For decades, the United States government told Americans to build their diets on grains and to treat fats with suspicion. The 1992 Food Pyramid placed bread, cereal, rice, and pasta at the base—six to eleven servings a day—while instructing citizens to use fats “sparingly.” Low-fat products flooded the market, many of them loaded with sugar and refined carbohydrates. Obesity, type 2 diabetes, and metabolic disease rose in lockstep.
This was not a simple scientific error. It was the predictable result of corporatism: the fusion of government authority with private commercial interests that stood to profit from the advice being issued in the name of public health.
The Documented Proof
In the 1960s, the Sugar Research Foundation paid Harvard scientists the equivalent of roughly $50,000 in today’s dollars to produce a literature review. The resulting 1967 paper in the New England Journal of Medicine minimized evidence linking sugar to heart disease and directed attention toward saturated fat instead. The industry selected the studies, reviewed drafts, and the funding was never disclosed.
















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