As reported earlier this week in the NYT, the medical journal, “JAMA Internal Medicine,” just published an article revealing the evidence that in the 1960s, the trade organization that represented the sugar industry paid Harvard nutrition scientists to write a review that exonerated sugar as a contributor to heart disease and blamed fat instead. An editorial in the journal digs a little deeper to sum up the new article and put it into historical perspective.

On a personal level, this news chills me to the bone. First, the Harvard scientist most implicated in the scandal would have been my thesis advisor had I chosen to go to Harvard for my graduate degree. Second, I narrowly escaped being involved in a sugar-industry funded study myself that, on the surface at least, sounded a bit shady. In the late 1970s, a prominent nutrition scientist at MIT (where I did end up) invited me to work on a project that would be funded by a large sugar company to demonstrate that artificial sweeteners caused brain damage; it would have been my thesis project. Not only did something about this idea sound fishy, it also struck me as kind of boring—so I politely declined the offer and was promptly invited to find another research advisor.

So I was not surprised by this new revelation, but I am greatly disturbed by it for all kinds of reasons. Here they are, in no particular order.

First, I hate conspiracy theories, and this latest evidence has got to have all the conspiracy-seeking pseudo-nutritionist writers jumping up and down with glee because it corroborates those theories that the food industry has conspired to make us all sugar and additive addicts.

Secondly, it appears to further erode any shred of credibility nutrition research still had. Why should consumers believe anything they read about nutrition when it’s all just funded by food companies? The Dairy industry says milk helps prevent diabetes (doubtful) and bone loss (absolutely true). Coca Cola says sugar-sweetened soda doesn’t contribute to childhood obesity…

Third, this revelation comes at a time when the Dietary Guidelines and other nutrition advisors are finally coming around to advise folks that diets high in processed sugar are no healthier than diets high in saturated (meat and dairy) fat. I cannot begin to imagine the costs we’ve incurred by our mass consumption of high-carb processed foods in response to “nutrition” advice that the public needed to shun fat, which began in the 1980s.

Fourth, this revelation should serve as a huge wake-up call that we should all switch to a diet of real, non-processed, more plant-based food: fruits, vegetables, whole grains, beans and nuts, and small amounts of animal products. But, as Nestle mentions in her editorial, too much focus has been placed on nutrients (like sugar), rather than on food, itself. As consumers, we have a hard time translating all this nutrient talk into information we can use when it’s 5PM, we have a hungry family to feed, and we’re wheeling a shopping cart past aisles and aisles of food. The food industry will use this confusion to their advantage, as they did with the fat-free cookies, to develop whole new lines of sugar-free nutritionally empty processed foods. Because that’s what they do to stay in business.

So did someone else accept the project to prove artificial sweeteners caused brain damage in my place? Not that I can gather. And repeated studies have found no credible evidence that they cause brain damage, cancer, or any other scientifically demonstrated health effects, unless you happen to have an extremely rare birth defect for which everyone is tested at birth. After turning down the project, I happily joined another research lab, one that kept large jars of the major artificial sweeteners by the coffee pot!