A report sharply critical of links between Harvard's Department of Nutrition and the food industry has drawn a spirited attack from the department's recently retired chairman, one of the study's prime targets.

Issued in mid-August by Rep. Benjamin Rosenthal (D-N.Y.) and the Center for Science in the Public Interest, the analysis characterizes the School of Public Health's Nutrition Department as "riddled with corporate influence," noting that its benefactors include the Kellogg Co., Gerber Products, Coca-Cola, Oscar Mayer & Co., and the Amstar Corp.

Specifically the report criticizes the corporate connections of Dr. Fredrick J. Stare, the professor of nutrition who chaired the department from its birth in 1942 until last June, and Jean Mayer, professor of nutrition until his departure this summer to become president of Tufts University in Medford.

The study charges that "eminent nutritionists" at the nation's most prominent universities "have traded their independence for the food industry's favors . . . [and] prostituted their professional independence to curry the favor of the food magnates."

In an interview last week, Stare called the report "a bunch of nonsense" and labeled Rosenthal a "loudmouthed, ultra-liberal consumer advocate politician who's looking for publicity." Stare defended his fund raising efforts, arguing that the department cannot depend solely on federal monies and that it has "never accepted one penny if there are any kinds of strings attached."

The 66-year-old professor also explained his remarkably successful fund raising methods, including the limits he puts on the advice he will provide corporations that do not contribute to the department.

Stare dismissed the study's suggestion that his ties with the food industry--which include a seat on the board of a major food packaging company and retainers with two cereal companies--have compromised his work. "To the best of my ability," Stare said, "I always speak and write the truth."

In publicizing Stare's industry connections, the Rosenthal-Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) report let loose the latest salvo in a long-running battle between Stare and consumer groups suspicious of the outspoken nutritionist.

These groups have often warred with Stare because he has prominently and repeatedly pooh-poohed warnings about excess sugar consumption in the United States, contradicting, the report says, "one of the few accepted nutritional principles, namely, that Americans eat far too much sugar." In an interview published in January 1974, for example, Stare said that most people could healthily double their daily sugar intake. Stare's defense of food additives has similarly riled those who argue that many of the chemicals are unsafe.

Thus while ex-professor Jean Mayer also has ties to the food industry, including board directorships on Monsanto and Miles Laboratories, which make food flavorings and other additives--he is criticized less forcefully than Stare in the study for lending his "prestige" to food and chemical companies. Indeed Mayer is praised for "repeatedly [voicing] his concern over food industry advertising and the quality of the American diet."

Mayer has refused to comment on the Rosenthal-CSPI report.

After examining the corporate ties and nutritional writings of academics in several universities, including Stare and Mayer, the authors of the Rosenthal-CSPI study suggest that the "moonlighting for industry" of academics like Stare "impinges on professors' commitment to their students and their allegiance to professional objectivity. The report continues:

But an even more serious concern than creating a professional advocate is the gag-effect of company money. Intimate working relationships between professors and executives inevitably lead to friendships, sympathy, and reluctance to alienate future sources of grants or job possibilities for oneself and one's students.

The authors of the report offered two steps to stem these phenomena:

Compile a list of faculty members' outside activities and make it available to the public, allowing it a chance to detect conflicts of interest; and