to change discourse, you just need one expert and a few magazine articles and the rest is history.
    • jjk166 9mo ago
      How do you eat an entire elephant? One bite at a time. How do you corrupt an entire government? One congressperson at a time.
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
  • JumpCrisscross 9mo ago
• ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
  You're right to be skeptical, but: > They paid a total of 2 people $50,000. That's over half a million, in today's dollars. With inflation, and whatnot, we get numb to what money was, back when.
  • jscd 9mo ago
    Other way around. To quote the article: > To conduct the literature review, the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars [...] So it was actually about ~$5,000 in 1965 dollars.
  • eru 9mo ago
    No, that's already inflation adjusted.
  • astura 9mo ago
    The $50k is already adjusted for inflation.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 9mo ago
      Ah. My bad, then.
  • deathanatos 9mo ago
    … it's $68,404 in today's dollars, according to BLS's inflation calc. (…your figure works out to a 26% per annum inflation rate. The $50k figure is in 2016 dollars — "the sugar industry paid the Harvard scientists the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars".)
• ceejayoz 9mo ago
  > They paid a total of 2 people $50,000. In this specific case.
  • rendaw 9mo ago
    Oh yeah, that was another question I had. So was this the only time the sugar industry influenced things? Was there an investigation? Either there was no investigation (why) or it didn't find anything else (?) When this came out I was expecting it to be the tip of the iceberg.
• ycombinary 9mo ago
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• aldarion 9mo ago
  "Okay, where is it? What are the conclusions? Is sugar actually contributing more than fat for CVD in most patients?" Depends on the type of fat, I think. From what I have found out myself, it is trans fats > sugars / simple carbohydrates > polyunsaturated fats > complex carbohydrates > monounsaturated fats > saturated fats. Obesity really exploded when consumption shifted from butter towards margarine and vegetable oils: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-US-fat-consumption-1909-2010-Data-from-http-wwwcnpp_fig29_303745090 https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Trends-in-US-fat-consump... If anything, consumption of monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats is the issue: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3389/fnut.2021.748847/full https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/nutrition/articles/10.3... But of course, you also have to consider nature of food. In nature, you would consume either carbohydrates or fats - either plants or meat. But processed foods include a lot of fats and a lot of carbs in a single package. And that is the actual killer. Fats aren't an issue, carbs aren't that much of an issue, isssue is the nature of fats and carbs consumed, and issue is the way we consume them.
  • tsimionescu 9mo ago
    You'll find many people claiming almost the exact opposite, just as confidently. Plant fats are generally seen as much healthier, especially olive oil and similar fats. This idea that the combination of macronutrients that a food contains also seems highly suspect - generally people tend to think that macronutrients work independently of each other. The reality is, of course, that we just don't know. Nutrition "science" is almost entirely bogus (the only real part of it is the discovery of the nature and functioning of the various vitamins, and thus the elimination of scurvy and similar diseases - plus a few other extremes). Even the existence and importance of dietary fiber in many foods was a very recent discovery (resistant starch and oligosaccharides were only identified as dietary fiber in the 2000s, for example) - meaning that even the base caloric contents of many foods were wrongly measured as late as the 2000s (and who knows what else we're missing here).
    • aldarion 9mo ago
      "generally people tend to think that macronutrients work independently of each other" Well, that is obviously the wrong idea. Even basic logic speaks against it: people lose weight on keto diet, people lose weight on vegan diet... so neither protein, fat nor carbs can be causing obesity. But what do foods that we know are obesogenic have in common? 1) They are highly processed and/or 2) they combine fats and carbs into single package. But it is true that we don't know for certain. What we do know is that this dietary experiment we have had going since 1970s at the latest has failed completely. As I tend to say: paleo diet should be the basis of any diet, and then you further adjust it based on how your body responds.
• octaane 9mo ago
  > They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars). That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar. You would be astonished at how little it takes to bribe, I mean donate, to a politician for example. For as little as $10-20k USD you can get a literal seat at a table with a sitting senator or congresscritter for several hours at a "charity" dinner, with results as expected.
• casualrandomcom 9mo ago
  I don't know why this was re-posted today (kind of suspicious that this floats again after 10 year just by chance) anyway, there is a full citation-heavy book by Gary Taubes about this, and one of his points was that the sugar industry paid 2 million in 1970's dollars to create the nutrition department of Harvard, which was the first nutrition department in the world. (This was to say that nutrition science itself has been corrupt since its birth).
  • nearbuy 9mo ago
    The department of nutrition at Harvard was founded in 1942.
    • casualrandomcom 9mo ago
      To be true to Taubes, my memory was too approximate. The actual claim was that in 1976 Fred Stare, the director and founder (in 1942) of the Department of Nutrition of the Harvard School of Public Health was exposed by Michael Jacobson having received around 200.000 dollars in the course of the preceding 3 years from Kellogg's, Nabisco e and their foundations, after he had testified before the Congress about the virtues of cereal as a breakfast food. Apparently this discredited Stare as a scientist. Wikipedia also states that "Kellogg's funded $2 million to set up the Nutrition Foundation at Harvard. The foundation was independent of the university and published a journal Nutrition Reviews that Stare edited for 25 years." But I cannot find this is Taubes's book.
• scotty79 9mo ago
  > That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar. Check out the story of Andrew Wakefield. One financially motivated lie can spark wildfire.
