Sugar Polluted Scientific Research
October 19, 2016
If your diet includes too much sugar, it is a good idea to cut back on the amount you consume. If also turns out if you have too much sugar in your research, the sugar industry will bribe you to hide the facts. Stat News reports that even objective academic research is not immune from corporate bribes in the article, “Sugar Industry Secretly Paid For Favorable Harvard Research.”
In the 1960s, Harvard nutritionists published two reviews in medical journals that downplayed the role sugar played in coronary heart disease. The sugar industry paid Harvard to report favorable results in scientific studies. Dr. Cristin Kearns published a paper in JAMA Internal Medicine about her research into the Harvard sugar conspiracy.
Through her research, she discovered that Harvard nutrionists Dr. Fredrick Stare and Mark Hegsted worked with the Sugar Research Foundation to write a literature review that countered early research that linked sucrose to coronary heart disease. This research would later help the sugar industry increase its market share by convincing Americans to eat a low-fat diet.
Dr. Walter Willett, who knew Hegsted and now runs the nutrition department at Harvard’s public health school, defended him as a principled scientist…‘However, by taking industry funding for the review, and having regular communications during the review with the sugar industry,’ Willett acknowledged, it ‘put him [Hegsted] in a position where his conclusions could be questioned. It is also possible that these relationships could induce some subtle bias, even if unconscious,’ he added.
In other words, corporate funded research can skew scientific data so that it favors their bottom dollar. This fiasco happened in the 1960s, have things gotten worse or better? With the big competition for funding and space in scientific journals, the answer appears to be yes.
Whitney Grace, October 19, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
Hire Watson As Your New Dietitian
August 4, 2015
IBM’s supercomputer Watson is being “trained” in various fields, such as healthcare, app creation, customer service relations, and creating brand new recipes. The applications for Watson are possibly endless. The supercomputer is combining its “skills” from healthcare and recipes by trying its hand at nutrition. Welltok invented the CaféWell Health Optimization Platform, a PaaS that creates individualized healthcare plans, and it implemented Watson’s big data capabilities to its Healthy Dining CaféWell personal concierge app. eWeek explains that “Welltok Takes IBM Watson Out To Dinner,” so it can offer clients personalized restaurant menu choices.
” ‘Optimal nutrition is one of the most significant factors in preventing and reversing the majority of our nation’s health conditions, like diabetes, overweight and obesity, heart disease and stroke and Alzheimer’s,’ said Anita Jones-Mueller, president of Healthy Dining, in a statement. ‘Since most Americans eat away from home an average of five times each week and it can be almost impossible to know what to order at restaurants to meet specific health needs, it is very important that wellness and condition management programs empower smart dining out choices. We applaud Welltok’s leadership in providing a new dimension to healthy restaurant dining through its groundbreaking CaféWell Concierge app.’”
Restaurant menus are very vague when it comes to nutritional information. When it comes to knowing if something is gluten-free, spicy, or a vegetarian option, the menu will state it, but all other information is missing. In order to find a restaurant’s nutritional information, you have to hit the Internet and conduct research. A new law passed will force restaurants to post calorie counts, but that will not include the amount of sugar, sodium, and other information. People have been making poor eating choices, partially due to the lack of information, if they know what they are eating they can improve their health. If Watson’s abilities can decrease the US’s waistline, it is for the better. The bigger challenge would be to get people to use the information.
Whitney Grace, August 4, 2015
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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