Finally, a study that's really helpful; a study of all those confounding studies! The Wall Street Journal has done a great public service by scrutinizing the recent studies from the Women's Health Initiative that have left us all scratching our heads, tossing our supplements, and chewing the fat, be it good or bad.

I don't want to say I told you so, but, well, OK, that's actually exactly what I want to say. These WHI studies seemed so riddled with flaws, that, no matter how well-intentioned they may have been, the findings struck me as suspect.

Much of the medical community and the nation's leading nutrition experts shared my skepticism. The media? I don't want to call them lazy lemmings, but, well, OK, actually, that's exactly what I want to call them; they regurgitated snippets of the studies without bothering to digest all the information first, reducing complex issues to silly soundbites that did more harm than good.

Wall Street Journal reporter Tara Parker-Pope analyzed the federally funded WHI studies, which attempted to evaluate the possible benefits of calcium/vitamin D supplements, low-fat diets, and hormone replacement therapy.

She found significant flaws in the ways the studies were conducted. “A close look at the Women's Health Initiative raises questions about its central conclusions. Design problems in all of the trials mean the results don't really answer the questions they were supposed to address.”

The National Institutes of Health, which oversees the WHI, insists that all the brouhaha is simply proof that they're doing something right. “The strength of the reaction has been commensurate with the strength of the dogma it overturned,” according to Jacques Rossouw, WHI project officer for the NIH.

Bernadine Healy, the former NIH head who launched the WHI back in 1991, is even more blasé. She told Parker-Pope “I find the criticism amusing and fulfilling. We're not getting pat answers, and that's been one of the problems in the past – we've been given pat answers, and they're generally wrong.”

Are complicated and confusing answers that turn out to be generally wrong an improvement? Now we don't know what to believe, or who to listen to. Me, I trust NYU professor Marion Nestle, who, in the wake of the low-fat diet flap, told a local NPR radio show host that all the low-fat study proved was that all these flawed federally funded studies are useless. I think they're worse than useless. They're bad for our collective health.