Jennifer Lai | Contributor
Featured image: The stigma against fatty products originated from biased research claims in the 1960s. | Jasmine Wiradharma
Growing up, my parents tried to provide the healthiest food options for us. We drank skim milk and used margarine instead of butter on our bread.
My mother, a teacher educated in nutrition, and my father, a physician, thought they were doing the right things to feed us this “healthy food.” Unfortunately, their beliefs may have been misinformed.
A May 2016 study from the UK damned the food industry and major public health agencies for vilifying fat. “Processed foods labelled ‘low fat’, ‘lite’, ‘low cholesterol’ or ‘proven to lower cholesterol’ should be avoided at all costs,” recommended the study. The stigma against fat originated from research claims from the 60s. As it turns out, the sugar industry paid for the publishing of these claims—and it was Harvard that published it.
In the 1960s, the American health community recognized an increase in deaths related to heart disease. The cause of the increase was thought to be associated with two potential things: added sugar or the high-fat nature of the North American diet. A group called the Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard researchers to interpret the facts in favour of sugar, putting the blame for heart disease on fatty foods causing high cholesterol.
The original American food guideline cited the Harvard researchers in their recommendation of a low-fat diet to avoid heart disease. The research on sugar’s relationship to health was pushed back decades.
The study from the UK stated: “Our populations for almost 40 years have been subjected to an uncontrolled global experiment that has gone drastically wrong.” It added that the fight against fat was “perhaps the biggest mistake in modern medical history, resulting in devastating consequences for public health.”
Market-driven research is a common tactic used by the industry. Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University, investigated studies funded by the food industry in 2015 and found that 156 of 168 studies showed results that benefited the brand.
“The only thing that moves sales is health claims,” she said. Industry-funded studies are also designed to produce results that create eye-catching headlines. This is only magnified when the media interprets it. Headlines like “Does candy keep kids from getting fat?” are the outcomes of media simplification. Often, journalistic integrity is sacrificed for click-bait.
Sadly, funding bias isn’t the only reason research has to be questioned. Sometimes it is falsified in the author’s interest of proving a point.
A study released in 1998 linked autism to childhood vaccines. The researcher, Andrew Wakefield, deliberately manipulated data to support his hypothesis, showing vaccines caused autism.
The conclusions of his study were so convincing at the time that they started a raging public debate and motivated many parents to refuse to vaccinate their children. Preventable diseases spiked in the wake of this public panic.
The paper has since been discredited, and Wakefield was stripped of his medical licence. “It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors. But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data,” said Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal.
Evidently, “scientific” research is not always what it claims to be. As students, we have to use a critical eye when picking our sources. If we interpret and credit bad sources, we could be spreading lies disguised as “science” that could have adverse effects on our health.
