The incoming president of the nation's leading group of obesity researchers has sparked a debate among his colleagues by taking the restaurant industry's side in a court case to limit obesity.

At issue is the effort by the New York City health department to make restaurants with 15 locations or more post food calories on overhead menu boards.

The industry is fighting the effort as unconstitutional even as the idea is popping up in the King County area around Seattle and in Montgomery County, Md. A similar measure was introduced this week for the second time by Philadelphia City Councilwoman Blondell Reynolds Brown.

The fight over calorie labeling in New York escalated recently when David B. Allison, a nutrition professor at the University of Alabama, wrote a 43-page brief for the New York State Restaurant Association, stating that there was no clear evidence that calorie postings would work.

The filing by Allison, president-elect of the Obesity Society, stunned some colleagues, who said he had crossed the line into paid advocacy.

"He's working as an advocate for a company against what I view as the public good," said Barry M. Popkin, director of the Interdisciplinary Obesity Center at the University of North Carolina, who filed a brief in support of the health department.

"What he recommended flew against what all public health and obesity professionals have been promoting, which is more information" for consumers, said Popkin, who has consulted for the cereal-maker Kellogg's, among others.

Allison said he was disappointed by the attacks. He said he did not write that the New York plan was bad, only that science did not yet support it. "I'm questioning what people don't want to see questioned," he said.

The relationship between academic researchers and industry is a front-burner issue in many fields. Several congressional inquiries are looking at drug-firm support for the American College of Cardiology, the national cardiology group, and the American Heart Association.

Compared with those groups, the Obesity Society, based in Silver Spring, Md., would seem like a tiny outpost with its $2.1 million budget. But the group's 1,800 members include many influential researchers, physicians and dietitians.

The society relies heavily on industry money, raising about $1 million in the last year from various companies, said Morgan Downey, the group's executive vice president. The biggest corporate donors were drugmakers sanofi aventis, GlaxoSmithKline and Allergan as well as the health-care conglomerate Covidien, he said.

About $230,000 of the corporate money funded a conference in September for health advisers to presidential candidates, Downey said.

Current president Gary D. Foster, director of the Center For Obesity Research and Education at Temple University, said Allison did nothing wrong.