This is what you get when you let industry regulate itself..
The decision to demonize fat for its caloric density and heart-clogging effects, a decision that drove people away from butter and cheese and towards low-fat foods that required plenty of sugar to have some flavor, wasn't just bad science, according to a report analyzing historical food industry documents published September 12 in the journal JAMA Internal Medicine.
That national dietary shift from fat towards sugar came about at least in part because of a major 1967 review of dietary science. Those historical documents reveal that a food industry group called the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) paid three Harvard researchers $6,500 (about $50,000 today) to discount research that increasingly showed links between sugar and heart disease and to point the blame at fat instead. The industry group selected the data the Harvard scientists used for the review and suggested the research they include. Their final paper, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, set the US diet on a new course.
"The documents leave little doubt that the intent of the industry-funded review was to reach a foregone conclusion," Marion Nestle, Paulette Goddard Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and Public Health at New York University, wrote in a commentary published alongside the new analysis.
Should you eat a low-fat diet? - Business Insider