Originally Posted by
Rowan
I suppose that the real issue is that people are coming to distrust the results of research, and more so when the findings of research flies in the face of everyday custom, habit or knowledge.
That distrust is made worse when so-called research has been used to get products on to the market that then cause issues requiring them to be recalled or to be withdrawn entirely.
Even here on BFs, we get people posting links or quoting "research" that can alarm people and flies in the face of sounds advice. Often these research studies comprise an N of less than 50, and have set out to prove a pet hypothesis of an undergrad student, rather than an underlying medical or other issue.
And marketing? Well, we all know about spin. I had a chat to a guy in charge of data-gathering and interpretation for a State Government's tourism department. He said he could manipulate any figures to show the complete opposite of what they actually said, depending on what the message was the government was trying to send out at the time. He might have been partly tongue in cheek in what he said, but I can't help but think it was 90% true.
And it probably wasn't the OP's intent for this thread to spin off the way it has. The article does deal with medical research, but it also does, in the summary page, highlight that point about financial interest and other prejudice.
There's also the fact that what people get aren't the studies themselves, but the pre-digested, and often misrepresented, summaries of what the studies supposedly mean, as presented to us by clueless mass media outlets.
There has never been something so good for you that, in excess it isn't bad for you, nor something so bad for you that, in small enough amounts, it isn't good for you. Everything is a hodge-podge of good and bad effects. So long as you stick to the basics in maintaining your health, you don't have to worry about all the "studies" that fiddle around with percentage points around the edges....