New research published in the American Medical Association’s JAMA Internal Medicine found that scientists were paid by the sugar industry in the 1960s and 70s to downplay sugar’s (sucrose) health risks. Research fellow Cristi Kearns, of University of California, San Francisco, reviewed more than 1,500 internal documents, memos, reports and studies commissioned in the 1960s by the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), now the Sugar Association.

The documents reveal that the SRF paid three Harvard scientists tens of thousands of dollars to publish a review of sugar, fat and heart research in 1965 in the New England Journal of Medicine, with hand-picked studies that minimized the link between sugar and heart health, and vilified saturated fat and cholesterol.