it's not necessarily the case that it's junk science, but it is absolutely beyond the capabilities of a normal person or persons to winnow out the chaff.
It's claimed that around 90% of Americans are choline deficient. Eggs are one the best nutritional sources for choline. There are several papers linking low choline levels with Altzheimer disease so it would not be surprising to find a link between egg consumption and Altzheimer incidence. Sponsored studies should indeed be treated with much caution but is anyone suggesting such authors invent positive results or ignore highly inconvenient results? Such behavior would be reprehensible and not something with which a researcher would wish to be associated.
> such authors... ignore highly inconvenient results?
There are plenty of examples where that does seem to happen. Not sure if anyone has done a comparison with rate of non-publication by non-interest group funded studies. Probably difficult given there's not much motivation to uncover non-publication without the anti-corporate sensationalism.
Wow, ad hominem reasoning as a principal for info consumption. I ought to shake your hand. In all seriousness, I can appreciate the time-economic value to your policy, but wouldn't regard it is as an epistemic device.
And all science these days is sponsored these days, given the shortage of self-funding landed gentry. And there's no guarantee that landed gentry won't be pushing an agenda, either.
Your logic is, "nothing's perfect so everything is equally good (or bad)".
Which is not true in this case.
For better and sometimes worse, the process through which medical drugs and procedures come to market, including studies and trials, is heavily regulated.
The Egg Board, however, is free to choose whichever studies to fund they prefer, and will gravitate to ones likely to show the positive effects of eggs and avoid ones likely to show the opposite.
The content of the paper may be entirely legitimate, but it still actually tells us nothing about whether we should eat more eggs or not.
And that's a problem. The best case scenario is it biases published results for things that benefit the sponsors. But there is certainly some amount of fraud including fabricated data, misinterpreted or exaggerated conclusions, suppressed research that isn't what the sponsor wants, etc.
This isn't a drug study. It's about food and nutrition, one of the most intentionally misled topics around. I put the blame for that squarely on those who sponsor studies like this that don't help anyone. They are just muddying the waters further. Any food you look at will have some good qualities, like being a good source of Vitamin C. It's like saying a block of calcium is a good source of vitamin C: of course it is! But that doesn't mean it's healthy to eat