This is a blog post about a consumer reports article one of the faculty was the primary source for.

The linked article is much better and cites numerous papers.

This wasn't published in an academic journal. It was published on the News page of Harvard's School of Public Health. It's PR/publicity for the school. The purpose of the post wasn't to appease industry donors, but to call attention to a Consumer Reports article that quoted someone from Harvard. The news post is just about bragging rights for the school. The Consumer Reports article seems to be a high-quality article, though still written for the general public rather than an academic journal.

> industry donors

Which ones? The meat industry or the soy farmers?

I don't know what you're complaining about, there's plenty of links in this short piece which ends with a link to https://www.consumerreports.org/health/healthy-eating/do-see... , an article that is somewhat more in-depth than the text from Harvard.

> with the supposed goal of appeasing industry donors

I've literally no clue why this strange thing fell out of the sky coming from seemingly nowhere. Are you angry Harvard doesn't comply with your imaginary goal posts? I don't get it.

Did you click on any of those links aside from the final one to the Consumer Reports article? All the other links are merely to listings of blog posts with the given tag. There's nothing specific or even human-curated about where those links point. They add no value to the article.

This isn't an article. It is a media summary.

Universities publishing media summaries of work done by their faculty is extremely common. If you want details, you are expected to click through and read the real thing.

"Hey look at this neat thing one of faculty did" is not some nefarious thing.

In my experience, in all of academia, Harvard dietary research is the shoddiest and the most biased, given their historical strong ties to Seventh Day Adventists which are notoriously pro-vegetarianism and pro-veganism.

Dietary science is as rigorous as astrology, and then there's commercial and religious interests to consider. The same institute can post research showing how a particular diet is better against another, and months later, publish the exact opposite. Given it's all tantamount to bullshit, N=1 anecdotes have greater validity than anything that's posted in press releases.

Wikipedia suffers from the same bias problem in dietary matters. It still defines low carb as a "fad", for heaven's sake.

(LOL at flagging OP's comment - what's going on these days that anything slightly disagreeing with the hivemind is worth being shadow-banned?)