FAT is the enemy. It’ll clog your arteries, raise your cholesterol levels, make you obese and put you on the path to a painful premature death. Fat — saturated, trans or otherwise — is the antichrist of nutrition.

We know this because we’ve read the articles. We’ve clicked the bait, we’ve browsed the listicles and number five did indeed shock us. We know this because ‘fat-free’ labels scream at us from the packaging of just about every food product.

All this material exists because some scientist at some point wrote a research paper on it, and we all trust scientists. But what we may not know is that research was likely bought and paid for by the sugar lobby.

There’s nothing wrong in corporate-funded research, so long as the source of funding is transparent and the researchers don’t skew the research in favour of the funders. Except that it hardly ever works that way.

Newly released documents from the 1960s show that the sugar lobby in the US paid scientists to publish research that “minimised the link between sugar and heart health and cast aspersions on the role of saturated fat”. The research was published in the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine and, according to Professor Stanton Glantz, “derail[ed] the discussion about sugar for decades”.

Researchers can skew their findings in favour of the patrons.

That’s because this research became the basis for subsequent research, which then made its way to the countless health articles, blogs and listicles and, more damagingly, to government health policies. The result was that for decades, Americans were encouraged to reduce their fat intake, leading many to switch to low-fat, high-sugar foods which in turn fuelled the obesity epidemic and led to a spike in heart disease.

This isn’t to say that saturated fat is good for you, but that the hired scientists produced one-sided research for the financial benefit of their patrons and the chance of industry jobs once they leave academia. Worse still, research that went against this view was attacked and suppressed.

A soda company spent $132.8 million from 2010-2015 on scientific research and other projects, most of which tried to downplay the link between obesity and diabetes and the consumption of sugary sodas. It was even revealed to have founded and funded a non-profit organisation called the Global Energy Balance Network, which promoted the idea that it doesn’t really matter how much soda you drink so long as you remain physically active. It’s also not a coincidence that its reports to the SEC list obesity as the single greatest threat to company profits. After the company’s involvement was revealed by a journalist, the group was quickly disbanded.

These aren’t exceptions; nutrition scholar Marion Nestle of New York University conducted a year-long study and found that “roughly 90pc of nearly 170 studies favoured the sponsor’s interest”.

The pioneer of these tactics was arguably the tobacco industry, which faced a crisis in the 1950s as evidence of the link between smoking and lung cancer began to emerge. Individual companies first responded with “more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette” advertising campaigns, but then the industry got into the act, funding research that would, if not disprove the health risks of smoking, then at the very least obfuscate and question the science that led to this inescapable conclusion.

For 12 years anaesthesiologist Scott Reuben published widely accepted research into painkillers that happened to favour certain combinations of drugs over others, and most of the drugs he favoured happened to be mostly manufactured by the same company that happened to fund his research for five of those years. Later, it emerged that at least 21 of his published papers were ‘pure fiction’ and that the drugs he promoted may in fact have been harmful to patients. While connivance on the part of pharmaceutical companies was never proven, Reuben’s lies led to a decade of dead-end research in pain management.

Worse yet is the attempted cover up of the birth defects caused by the use of thalidomide, a sedative marketed to pregnant women in the 1950s. When evidence emerged that it was causing horrific birth defects in the children born to those mothers the manufacturers responded by bribing compliant doctors into giving this drug a clean chit. One testimonial that appeared in medical journals was written by a doctor who later admitted he had never tested the drug and was in fact not even the actual author of the article.

If jeopardising the health of children sounds bad, how about jeopardising the planet itself? A scientist working for oil and gas giant Exxon warned in 1977 that the burning of fossil fuels was affecting global climate, a full 11 years before Nasa sounded the alarm about global warming. The report prompted Exxon to spend millions funding climate change denier groups and politicians in order to confuse the issue, and it worked beautifully. After all, if you repeat a lie often enough, it tends to become the truth.

The writer is a journalist.

Twitter: @zarrarkhuhro

Published in Dawn September 19th, 2016