Sugar, not fat, drove the obesity epidemic — and industry knew it

In 1967, the Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard scientists to publish a review downplaying sugar's role in heart disease and shifting blame to saturated fat — a fact uncovered in internal documents published in JAMA Internal Medicine in 2016. Decades of low-fat dietary guidelines followed, during which food manufacturers replaced fat with sugar to maintain palatability. Research by Robert Lustig and others now argues that fructose, particularly in liquid form, is metabolised differently from other sugars and plays a central role in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and metabolic syndrome.

Source: Kearns et al., JAMA Internal Medicine (2016)