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FILE 032 · VOL V · You Already Ate It
The Sugar Industry Paid Harvard to Blame Fat. The Checks Never Stopped.
Every study has a funding line. Almost nobody reads it.
Based on: The Sugar Industry and Harvard
Intake record
| Recovered from | University archive, papers of a retired nutrition researcher; one folder marked GRANTS 2014 |
|---|---|
| Contents | A funding agreement, a 1965 letter (photocopy), a eulogy (draft) |
| Finder | Dr. C. Voss |
| Status | The researcher's 2015 paper has been cited more than four thousand times. It has never been retracted. |
Recovered file
Claire Voss found the 1965 letters the same way everybody does now: in a lecture slide. She was a postdoctoral researcher in obesity metabolism, thirty-one, brilliant, broke, and four months from the end of her funding. She used the Harvard story in her teaching every year as a cautionary tale. She would click to the slide with the old letter on it, and the students would gasp, and she would say: this is why you always read who paid for the study.
In 2014, a group called the Active Living Alliance offered her lab one point five million dollars.
It was a respectable-sounding organization. Scientists on its board. A clean website. Its mission, it said, was to fight obesity by encouraging physical activity. The research it wanted funded was real research. Exercise is good for people. Nobody disputes that. All they asked was that the work focus on the energy balance side of the equation. Calories out. Movement. Fitness. Not so much on what people ate or drank.
The funding agreement was eleven pages long. On the last page, in the list of the Alliance's founding sponsors, in small type, was the name of the largest soft drink company in the world.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 032 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
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