[withad]

India on the whole has a lot of trouble with this sort of thing. One of the skeptics who criticised the Prahlad Jani experiments, Sanal Edamaraku (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanal_Edamaruku), had to leave the country to avoid arrest under outdated blasphemy laws for pointing out that the supposedly miraculous tears of a statue of Jesus were actually from a leaking sewage pipe. More recently, another noted skeptic, Narendra Dabholkar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narendra_Dabholkar), was shot dead shortly after making significant progress towards outlawing some very lucrative "mystical" practices.

And a large, well-funded project doesn't guarantee reliability. Science involves a certain amount of trust of your peers and scientists studying these claimed phenomena often miss tricks by the participants that someone trained in deception wouldn't (there's a reason so many skeptics and "debunkers" are magicians by training). Look at Project Alpha (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Alpha) - a couple of amateur street magicians were able to make a whole department of researchers believe they had psychic powers for years without even being challenged.

When it comes down to it, science is about evidence. That's why scientists were able to overturn ideas like geocentrism - they examined them and they didn't fit with the evidence, so they had to go. Theories that had seemed "impossible" to some (certainly not all) people before them, like the Earth going round the Sun, did fit the evidence when scientifically examined and they became the accepted scientific consensus (to cut a long story short).

Scientists dismissing these studies aren't doing so based just "on their own observations". There's a very solid base of scientific, verifiable evidence that says that people need to eat. I don't think it's overly cynical to say that a couple of flaky studies should do little to change anyone's mind.