History's case for skepticism
From sugar's manufactured rise to the woman who sold children
A few weeks ago, while my husband was working outside, a neighbor stopped by to tell him he’d recently seen an adolescent mountain lion in our neighborhood.
To give you some context, we live on the outskirts of St. Louis, in an area where subdivisions and shopping centers bleed into dramatic hills and valleys dotted with agricultural and horse farms, in a subdivision comprised of homes constructed in the 1980s and 90s. Where we own just over 4 acres and my two young children play in our large front yard for hours on end, largely unaccompanied.
That is to say that mountain lions are not a common occurrence around here. So, my neighbor’s news was both laughable and nerve racking.
This wouldn’t be the first time I’d heard of these wild cats being spotted in Missouri. In January 2023, a mountain lion was struck by a car on a main highway — in a town 30 miles southwest of us. In December 2024, a hunter was charged for killing a mountain lion in a town 55 miles south of us. And numerous other claims across social media and local news outlets have been made in areas surrounding us and even closer to the city. This is to say nothing of the increasing number of sightings confirmed by the state’s conservation department since the 90s.
The stories we tell ourselves matter
Through stories we discover universal truths, expand our minds, question the status quo, learn and grow — individually and collectively.
Following my initial but brief disbelief, my reaction to my neighbor’s tip, like any concerned person and mother, was fear and concern. Could I no longer let my kids play freely outside? Should I start taking a knife on my walks? Was this why we haven’t been seeing as many deer?
But, taking all the information we had into account — the fact that this was a one-time, second-hand sighting, but among a growing number in the state, and the many positives of letting my children run wild outside (not to mention my daily walks) — we continued living our lives the way we had. Our kids still roam free, and I still enjoy my daily walks. (As for the deer, well, they’ll have to fend for themselves.)
But we did become more vigilant and told our kids to as well. And while I don’t love the thought of a mountain lion running wild in my subdivision, I’m not about to completely change my life based on one, yet unproven, passing comment or even the possibility of its truth. (I have a similar mindset when it comes to news and politics, my children’s stories and my husband’s weightlifting claims.)
There’s value in having information, considering it, being skeptical of it, doing your own research and being aware of all possibilities.
That’s the thing about awareness, it empowers — whereas fear controls.
Awareness coupled with a healthy dose of skepticism — about what could happen, what has happened and of individuals’ motives — can help us make better decisions in the present.
He who pays the piper
calls the tune
In 1967, Harvard researchers and prominent figures in nutrition science Drs. Mark Hegsted and Frederick Stare, along with their colleague Robert McGandy, published an eye-opening study in the New England Journal of Medicine. Questions and rumors over the causes of congenital heart disease were circulating and the study seemed to definitively put those to rest.
The culprit? Saturated fats. Due to their correlation to high cholesterol, saturated fats, the researchers concluded, were the largest risk factor for heart disease.
As for sugar, the study’s authors said any evidence as to its correlation was weak and inconsistent, with previous studies noting otherwise attributed to “confounding variables.”
“The major evidence today suggests that control of saturated fat and total fat intake is the most promising dietary approach to the prevention of coronary heart disease,” they wrote.
The public health reaction was swift. Consumers swapped fatty foods for sugary cereals, fruit juices and the new, specially designed low-fat products flooding the market. And sugar was accepted as a harmless, if not essential, part of the American diet.
The only problem was … it wasn’t true.
In response to a surge in media attention around sucrose’s potential links to heart disease, the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF) secretly funded the study, titled “Dietary Fats, Carbohydrates and Atherosclerotic Vascular Disease.”
In 2016, nearly 50 years after the study’s publication, researchers from the University of California, San Francisco, led by Dr. Cristin Kearns, discovered more than 340 documents showing that SRF had paid the study’s authors the equivalent of $50,000 in 2016 dollars to downplay the role of sugar in heart disease risk and point the finger at fat.
“As the saying goes, he who pays the piper calls the tune,” said senior author Dr. Stanton Glantz. “There are all kinds of ways that you can subtly manipulate the outcome of a study, which industry is very well practiced at.”
Read more about Kearns and her team’s findings here.
Georgia Tann had a special place in her heart for children. Having seen at a young age the damaging effects poverty could have on them, she made it her life’s work to do something about it.
As a young woman, she took a job working at the Tennessee Children’s Home in Memphis, helping oversee child welfare and adoption placements for orphaned or abandoned children. Though the children were not always neglected or abused, Tann found the conditions in which many of the children were living appalling. So, on a welfare visit in 1924, Tann abducted a child, using candy to lure him to her vehicle. Claiming he was neglected by his mother, she had him placed with new adoptive parents.
This launched what would become a 25-year enterprise in which she ultimately prioritized profit and power over the welfare of the children she was charged with protecting. Tann ultimately abducted and placed an estimated 5,000 children with adoptive, and at times abusive, parents. With the help of many others, including nurses, judges and politicians, she took young children from their family homes and infants from their single mothers’ hospital bedsides, often claiming they were stillborn.
At the height of the Great Depression, at a time when many Americans were struggling to afford basic necessities, Tann was quietly amassing her fortune. Selling children for upwards of $700 a piece (the equivalent of $10,000 today), largely to out-of-state families, Tann made over $1 million.
In 1950, just as Tann’s crimes were coming to light, she died of uterine cancer at the age of 59.
Listen to the full story of Georgia Tann on Wondery’s 63rd season of “American Scandal,” here.