rely on outside funding, in such cases the sources of their
funding must be disclosed to alert their peers of any
potential bias. Unfortunately, this was not the case with that
NEJM article. The scientists behind it were each paid the
equivalent of $50,000 in today’s money by a trade
organization called the Sugar Research Foundation (now
known as the Sugar Association)—a fact that was not
disclosed in the original paper. Worse yet, the foundation
even influenced the selection of studies reviewed by the
scientists. “They were able to derail the discussion about
sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of
medicine at University of California, San Francisco, in an
interview with the New York Times. Dr. Glantz published
these findings in the Journal of the American Medical
Association in 2016.^3 (If you’d like to think such nefarious
tactics are behind us, think again. The sugar industry
continues to muddy the scientific waters, funding research
that seems to conveniently conclude that claims against
sugar are overhyped.)^4
ENTER: FRANKENFOOD
To what degree can food be manipulated before we can no
longer call it food? For many years, products that didn’t
adhere to the strict definitions of basic foods had to be
labeled as “imitation.” But a label bearing the i-word spelled
marketing doom for products, so the food industry lobbied
to have this imposition deregulated. In 1973 they got what