Sugar industry influenced US cavity research

The sugar industry convinced US government scientists decades ago to research ways of preventing cavities that did not involve eliminating sweets from the diet, a study said Tuesday.

The findings in the journal PLOS Medicine were based on 319 industry documents from the 1960s and 1970s that were stored in a public library collection at the University of Illinois.

They show that "a sugar industry trade organization representing 30 international members had accepted the fact that sugar caused tooth decay as early as 1950," said the study, authored by experts at the University of California, San Francisco who discovered the archives.

By 1969, the National Institutes of Health had decided that reducing sugar consumption, "while theoretically possible," was not practical as a public health measure, the researchers said.

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