Sugar Industry Buried Evidence Of Links To Cancer And Heart Disease For Half A Century

Hundreds of thousands of years ago, we craved energy-dense foods packed with salts, fats, and sugars because they ensured our survival. Nowadays, those in wealthy nations have easy access to a cornucopia of treats, and it’s one of the driving causes of obesity, itself linked to a plethora of health afflictions.

The US government has only recently updated its health guidelines to advise people to cut out a lot of sugar from their diets, but as highlighted in two recent studies, the sugar industry has been aware of its dangers for at least half a century.

“The sugar industry did not disclose evidence of harm from animal studies that would have (1) strengthened the case that the coronary heart disease risk of sucrose is greater than starch and (2) caused sucrose to be scrutinized as a potential carcinogen,” the team wrote in their paper.

Today, the trade association for the sugar industry in the US is known as the Sugar Association, but back in the 1960s, it was the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF). Researchers from the University of California at San Francisco have been digging through old records and, over the last few years, have uncovered evidence of a cover-up by the SRF of their own research that put them in a bad light.

As reported last year in JAMA Internal Medicine, the first study, funded by the SRF in secret, was published back in 1967. Using statistical techniques that reviewers would now say heavily biased the data, the paper discounted evidence linking sugar consumption to the levels of lipids (fats) within the blood – which in turn was linked to heart disease.

This study happened to appear at a time when that exact link was being debated by scientists across the world, and it sought to muddy the waters. The link today is absolutely clear and uncontroversial.

As has just been revealed in PLOS Biology, a second peculiar research project has been found. Carried out between 1967 and 1971 under the name Project 259, the SRF was assessing how sugar intake affected the digestive systems of rats.

After finding that there was a link to bladder cancer, the SRF terminated the project’s funding shortly before it was due to be completed. The results were never published.

It’s worth remembering that plenty of industry research is often kept behind closed doors. Major studies by tobacco companies and fossil fuel companies are often published behind a prohibitively expensive paywall or without fanfare, so not everyone can easily see them.

Even when the research lines up with what independent scientists have found, the PR messages the companies espouse are often in direct conflict with the studies. We’re not saying that all industries are involved in such behaviors, but it does seem like those selling sugar aren’t exactly being very open.

For their part, the researchers make a direct comparison between what is essentially Big Tobacco and Big Sugar.

“The tobacco industry also has a long history of conducting research on the health effects of its products that is often decades ahead of the general scientific community and not publishing results that do not support its agenda,” they noted.

“This paper provides empirical data suggesting that the sugar industry has a similar history of conducting, but not publishing studies with results that are counter to its commercial interests.”

For its part, the Sugar Association has released a statement deriding the new PLOS Biology study – one which claims that the sugar industry has always had a “commitment to transparency”.

Edited Blood Stem Cells Reverse Type-1 Diabetes In Mice

As an autoimmune disease, type-1 diabetes is caused by the body’s own immune system attacking the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. This has led to attempts to “reboot” the immune system in patients, but has only been met with partial success.

Now researchers say they have found out why these earlier attempts may have failed and, more impressively, how it can be fixed – even reversing type-1 diabetes in mouse models.

They found that the faulty immune system in people with type-1 diabetes failed to make a specific protein called PD-L1, and that this molecule has a strong anti-inflammatory effect when it comes to the condition. By taking the blood stem cells and engineering them to produce PD-L1, they showed that it can cure the autoimmune reaction in human and mouse cells in the lab, and in some cases reverse it in living mice.

“Blood stem cells have immune-regulatory abilities, but it appears that in mice and humans with diabetes, these abilities are impaired,” explains lead author Paolo Fiorina, from Boston Children's Division of Nephrology, in a statement. “We found that in diabetes, blood stem cells are defective, promoting inflammation and possibly leading to the onset of disease.”

It was previously thought that if doctors could reset the immune system of patients with type-1 diabetes, it could cure them. This process involved taking blood stem cells from a patient and culturing them, before wiping out the immune system. The stem cells that were harvested are then reinfused into the bones of the patient and the immune system rebuilt.

But this latest work, published in Science Translational Medicine, suggests that the condition might be caused – at least in part – by these blood stem cells that lack the ability to produce this certain molecule. This may explain why resetting the immune system doesn’t always work, because the stem cells that are harvested and then reinfused still have this fault.

It also provides a possible way to treat the condition. The researchers took some stem cells and, using a modified virus, inserted the missing bit of DNA that codes for PD-L1 into the cells. These were then injected back into mice with type-1 diabetes. In most cases, the treatment held off the condition in the short term, and in about a third of the murine models, the condition was reversed for their entire lifespan.

