By 1965, the SRF funded "Project 226", which would have Hegsted and McGandy-supervised by Stare-write a literature review that downplayed sugars' role in heart disease and shifted blame exclusively to saturated fat. In it, University of California, San Francisco researchers uncover a long history of sugar companies influencing research.

"This study suggests that the sugar industry sponsored its first CHD [coronary heart disease] research project in 1965 to downplay early warning signs that sucrose consumption was a risk factor in CHD".

That's the takeaway of a new study published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), which claims the sugar industry in the 1960s launched a campaign in which it paid for nutrition research to downplay evidence linking America's rising sugar consumption to heart disease.

From the documents, the researchers have unveiled about a trade group known as the Sugar Research Foundation, known today by the name of the Sugar Association, has paid three Harvard scientists around $50,000 in today's dollar equivalent to come up with a 1967 review of research on sugar, fat and heart disease.

The next year, after several scientific articles were published suggesting a link between sucrose and coronary heart disease, the SRF approved the literature-review project. One recent study in PLoS One found 1,500 pages of correspondence between sugar executives, which reveal that the industry ensured that all but one member of the government task force on tooth decay was paid off by Big Sugar. Only this year did the FDA decide to rethink its definitions of "healthy" and "unhealthy," The Wall Street Journal reported in May, after decades of rules that considered foods like toster pastries and sugary cereals "healthy" while labeling high-fat foods like avocados and almonds as "unhealthy".

$50,000 may seem like a lot to pay to try to influence a single paper, but Kearns thinks the then-Sugar Research Foundation was right to expect it would be a reasonable investment, if the review turned out in the foundation's favor.

Meanwhile, Ancel Keys, an American physiologist, argued that heart disease was related to scarfing down too many bad types of fat, as such fats may raise cholesterol and possibly cause a heart attack. In 1964, the vice president and director of research for the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), John Hickson, proposed that the group "embark on a major program" to dispute the data as well as any "negative attitudes toward sugar".

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The internal sugar industry documents were found in public archives by a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco. "If the carbohydrate industries were to recapture this 20 percent of the calories in the USA diet (the difference between the 40 percent which fat has and the 20 percent which it ought to have) and if sugar maintained its present share of the carbohydrate market, this change would mean an increase in the per capita consumption of sugar more than a third with a tremendous improvement in general health".

"This historical account of industry efforts demonstrates the importance of having reviews written by people without conflicts of interest and the need for financial disclosure", the study authors said, in a statement. The statement further said research had continued to show that sugar "does not have a unique role in heart disease". "Yet, health policy documents are still inconsistent in citing heart disease risk as a health outcome of added sugars consumption". And yet, Americans fell for industry-sponsored sugar studies throughout the 1960s, according to a new study in JAMA Internal Medicine.

Some of the letters, about 319, were in correspondence with Roger Adams, an organic chemist at the University of IL who died in 1971, and about 27 documents were in correspondence with David Mark Hegsted, a nutritionist at Harvard University who died in 2009.

The warped research appeared in a 1967 literature review in The New England Journal of Medicine.

The foundation, now called the Sugar Association, questioned the new paper's findings in a response to CNN, saying it's "challenging for us to comment on events that allegedly occurred 60 years ago, and on documents we have never seen".

The 1965 review appeared in a prestigious, peer-reviewed journal-a distinction that numerous other sugar papers Kearns has analyzed lack.