The Vipeholm Experiments

03/21/2025

Human experimentation.

When I say that, what comes to mind? The Tuskegee airmen, who were unknowingly subjected to sexually transmitted diseases? The experiments done to those in concentration camps Dachau and Auschwitz? The tuberculosis inoculation tests done on indigenous children in Saskatchewan?

Humanity has a long, ugly, and deeply cruel history of experimenting on those considered "lesser": those with mental impairments, people who were not white, children. So many injured and killed, and because of some of those experiments, we know have a better understanding of the human body and systems. It's stomach-churning, to say the very least.

You can now add the Vipeholm Experiments to that list. It was a study I was very unfamiliar with until it was mentioned in a book I was reading, and I thought it important enough to bring up on the podcast.

PDF on the study and additional info can be found here

Vipeholm Hospital (1953)

Episode: File 0143: Tooth Fairies of Aotearoa

Release Date: Mar 21 2025

Researched and presented by Halli

Sugar and Teeth

Lördagsgodis is a Norwegian and Swedish tradition of children eating sweets only on Saturday. It's a habit that dates back to the 1950s, when two medical professionals –Lisa Swenander Lanke, a doctor, and Bo Krasse, a dentist, saw firsthand how sugar deteriorates teeth and leads to all sorts of complications, including but not limited to cavities. They believed it was smart to limit sugar intake to one day only (but I very quickly noticed there was no "limit" imposed on the sugar binged on that one day, so…maybe not so smart now).

We know about sugar's harmful impact now, and it seems like common sense, but it is the work of Lanke and Krasse, and others at a place known as the Vipeholm Institution, that allowed medical professionals to understand how harmful sugar is.

Let's start with dental health, first. We joke about teeth: how the British have bad teeth, how the tooth fairy won't visit us if we don't put our baby teeth under our pillow (or whatever legend/fable a culture or people has about teeth, if they have any). But tooth health is deeply tied to our entire body's well-being, and what starts as a toothache can quickly turn dangerous, even deadly.

The National Dental Service of Sweden wasn't established until 1938, and it was largely in response to the skyrocketing number of cavities seen in young children in the country.

"The total consumption of sugar in Sweden with its popular of 7,000,000 is about 300,000 tons per year, i.e. round 45 kg. per person per year."

For the rest of us, that's just under 100 lbs per year. Holy shit, that is SO much sugar. Even modern diets and health/wellness culture talk about all the sugar in American food, and some of it has to do with the ultra-processed food that sits on grocery store shelves, and how cutting down or out sugar completely can help your body with inflammation, joint pain, weight loss, you name it. But I digress, because I was quoting a revised paper, "The Vipeholm Dental Caries Study: The Effect of Different Levels of Carbohydrate Intake on Caries Activity in 436 Individuals Observed for Five Years", authored by several medical experts, including the aforementioned Lanke and Krasse.

Vipeholm Hospital

Vipeholm, the institute mentioned, was not a kind or nice or cheery place. It was a building of horrors.

"Vipeholm was Sweden's largest facility for people with "severe intellectual and developmental disabilities" and was chosen to be the site of the largest experiment ever run on humans in Sweden at the time. Initially, Vipeholm employees were also a part of the experiment."

In 1945, the Swedish government sanctioned a trial on individuals locked away in Vipeholm to test different vitamins to increase health (there is little detail on this). But in 1947, unknown to the government, the vitamins were switched out for sugar. And thus the Vipeholm, or Sugar, Experiments began.

"...it was decided to choose an institution for the mentally deficient, where the patients – on account of their mental disorders – might be expected to remain for a long time."

It's clear from the paper authored by Lanke, Krasse, et al., that Vipeholm was specifically chosen, and the undercurrent of that choice carries through their words. They chose an institute where patients were locked away, with no autonomy, to conduct their experiments. It's sickening.

Each patient, all 436 of them, had their teeth assessed very carefully, and then "[t]o the basic diet of every experimental group was added some supplement, which varied from one group to another….The investigation, which is still in progress, began in 1945. The first year was a preliminary and adjustment period (Preparatory Period). For 18 months (1946 - 1947) various vitamins and mineral substances were studied for their effect on caries in different groups." (Caries means the crumbling or decay of a tooth, for those of us not in the dental field)....the caries activity in the series studied was found to be low and without any significant differences between groups."

All I can assume, and this is just me, is that the scientists didn't get the decay and tooth pain they were looking for, so they upped the ante. And why not? They had hundreds of patients at hand, patients who were unable to speak up and contest what was being done to them. So why not keep going?

