I can’t speak for others in the thread, but I never claimed that. I think our food system does have a lot of problems. All I’m arguing is to look at evidence for what it is, and not extrapolate meanings that might not be there.
I’m not sure there’s as much “strings attached” research as we might be led to believe. Does a study “having strings attached” mean the outcome has to be fudged? I’m not convinced that happens as often as naysayers would have us believe. Someone has to pay the people to do it. I’ve seen vegan/vegetarian doctors get funding from Kelloggs and Quaker Oats, and I’ve seen research on meat funded by cattle farmers. I don’t mean to sound rude, but it seems quite obvious what entities will fund what research. I think the funding is a moot point.
This is part of why I wrote “most people don’t know what a confidence interval or P-value are.” If a study contains data, which all do (and a great deal of it becomes numerical) all the numbers and percents and whatnot that you read in a study mean something that tells the authors how reliable something is or isn’t, or how much of an effect variables have on each other, etc. It doesn’t matter who funded the study if you understand how to interpret all that. You’re just going to have to trust someone at some point. This is also why I have been trying to say that we need to able to trust our professionals. Do we really think they’re spending decades trying to understand something, doing research, testing ideas, and that all of it is just made up to get rich from [donor x]?