“Signs, signs, everywhere there’s signs.”

According to the protest song that hit the American airwaves in the summer of 1971, placards, posters, signboards, and billboards are worse than ubiquitous. They separate the privileged class from the working class.

They block out the scenery. They break your mind.

But that final misfortune of cognitive exhaustion need not befall you.

You can encounter sign after sign and — just like long-haired “freaky” person in the song about the surfeit of them — still be “alive and doing fine.” In fact, there’s a way for you to encounter them and become as wise and understanding as the father in the Parable of the Chinese Farmer you’ll read about later.

Even when the sign’s a piece of health information inside a scientific paper that seemingly contradicts all the information you’ve read before.

The paper in question has not yet been published but was presented last weekend at the annual meeting of the Endocrine Society. The findings have not yet undergone peer review, yet they’ve created a stir just the same.

For the big takeaway in the study is that feeding mice a diet totally devoid of sugar created many of the same health problems humans face when they consume sugar in excess.

To start this study, Rasheed Ahmad, PhD, principal scientist and head of the Immunology & Microbiology Department at the Dasmon Diabetes Institute in Kuwait, and colleagues obtained 12 healthy mice who weighed nearly the same. For 16 weeks they fed six mice a low-fat diet that contained sugar.

The other six were fed the same number of calories and nearly the same low-fat diet. Except this low-fat diet was devoid of any sugar.

At the study’s end, the body and liver weights of both groups of mice remained unchanged. But the mice in the group who ate no sugar had telltale signs of worsening health.

They exhibited impaired glucose tolerance, reduced insulin sensitivity, and “significant alterations in circulating metabolic hormones,” as well as lower fasting insulin levels. Moreover, 16 weeks of the low-fat, sugar-free diet created “significant colonic inflammation,” which was associated with “disrupted gut microbial diversity and composition.”

When Science Daily asked Ahmad to make sense of this, he hypothesized that “completely removing sucrose from a low-fat diet may unexpectedly disrupt gut health and promote inflammation and metabolic dysfunction” while adding something important to remember. Balanced nutrition is more important to sustained overall health than a total abstinence of sugar.

With that said, it’s good know what others in the know, but who weren’t involved in the study, think about it.

Mir Ali, MD, bariatric medicine specialist and medical director of MemorialCare Surgical Weight Loss Center at Orange Coast Medical Center in Fountain Valley, CA, tells MDLinx while he’s “surprised to see this result,” it should not usurp the large body of research supporting the benefits of decreased sugar intake. Nneoma Oparaji, MD, a Houston-based physician specializing in lifestyle medicine and obesity medicine, shares with Medical News Today that “the study is intriguing because it challenges the oversimplified idea that removing sugar is automatically beneficial [but that] nutrition is more complex and nuanced than removing a single ingredient.”

To challenge any oversimplified idea is good advice.

Advice that the long-haired freaky person in the song about signs follows. Advice that the wise and understanding father in the Parable of the Chinese Farmer gives his teenage son four times over.

In my favorite variation of it, his son tells the farmer that their horse, their only horse, has just run off. And that this is the worst thing in the world.

To this, the farmer simply says, “How do you know what it means?”

When the boy begins his chores the next morning, he notices that the horse has returned — along with a number of wild stallions. He tells his father this is great bit of good luck because once he tames the stallions and sells them at market, they’ll be wealthy.

The farmer again says, “How do you know what it means?”

The boy breaks his leg taming one of the wild stallions. When he calls this the worst thing in the world, the farmer says to his son he’s asked him twice before: “How do you know what it means?”

Which he then asks the boy a fourth time, this time after a warlord leaves their farm empty-handed. The warlord’s intention, you see, was to abduct the boy and make him fight in his army.

I find the moral to this story, my friend, apropos of what you need to do when you encounter conflicting messages about health and fitness.

You need to read the “signs” that are everywhere, but realize they were not necessarily written with you in mind. You then need to ask good questions about them.

Do so and you’ll get great answers — but only if you also do what I so often tell you to do.