Step inside any dining hall at Binghamton University and you can see a variety of healthy snack bars, such as Odwalla, arrayed on the shelves. Although low-fat, these bars are sugar-laden, containing up to 25 grams of sugar — which is coincidentally the recommended daily sugar intake by the World Health Organization.
Until this year, food labels in the United States obstructed consumers from conceptualizing the product’s sugar content; unlike carbs and fats, packages did not list a recommended daily limit for sugar— for reasons dating back five decades.¶
In the 1960s, three Harvard University scientists published research focused on the contributing factors to heart disease. A researcher at the University of California recently uncovered documents revealing that the sugar industry gave $50,000 to these scientists so that they could selectively choose studies that demonized saturated fat while downplaying the unique role sugar has in causing heart disease. The tampering of this Harvard research paper impacted 50 years’ worth of research on heart disease and nutritional science.
After this report, scientists are still debating whether sugar contributes more to heart disease than saturated fat. Dietitians, for years, have made nutrition recommendations that influenced Americans to begin consuming more low-fat, high-sugar foods; hence, the low-fat, sugary “healthy” snack bars in our dining halls. This transition contributed significantly to the current obesity problem, which costs over $100 billion in annual estimated health care costs, since large amounts of sugar consumed over several years leads to diabetes and obesity.
To prevent such an occurrence from repeating, a few changes must transpire. First, public funding of university-led research should be increased so that researchers rely less on industries as funding sources. This will lead to an increase of independently published articles. The freedom to publish nutritional research papers on the harmful effects of sugar will help convince people to shift their diets once more to a low-fat, low-sugar diet. Additionally, an increase in federal funding to university-led research will help alleviate the pressure on faculty and students, such as those at BU, who conduct research as they struggle to find sources of funding.
However, I believe it is unrealistic to expect that universities can survive purely on public funding to finance their research. According to the Science and Engineering Indicators 2012 report, industry funding of research outpaces government funding, which indicates that it will be difficult to support completely university-led research. Thus, an increase in federal funding to research must also be coupled with a greater transparency of the funding sources that universities rely on for research.
This transparency would require researchers to disclose the sources of their funding to reveal whether any conflicts of interest exist within scientific publications. As college students that rely heavily on academic research for our studies, it is essential to show discernment when reading published research to remain aware of how the biases affect the arguments presented in the research.
The tampering of this Harvard publication reveals the damaging effects from industries meddling with scientific research. We all have a stake in supporting actions that would lessen the bias that exists in university-led research. By pressuring universities to be transparent with the sources of their financial backers, and by increasing public funding for university-led research, I am confident that people will be able to once again deem scientific publications trustworthy.
Sarah Tucker is a senior majoring in business administration.