For many years the tobacco industry hid information on how cigarette smoking affected our health. They knew back in the 1950s that to smoke would have a seriously detrimental effect on our health.
Unfortunately, we are still suffering from withheld data relating to the consumption of food and the subsequent effects on health. The basis of this secrecy is always commercial. As consumers, we are always the subject of profit making in huge organisations. If we think about this too closely, we could become quite paranoid, mainly because most things that affect our lives are linked to commercialism.
The ‘Big Pharma’ (the collective term for all pharmaceutical organisations in the industry) holds to ransom our good health by charging huge amounts for new medical breakthroughs (the argument would be that they have spent millions on research and so wish to recoup the spend). They continue to push medicines that are old and overused because they are profitable, instead of looking for alternatives.
It is also important to look at the sugar industry, which has worked closely with our health ‘guardians’ to ensure that its products were not targeted in a programme to prevent tooth decay – even though they seem to be the main cause. This has been revealed by a secret cache of papers recently discovered.
A sugar industry trade association representing 30 international sugar manufacturers knew from the 1950s that sugar was the principal cause of tooth decay. They immediately set out to deflect the blame onto other spurious factors. A willing ally was soon found in America’s National Institutes of Health, supposedly the public’s health guardians, after it concluded in 1969 that focusing on reduced sucrose consumption was not a practical health measure. This was enough to get people looking at other factors.
So, two bodies fully aware that sugar was the main cause of tooth decay set about creating an alternative programme, behind which the sugar industry placed its full weight. It channelled most of its research resources into the National Caries Programme (with sugar firmly off limits).
To redirect public attention, it also funded research with the food industry to look for enzymes that could break up dental plaque and even bankrolled the development of a vaccine designed to prevent tooth decay. Sugar industry representatives filled every seat but one on the National Institute of Dental & Craniofacial Research advisory committee, which set the agenda for the NIH initiative.
Dental decay is still the leading chronic disease among children and half of all American children have caries
“These tactics are strikingly similar to what we saw in the tobacco industry in the same era,” said Stanton Glantz, one of the researchers from the University of California at San Francisco who discovered the cache of papers left to the University of Illinois by the late Roger Adams, a professor of organic chemistry who served on the Sugar Research Foundation.
Dental decay is still the leading chronic disease among children and half of all American children have caries. Sugar is also linked to heart disease, diabetes and liver disease. So, once again, we have a lifetime’s worth of health issues related to commercial gain (PLoS Med., 2015).
Mammograms are an issue I have written about. Misdiagnosis is the main problem, with up to a 50/50 per cent chance of the diagnosis being wrong. Previous studies have suggested a rate of anything from five per cent to 50 per cent, while a UK independent panel in 2012 settled on a figure of 19 per cent. Whatever the actual number, these false results have led to unnecessary treatments, which is very distressing for those women and their families.
Mammography has been adopted as the standard screening programme for detecting breast cancer worldwide. Its acceptance was helped by early reviews suggesting that it could reduce the rate of breast cancer death by 30 per cent. Yet, while there has been a steep increase in the detection of early breast cancers, the rates of advanced cancers have declined only slightly, if at all.
“Which suggests that mammography is detecting low-risk or non-progressive breast cancers,” said Alexandra Barratt, professor of public health at the University of Sydney.
As 99 per cent of women with detected breast cancer go on to have chemotherapy, radiotherapy or breast removal, a false positive rate of 20 per cent suggests that one in five of all cases are false-positives.
“This, nonetheless, still triggers unnecessary invasive and distressing treatment,” Barratt added (BMJ, 2015).
kathryn@maltanet.net