Approach is everything when it comes to writing a conspiracy column about public health issues. If I take the proper approach, you think seriously about the information, how it affects you, and whether or not you need to make significant lifestyle changes as a result.

If I take an improper approach, what you think seriously about is my sanity, if I wear a tinfoil hat to keep the bad voices away, and whether or not I stopped taking my numerous prescription medications.So before I claim that the sugar manufacturers knew that all added sugars were adversely affecting health even years before they adamantly denied allegations about the newest and most deleterious type - high-fructose corn syrup - let's review how vigorously the tobacco industry conspired to keep the link between lung cancer and cigarette smoking from the public.In response to studies done in the 1950s linking smoking to lung cancer, the tobacco industry created the Tobacco Industry Research Council and started funding their own studies. But the big wigs in the industry knew that their research need not suggest that cigarette smoking was harmless. All their research needed to do was create reasonable doubt.In fact, an excerpt from a 1972 memo by Tobacco Institute Vice President Fred Panzer cited in a Free Online Library.com article states exactly that: "[create] doubt about the health charge without actually denying it."Creating doubt about the danger of cigarettes smoking was critical to avoid lawsuits that claimed cigarette smoking - and later second-hand smoke - caused lung cancer. In fact, a 1970 letter from the tobacco companies' defense attorney, David R, Hardy, warned that if the information held by industry scientists about the harm of cigarette smoke were expressed in a court of law, it would be perceived by the typical juror as "evidence of willfulness or recklessness sufficient to support a claim for punitive damages."By the 1980s, study after study showed the nicotine in tobacco to be as addictive as most hardcore drugs. And how did the tobacco companies react? According to a New York Times article, while they presented their own research that suggested otherwise, they also loaded their cigarettes with extra nicotine - and began elaborate advertising campaigns that directly targeted youngsters, like Camel Joe.Does the phrase "how low can you go" suddenly come to mind?Eventually the Department of Justice waded through the scientific confusion and the industry's collusion, and indicted Big Tobacco for federal racketeering in 2004.By 2007, the tobacco industry was found guilty of 40-year conspiracy to defraud the public. To make amends, the tobacco industry has been paying individual states millions of dollars per year and will continue to do so for another 15 or so.But the tobacco industry was not the only big industry in the 1960s bluffing the public into believing their product was innocuous. An article published online in September by JAMA Internal Medicine reveals that the sugar industry knew there was a link between sugar consumption and deaths from heart disease way back when, but funded research to place all the blame on dietary fat.Worse, their research that was designed to exonerate sugar yet still found a correlation between sugar consumption and heart disease was never disclosed. Surprisingly, keeping such a secret back then was only unethical but not criminal. Mandatory conflict of interest disclosures were first introduced in the 1980s.In short, the sugar companies paid three respected Harvard nutritionists to create research that found dietary fats caused heart disease. The research was done - or doctored - so well that the New England Journal of Medicine published it in 1967.The article, according to Medical News Today, poked holes in any previous research that suggested that sugar caused heart disease and concluded that there was only one way to avoid heart disease: to lower the intake of dietary fat.How effective was the sugar industry's campaign of misinformation? Very. For about 15 years beginning in the mid-1980s fat-free products were all the rage. And what was normally added to those products fat-free products to insure pleasant taste?Extra sugar. Lots and lots of added sugar.In fact, some fat-free versions of products contained the same number of calories as the original versions - despite the fact that fat is 225 percent as calorically dense as sugar.That fact explains the dramatic increase in the number of overweight adults that began during the fat-free craze.While this article could end as a cautionary tale about the dangers of industry-funded studies, it won't. After all, you can't control big business.What you can control is what you put indoor mouth.And by doing so, you can improve your health. All it takes is the desire to do so, a willingness to learn about nutrition, and a good deal of experimentation.It also takes time - something that so many people claim not to have.But if you make time for yourself and your health, you'll have far more high-energy time - time when you can actively do stuff - than you do now.One key to achieving this is recognizing that added sugars abound and need to be severely limited for optimal health.