In the 1960s the sugar industry paid three Harvard scientists to publish a review blaming fat for heart disease and clearing sugar. The payments were discovered in 2016 by researchers at the University of California, San Francisco, who found the internal industry documents and published them in JAMA Internal Medicine.

The documents showed that the Sugar Research Foundation, now called the Sugar Association, paid the equivalent of about 50,000 dollars in today's money to three Harvard researchers to write a review of the evidence on sugar, fat, and heart disease. The review, published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1967, concluded that fat was the dietary villain and that sugar was innocent. The funding was not disclosed.

The consequences lasted fifty years. Dietary guidelines in the United States shifted toward low-fat diets, and the food industry replaced fat with sugar in thousands of products. Americans ate less fat and more sugar for three decades, and rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes rose in parallel. The science that drove the shift was paid for by the industry that benefited from it.

The 2016 paper, led by Cristin Kearns, found that the Sugar Research Foundation had set the review's objective in advance, selected the studies to include, and reviewed drafts before publication. The Harvard researchers accepted the money and the direction without question, and the journal published the result without requiring disclosure of the funding.