The next move is to look at how long this reversal lasts for and why it was only maintained over the lifespan of one-third of the mice. They also need to uncover how often the treatment would need to be given if extended to humans.

A Lost River Made Possible One Of The First Great Civilizations

The Indus Valley Civilization was among the pioneers of Bronze Age technology, its advances in metallurgy and measurement influencing cultures across Asia, Europe, and North Africa. Yet archaeologists have been puzzled by one feature: many of the civilization’s greatest cities lacked a nearby permanent water flow to meet their needs. The dating of an old riverbed demonstrates much of the area really did flourish without a great river.

Even today, the vast majority of the world's cities lie on sources of fresh water. Urban areas that outgrow the rivers that once fed them rely on great feats of engineering to bring water from neighboring valleys. How, then, could some of the largest settlements in the world 4,600-3,900 years ago have sat between the Ganges and Indus river systems, not close enough to either to survive?

In the 19th century, geographers discovered that the glacial-fed permanent Sutlej River once ran past several of these great metropolises. Case solved? Not quite. A paper in Nature Communications reports that dating of the sediments in Sutlej's former and current routes show the major tributary of the Indus had taken its current course by 8,000 years ago, long before these sites became substantial settlements.

When populations eventually congregated along the old riverbed (paleochannel), any water that flowed was seasonal – a product of the monsoon. Exactly how people managed to collect enough water to support a civilization through the dry season remains a mystery, particularly since there is no evidence of major dams. Groundwater left over from the era when the Sutlej flowed through the valley may have been a factor.

However, senior author Professor Sanjeev Gupta of Imperial College London argues the Sutlej's absence would have had its advantages. The intact rivers of the region are subject to devastating floods, frequent enough to have threatened cities. Even in a rainy year, however, the temporary flow through the paleochannel was probably insufficient to threaten those on its banks.

Where once it was thought the diversion of the Sutlej caused the abandonment of the population centers along its former banks, it now seems it was this redirection that made its former course so suitable for cities.

In the soft soils of deltas, rivers can constantly change their course, but usually fairly subtly. On the other hand, landslides or the dramatic collapse of an upstream riverbank can occasionally trigger major changes in a river's route. In 2008, the breaking of a beach of a levee of the Kosi River, northern India, caused the entire waterway to re-route 60 kilometers (40 miles) eastwards. Often, as in the Kosi River's case, such changes cause rivers to return to a route they had followed once

Blue Planet II To Highlight How We Are Choking The Oceans With Plastic

From the vast expanses of the seemingly endless open oceans to the microcosm of life found within a single rock pool, the latest offering from the BBC Natural History Unit has not disappointed. But as Blue Planet II draws to an end, it has a somber warning for humanity: we are smothering the oceans with plastic.

The final episode of the series will address the state of the oceans, and what humans have done to cause it. Often accused of skirting around the issue of how we are destroying the environment, the makers are dedicating a whole episode to how climate change, plastic, overfishing, and noise pollution are creating the greatest threat our oceans have seen in human history.

“For years we thought the oceans were so vast and the inhabitants so infinitely numerous that nothing we could do could have an effect upon them. But now we know that was wrong,” said David Attenborough. “It is now clear our actions are having a significant impact on the world’s oceans. [They] are under threat now as never before in human history. Many people believe the oceans have reached a crisis point.”

One particularly heartbreaking story involves the wandering albatrosses filmed for the Big Blue episode. Despite nesting on remote islands in the Antarctic Ocean, the scientists monitoring the birds on South Georgia's Bird Island have found that the chicks are still being killed due to plastic. The adults search thousands of miles of ocean seeking out enough squid and fish to feed their growing chicks, but often pick up plastic floating on the surface instead.

One researcher described finding that a chick died because a plastic toothpick had punctured its stomach. “It’s really sad because you get to know the birds and how long it takes the parents, away for 10 days at a time, to collect food for their chicks and what they bring back is plastic,” explained Dr Lucy Quinn.

“And what’s sad is that the plague of plastic is as far-reaching as these seemingly pristine environments.”

In fact, in every environment that the crews filmed, they found plastic, with the team collecting it whenever they found it. But this was not the only threat experienced, as rising ocean temperatures are killing coral reefs, the noise from boats and underwater exploration for oil and gas drown out the calls of fish and whales, and overfishing strips the seas bare.

There is hope though. The episode will show how the management of herring fisheries in Norway help to not only make the industry sustainable, but also protect the orca. Or how one conservationist in Trinidad is securing the future of leatherback turtles on the island.

