Big companies are like an obnoxious, chain-smoking roommate who owns a car when you don't -- just because we can't live without them doesn't mean that living with them is easy. Especially when they're, you know, trying to kill you and stuff.
You see, while the sales pitch of every successful company is to offer consumers some way to make our lives better, a whole bunch of them have secretly been doing the exact opposite. So, let's buckle down and discuss some of the worst examples ... that we know about, anyway.
7
Big Sugar's Been Covering Up Sugar's Link To Heart Disease For Decades
422737/Pixabay
For five decades, the consensus on heart disease was that fat was to totally blame, and sugar was nothing but an innocent bystander. Your doctor probably didn't prescribe two Snickers bars to deal with those chest pains, but it's not like they could hurt, right? Yes, they totally can, and researchers have known about it since the '50s.
So, how come we're only hearing about sugar's link to heart disease now? Well, the small fortune the sugar industry gave those researchers might have something to do with it.
OC Always/Wiki Commons
Worst yet, they already ate all their payment.
The academics supposedly looking out for us didn't just drop the ball on this one, they gleefully threw it at our groins. In the 1960s, the Sugar Association straight-up gave three scientists at Harvard $50,000 (in today's money) to write a review paper exonerating their sweet asses. All parties were quite open with each other about what their mission statement was -- Dr. Hegsted, one of the scientists, wrote, "We are well aware of your particular interest and will cover this as well as we can." The sugar industry secretly selected data for the paper and gave feedback on drafts until, finally, the scientists had conducted shillwork they could truly be proud of.
The paper wasn't published in some hack journal, either: that shit went straight to the pages of The New England Journal Of Medicine, which is basically the New York Times of American medical research. Happy with the result, these Avengers of sugar companies kept funding studies that shifted the blame to fat for decades, while they printed "nutritional tips" like these:
Buzzed
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