alt Hacker NewsThis is straight up just a bold faced lie.
Big Tobacco never funded the American Heart Association.
AHA never purposefully ommited smoking as a cause of heart disease. In fact, they were at the forefront of the research to prove a link between smoking and heart disease. They met with the The Surgeon General in 1961 to request the formation of the Advisory Committee on Smoking and Health. Report can be viewed here - https://biotech.law.lsu.edu/cases/tobacco/nnbbmq.pdf
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I'm more inclined to believe the person you responded to given how often I saw the AHA heart check logo on some questionable cereals in the 90s.
Yeah, these cereals have soluble fiber...with a bunch of sugar.
> Big Tobacco never funded the American Heart Association.
Yeah...not so sure about that. Tobacco has been pretty sneaky, in funding stuff (see the NIH article on stress research).
A lot of this stuff is only starting to come to light, because folks are able to scan databases of historical information.
I would be careful about labeling stuff “lies.”
What’s that saying? “Make your words sweet, because one day, you may need to eat them.”
Shadow funding has been a thing for over a century, but it’s getting harder to pull off, as time progresses.
My mother used to be in charge of fundraising for a nonprofit, and she had to be very careful about the provenance of funding. She was just doing it for a science center; not research, so she was actively seeking support from corporations, and needed to make sure that there was no hidden “quid pro quo” (sometimes , there was “aboveboard quid pro quo”). Some of the stories she told me about dodgy funding schemes were eyebrow-raising.
A lot of time, there’s no “quid pro quo.” They just want to have additional research out there, to “muddy the water,” in the future, so they may proxy-fund some pretty whacky stuff.
They will also go after individuals; not organizations. Why leave an NPO paper trail, when you can just send the underpaid professor on an all-expenses-paid “fact finding” trip?
People kind of suck, sometimes.