One thing is certain though. We need to act, and we need to act now.

Shady Herpes Vaccine Trial By Rogue Scientist Could Cost University Millions

The controversy has also since brought in PayPal founder Peter Thiel, whose investment firm later invested millions into the project.

The research, led by the late Dr William Halford, involved testing out an experimental genital herpes vaccine on 20 humans on the quiet Caribbean island of St Kitts between March and August 2016. The patient's consent forms openly stated that the trial was ignoring regulations of the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA).

The medical trial was run by the private company Rational Vaccines, co-founded by Dr William Halford, who also independently worked at the Southern Illinois University School of Medicine (SIU). He died on June 22 of this year, after a battle with cancer. In his account, he wanted to defy the regulations of US clinical trials because he was desperate to fast-track the herpes vaccine following his diagnosis of cancer.

In his own words, Dr Halford wrote: “Some readers may find this course of action reckless... I would suggest the opposite… The risk I accepted by self-injecting the live HSV-2 vaccine pales in comparison to the morbidity that actually occurred in the 1.5 billion people who were newly infected with HSV-1 or HSV-2 whilst FDA sanctioned herpes subunit vaccine trials have failed for three decades.”

In August, Kaiser Health News reported that controversial Paypal founder Peter Thiel and a “group of wealthy libertarians” had invested $7 million into Rational Vaccines. This money was reportedly invested after Dr Halford and Rational Vaccines had carried out the human trial in the Caribbean.

In the past, Silicon Valley billionaire Thiel has expressed disdain for the overly bureaucratic nature of the FDA, once saying“you would not be able to invent the polio vaccine today” due to their regulations.

Halford attempted to submit the findings of his studies on the genital herpes vaccine into the journal Future Virology, however the editors rejected the study. One reviewer said: “This manuscript is partly a vision, partly science, and partly wishful thinking.”

Whether SIU loses their $15 million funding pot depends on the ongoing federal inquiry, conducted by an arm of the US Department of Health and Human Services.

“This researcher went rogue,” Holly Fernandez Lynch, a lawyer who specializes in medical ethics, told Kaiser Health News. “It’s true that universities can’t stand behind their researchers watching their every move. But when one of their own goes rogue, a university should launch an aggressive investigation, interview the participants, and make sure it never happens again.”

Super-Eruptions Are More Frequent Than We Thought

We don't want to alarm you.... Ok actually we do, but only a little. Super-eruptions, so large they can cancel multiple summers and blanket a continent with ash, happen more frequently than we thought. That doesn't mean we should expect one next Tuesday, and the risk remains much lower than for human-induced threats, but the methods used to determine this might reveal some other lurking dangers.

In 2004, geologists estimated that volcanic eruptions where more than 1,000 gigatons of material is released happen somewhere between once every 45,000 and once every 714,000 years. That's a very wide range of uncertainty, but even at the lower end, it's substantially longer than the time since the invention of agriculture, making it unsurprising that an eruption hasn't come along to throw our civilization off course.

Professor Jonathan Rougier of the University of Bristol, UK, has challenged that estimate in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. He thinks the true range is 5,200-48,000 years, with the most likely figure being 17,000 years. It's been longer than that since the Earth last experienced such an event, with the most recent occurring over 20,000 years ago.

However, such eruptions don't occur on a reliable cycle. Rougier's team found that there were two in the period between 20,000 and 30,000 years ago. “On balance, we have been slightly lucky not to experience any super-eruptions since then,” Rougier said in a statement. “But it is important to appreciate that the absence of super-eruptions in the last 20,000 years does not imply that one is overdue. Nature is not that regular.”

He also told IFLScience that geologists now "have a much better database [of big eruptions] than we did a decade ago."

Since humanity survived this pair, and the even larger explosion at Toba, Sumatra, 75,000 years ago, it's likely we'll make it through a future event on the same scale. But that doesn't mean we would remain unscathed. Just how devastating such an event would be depends on its size, location, and timing, but Rougier told IFLScience; "The direct effect of a super-eruption would be to sterilize the land for thousands of miles... The indirect effect (about which there is more uncertainty) would change global weather patterns for possibly decades."

Rougier said the work is also important for applying the techniques his team has developed to other rare events that might not be well recorded. Even though these events are infrequent, some of them, such as very big earthquakes and smaller, locally damaging, eruptions are more common, and therefore more threatening than super-eruptions. To Rougier's mind, these are much more worth worrying about, along with the disasters that are becoming more frequent due to our own behavior.

Unfortunately, this hasn't stopped headlines misrepresenting Rougier's statements by suggesting disaster is imminent.