Harvard Medical School’s Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine on the sad state of medical research:
It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of The New England Journal of Medicine.
Scary, but I bet she’s right.
Weight Maven is written by Beth Mazur. Beth believes that obesity is more symptom than cause and that the real problem is our Western diet -- especially sugar, refined grains, and industrial oils. Beth writes about nutrition, ancestral health, & food policy. And cats! 
Thank you for sharing this important perspective! I arrived at a similar conclusion about published medical research when I was earning my B.S. in Nursing. I remember the exact day when I could no longer deny the woeful (& corrupt) state of professional healthcare-related journalism. I felt sick. Literally. My own realization coincided, ironically, with the major push toward so-called evidence-based practice (EBP) in nursing. As nursing students, we often worked in groups on research projects-and of course I was disliked immensely for constantly pointing out the egregious flaws, poorly designed research, and conflicts of interest in the research reports that we were relying on for evidence. I often felt like the child (in the story) who pointed at the emperor’s nakedness. Eventually, I learned to keep quiet when working with my fellow students, but my silence felt shameful-I was colluding in a great farce, except that EBP was applied to actual, living, breathing (vulnerable) human beings in clinical settings. And there was no way to know for sure if patients paid the price while we “care providers”-including our instructors-looked the other way and/or minimized the potential consequences. The whole ordeal still haunts me. Here is a link to a (somewhat) related topic (“Selling Sickness: the Pharmaceutical Industry and Disease Mongering”):
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1122833/
Of course, the newest “weight-loss” drug undoubtedly ranks right up there in terms of wasteful (consumer) spending accompanied by windfall corporate profits. Thanks once more for continuing to provide your readers with salient and useful sources. Also, I love cat Fridays. :)