With the obesity epidemic reaching an all time high, the sugar industry has a lot to answer for. A new research study has unveiled the lengths sugar industry executives went to persuade the unknowing public that sugar was not to blame for weight gain and heart disease.

It was back in the 1960s that one executive paid off Harvard researchers to soften the harsh reality that sugar is to blame for health problems and to publish the insinuations in a well-known medical journal. It didn’t end there – the Harvard researcher in question then went on to be instrumental in setting government dietary guidelines that have influenced our eating habits for the past 50 years.

“They were able to derail the discussion about sugar for decades,” said Stanton Glantz, a professor of medicine at U.C.S.F. and involved in the current research paper.

The 1960s paper was to review the research on sugar, fat and heart disease but corruption was not far from the minds of the Sugar Research Foundation who, at the time, paid the Harvard researchers the equivalent of $50,000 in today’s money in order to make sugar look more favorable to the public. This in turn, caused fat to get the bad rap which has been instilled in the minds of the western world for an extremely long time.

According to a report in The New York Times, several other big sugar companies have been caught paying off researchers to also downplay the effects of sugar including Coca Cola who funded research to soften the link between obesity and sugary drinks.

“There is now a considerable body of evidence linking added sugars to hypertension and cardiovascular disease, which is the No. 1 cause of premature death in the developed world,” say the authors of the new study. “Yet, health policy documents are still inconsistent in citing heart disease risk as a health consequence of added sugars consumption.”

Details of the study were published in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.