The paper proceeds to spell out the various stages of the study, from "Carbohydrate Study I [where] the amount of refined sugar used in the preparation of the basic diet was kept to minimum…in some groups, the subjects received nothing to eat between meals, in others they received a certain amount of sweets, which they were allowed to eat when they liked. The sweet ration varied from one group to another. In other groups the subjects received a supplement of refined sugar at meals, which brought the total sugar ration up to about twice as much as the daily consumption of sugar per head of the Swedish population."

"Carbohydrate Study II" took place during 1949-1950.

"One group received sugar dissolved in the beverages they drank at meals, while another group received only the basic diet plus fat to make up for the calories. Finally some patients received sugar-rich bread instead of the ordinary bread of the basic diet".

The paper goes into detail the fluctuating population at Vipeholm, and that only 436 patients were still there through the vitamin trials and into the carbohydrate studies, which is where that number comes from. It was mostly made up of men, but there were some women as well, and patients at Vipeholm came from all over Sweden.

The "Study"

It is worth noting that "only some of the least defective cleaned their teeth. Of the entire series, only 82 subjects brushed their teeth regularly. The better oral hygiene in the female bread group is explained by the fact that the nurses in that department brushed the patients' teeth every morning".

That is a WILD thing to say, and not control for. Beyond the ethical considerations of not letting a human being clean their teeth, or helping them to clean their teeth, the scientists don't seem to be accounting much for the wide variety of care taken to the subjects' teeth. Free cavities and tooth rot for everyone, I guess (except the women, for some reason).

But also deeply disturbing: "Difficulties have always been encountered in the conservative dental treatment of these patients. Some of them have, however, received such treatment by dentists outside the hospital…dental treatment had formerly usually consisted of extraction, while most of the cavities had been left untreated. Thus in the beginning of the investigation only 625 (5.6 per cent) of the 11,238 cavities had been filled. At the end of the Carbohydrate Study, the number of untreated cavities had increased to 13,363. Since 1950 the patients have received more systematic dental treatment which thus consists of mainly filling cavities that had existed before the commencement of the investigation."

It is also worth noting that the paper authors were aware of the discrepancies in dental records of the entire series of studies were human error and it was a serious issue. That some cavities could have been missed in a patient in one study, and then "found" later on, spoke to how little control they accounted for.

I also want to note that the groups of patients experimented on were named after the things they were essentially force-fed, including "Caramel" and "Toffee".

So, if you're following along, here's the timeline of the study, according to the study's authors:

Not all the recordings of the patient examinations were done by the same dentists, which is also a huge red flag. The dental cards the dentists would use to compare rates of decay and that kind of thing weren't always accurate, and of course are subject to human discretion and error. And the study makes no accounting for differences in genetics and general tooth health.

Now look at how the paper's authors describe the subject groups:

Imagine eating 8 toffees a day (which….how big are they? What's the ratio of sugar to other ingredients in the toffees??) I also want to note that those in Carbohydrate Study I only ate 1800 calories a day, while those in the Vitamin Study ate 3000, and those in Carbohydrate Study ii ate 2700. The nutritional standard in Sweden at the time was 3791 calories a day. All of that can have an impact on health!

There's so much in this paper that I am not even, in any way, an expert. I can't break down a lot of this, but the tables are pretty damn telling. It is worth mentioning that the study's leaders say the patients weren't forced to eat the sweets given to them, but how were these patients in any way able to say no?

So here's the long and short of it - these people, patients in Vipeholm, were victims of unethical medical experimentation. What came out of the Vipeholm study led to a much better understanding of how harmful sugar can be to the human body, specifically teeth, but it was in no way shape or form the kind of study that would be done now (hopefully…who fucking knows at this point).

These were people. People used for the sake of "science" and "health", but they were victims. Victims of scientists eager for results, but also being paid by the sugar industry in Sweden. That should not be surprising that Big Sugar paid for the experiments.

Elin Bommenel, a doctoral student, was given access to Vipeholm records and wrote, scathingly:

"While science had to profile itself as being shielded from political interests in order to be credible, it was not objective in practice. It is part of politics and society. This was politically commissioned research. In scientific terms the results were sound, and they were politically useful. In 1957 a major campaign was started to prevent tooth decay. The Vipeholm researchers' findings still hold up. In fact, we have them to thank for the excellent dental health that Swedes now enjoy. The price was paid by the patients with rotten teeth."

These patients were deliberately harmed, were unable to consent, and were forever injured by science, in the name of progress.

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