Letter to the Editor: Don't Kill the Messenger

To the Editor:

The Crimson quoted Walter C. Willett, current chair of the Harvard School of Public Health’s Nutrition Department in its coverage of our paper, “Sugar Industry and Coronary Heart Disease Research: A Historical Analysis of Internal Industry Documents,” published in JAMA Internal Medicine. We documented how the sugar industry enlisted three Harvard nutrition scientists in the 1960s to prepare a review published in the New England Journal of Medicine that downplayed emerging evidence linking sucrose with coronary heart disease and concluded there was “no doubt” that the only dietary intervention required to prevent coronary heart disease was to reduce dietary cholesterol and substitute polyunsaturated fat for saturated fat in the American diet. Willett said that the episode brought to light the dangers of industry funding, and that, “Both [the sugar and fat] sides were on the right track in the 1960’s publication, and it is clear that the causes of cardiovascular disease, and most major health problems, are multi-dimensional.”

We agree.

We disagree, however, with his statement that, “[Our] paper tried to portray it as one or the other, one-dimensional thinking for not a one-dimensional problem.”

It was the Harvard authors of the 1967 review, not us, who imposed one-dimensional thinking on the complex problem of dietary risk factors in heart disease. With funding from the sugar industry, they claimed that reducing the fat and cholesterol content of the American diet was the only dietary change necessary to prevent and control coronary heart disease, rather than changes to the fat, cholesterol, and sugar content of the diet.

Sincerely,

Cristin Kearns
Laura Schmidt
Stanton Glantz

Cristin Kearns is a postdoctoral fellow and Laura Schmidt and Stanton Glantz are professors at the University of California, San Francisco.