• didibus 9mo ago
  This is one of those where you need to be able to discern nuances in your brain as multiple things are happening. First, identifying cause and effect of CVD is super hard, and there are lots of studies with various level of indications and in reality we're still far from understanding most of it. Even just the effects of fat and sugar on it isn't clear, and our understanding of fat itself, and all its types, and of sugars and all its types, even that's incomplete. And this makes it a perfect battle ground for grift and financial interests, because you can paint various narratives and cleverly build a case for it, since in reality so many possibilities are still on the table. I think the conclusions that are on the stronger side are those that relate to medication and surgery. Blood pressure pills, statins, antiplatelet, coronary artery bypass, aortic valve replacement, etc. When it comes to nutrition and other lifestyle changes, things are muddy. So instead you have "school of thoughts" and belief systems forms that often tie up with personal identity. Second, you have financial interests meddling with research and messaging. A financial interest might want to mingle even if the research supports them, just not to take any chances. And if we found two cases of it, that's just those that were caught and proven, it's likely there's many more mingling then just that. Even if it doesn't end up proving things their way, you can assume all this mingling slows things down and makes figuring out the truth much harder and slower, which maintains the state of uncertainty for longer and that state is good for financial interests. Lastly, it's not that we know nothing at all, and everything is just beliefs. There are a few things that have strong evidence repeatedly. We know that smoking, high blood pressure, plaque buildup, high lifetime LDL, clots, and diabetes/insulin resistance are all bad and lead to increase risks of CVD. And avoiding or lowering those, no matter how, helps reduce that risk. But it's not enough for most people that want to feel in control and believe they're living in a way that CVD won't happen to them. Which makes them vulnerable to grifters and various influencers.
• zug_zug 9mo ago
  This is just the time that we caught. Who knows how many more times it happened and wasn't caught? > I guess the thing that I most don't get is it's now been 10 years since then, and I haven't seen any news about the link between sugar and CVD. Perhaps this is more evidence that not everybody has been caught? It's not like this is some isolated thing, like it's a documented fact that the food pyramid was shaped the way it was due to industry pressure.[1] 1 - Marion Nestle, Food Politics
  • guelo 9mo ago
    You're arguing for a pattern based on 1 data point.
• ipv6ipv4 9mo ago
  > And the research was out there! Does everybody only read this single Harvard literature review? Does nobody read journals, or other meta studies, or anything? Did the researchers from other institutions whose research was criticized not make any fuss? They did. But Ancel Keys, one of the bribed researchers, author of the infamous seven countries study that laid the groundwork against fat made it his life’s mission to discredit anyone who researched sugar. He effectively made the topic academic suicide. His primary target, that served as a warning example for others was his contemporary in the U.K. John Yudkin.
• ptaffs 9mo ago
  Good comment. Industry influencing research is nothing new (Global Warming, Oxycodone), and the dollar amount is small but it really doesn't take a lot of money to influence anyone. This case was interesting because they diverted attention to another contributor and influenced public policy against savory snacks; I remember the public health campaign against habitual daily consumption chips/crisps, without equally addressing chocolate bars: https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/a-packet-of-crisps-a-day-thats-5-litres-of-cooking-oil-in-a-year-27q07fqz7ff?msockid=2d0227585ee46945095e31925fd76876 https://www.thetimes.com/travel/destinations/uk-travel/a-pac... And I'd also comment the ludicrous abstract comparison of drinking oil in a year. I wouldn't want to eat a football field of raw potato either. I do wonder how/why the Savory Snack industry didn't fire back, and why don't we have anything better than: are they both equally bad or is fat or salt worse.
• nomnomconflicts 9mo ago
  > They paid a total of 2 people $50,000 (edit: in 2016 dollars). > That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar. A contradictory example where this does occur is in propaganda. Technology can be applied to maximize the reach and influence of otherwise inferior arguments at a fraction of the cost. A relatively small sequence of "shows" or "films" can disproportionately affect the world view of billions. edit: The adoption of cigarettes across the world was affected by a significantly much smaller investment in ad placement compared to its global adoption and affects due to the reach and amplification "of technology".
• stefantalpalaru 9mo ago
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• dredmorbius 9mo ago
  They paid a total of 2 people... That's not quite what TFA says. Rather: "The UCSF researchers analyzed more than 340 documents, totaling 1,582 pages of text, between the sugar industry and two individuals...." That is, this research (into industry influence) focused on the available and reviewed correspondence between the industry group and two specific researchers. There's nothing about this article or the referenced analysis which precludes additional other researchers being similarly influenced.
• ndr 9mo ago
  Correction: they paid at least 2 people, at least $50,000. Assuming this is true, it's a lower bound. What else has been tried?
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• astrostl 9mo ago
  > That doesn't seem like enough to entirely shape worldwide discourse around nutrition and sugar. IDK, see the "BLOTS ON A FIELD?" by Science ("A neuroscience image sleuth finds signs of fabrication in scores of Alzheimer’s articles, threatening a reigning theory of the disease") or "The 60-Year-Old Scientific Screwup That Helped COVID Kill" by Wired (regarding the anti-scientific refusal to acknowledge it as airborne) for a couple of recent examples. Once underlying assumptions stop getting questioned, I think anything is at least possible.