Where is the line between advocating science and protecting corporate profits? It's usually only clear to people trying to show the other side is involved in wrongdoing. A paper in PLOS Medicine uses sugar industry documents to note how they influenced research priorities for the 1971 US National Caries Program (NCP).

The authors looked at 319 internal sugar industry documents from 1959 to 1971 (the "Roger Adams papers") and US National Institute of Dental Research (NIDR) documents to show that the sugar industry sought to influence the setting of research priorities for the NCP. Their analysis indicates that, as early as 1950, sugar industry trade organizations had accepted that sugar damaged teeth and recognized that the dental community favored restricting sugar intake as a key way to control caries. The sugar industry therefore adopted a strategy to deflect attention towards public health interventions that would reduce the harms of sugar consumption, funding research on enzymes that break up dental plaque and looking into a vaccine against tooth decay, and cultivating relationships with the NIDR leadership rather than simply going out of business, as academics tend to favor.

But does that mean they were wrong? 78% of a report submitted to the NIDR by the sugar industry was directly incorporated into the NIDR's first request for research proposals for the NCP - the panel did not find credibility in alternate claims that researching methods to measure the propensity of specific foods to cause caries was as valuable so those were omitted from the research priorities identified at the launch of the NCP. They were later, so why the conspiracy story? The researchers relied on a single source of industry documents and did not interview anyone, they simply state as fact that the NCP and the sugar industry were in bed together.

The authors say: "Actions taken by the sugar industry to impact the NIDR's NCP research priorities, which echo those of the tobacco industry, should be a warning to the public health community."

Pay-to-publish journals publishing editorials as studies should be a warning to the public health community also.

Citation: Kearns CE, Glantz SA, Schmidt LA (2015) Sugar Industry Influence on the Scientific Agenda of the National Institute of Dental Research's 1971 National Caries Program: A Historical Analysis of Internal Documents. PLoS Med 12(3): e1001798. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1001798. Funding: This work was supported by the UCSF Philip R. Lee Institute for Health Policy Studies, a donation by the Hellmann Family Fund to the UCSF Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, the UCSF School of Dentistry Department of Orofacial Sciences and Global Oral Health Program, National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research grant DE-007306 and National Cancer Institute Grant CA-087472.