But she called the UCSF findings a “smoking gun” - rare, hard evidence of the food industry meddling in science. Marion Nestle, a nutrition expert at New York University who was not involved in the paper, said she’s still not convinced by those who argue that “sugar is poison” - a person’s total calorie consumption could matter more. “By doing that, it delayed the development of a scientific consensus on sugar-heart disease for decades.” Having two major reviews published in an influential journal “helped shift the emphasis of the discussion away from sugar onto fat,” said Stanton Glantz, Kearns’s coauthor and her advisor at UCSF. Nearly 50 years later, some nutritionists consider sugar a risk factor for coronary heart disease, though there’s no consensus. The documents Kearns calls the “sugar papers” in her office at the University of California, San Francisco. Kearns said the papers, which the trade group later cited in pamphlets provided to policymakers, aided the industry’s plan to increase sugar’s market share by convincing Americans to eat a low-fat diet.

That was an era when researchers were battling over which dietary culprit - sugar or fat - was contributing to the deaths of many Americans, especially men, from coronary heart disease, the buildup of plaque in arteries of the heart.

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Harvard medical conferences 2016