Those kinds of statements are generally found in women's magazines at the supermarket, not scientific journals.
Some journalist cherry-picks a quote from a medical study without understanding the context or how to frame it and then it gets repeated by your ordinary, average yahoo that also doesn't know how to interpret it in any kind of context.
Yep.
When discussing something somewhat scientific that conflicts with the bible, my father in law always loves to get on stage and say "so I can't remember, is coffee good for you this week or not?" in reference to the frequent news stories that coffee will cause cancer or prevents cancer or whatever. There are a number of misunderstandings that result in this so-called proof that science hasn't got a clue.
1. As creationists love to point out - the human body is incredibly complex and therefore can sometimes be influenced by relatively small factors. This can result in studies that seem to indicate conflicting results. The truth is that many of these results are essentially noise in the data and, to go back to my example, coffee is essentially neither good nor bad for you. When the noise in the data indicates something somewhat shocking/exciting about an everyday item (like coffee, or wine, etc) it is usually heavily reported - it gets people to watch the news, and that's what the media is about, not disseminating accurate information.
2. Often studies are done on very specific effects, which are then simplified for a headline/news story. Imagine if 4 studies are done on coffee - in one the effect of excessive coffee consumption on heart health is studied, in another the effect of moderate consumption is studied, the third investigates a link between coffee consumption and colon cancer, while the fourth looks for a link between coffee and brain cancer. If the results show that moderate consumption of coffee is good for your heart, but excessive consumption is very bad for your heart, you might find that one news station reports that coffee is good for your heart, while another says it's bad for your heart. If coffee seems to increase chances of colon cancer, but decreases chances of brain cancer, you'll hear one story that coffee causes cancer and one that says it prevents it. All of these would be factually correct, but the oversimplification seems to point to a contradiction. The whole of scientific knowledge is pushed forward, but the lay-person is left with the impression that "those scientists can't make up their minds."
3. Science is a process. Sometimes a study can be flawed (or falsified as was the case with the vaccine/autism BS that's been going around for a while) and it won't be discovered for a few years as other scientists try to duplicate the results themselves. This definitely indicates that we probably shouldn't put 100% faith in the latest scientific discoveries if they're only backed by one study or a very small sample size (incedentally, scientists aren't typically the type who ask you to put faith in something - they usually just present the evidence and their conclusions and invite scrutiny). The problem is that some will seize upon this so-called failure of leading-edge science to try to dispute well-established scientific theories. I.e. One study shows coffee is bad for you but was debunked therefore you can't trust evolution. In truth, the fact that science self-corrects and identifies flawed ideas and disproves them should increase our trust in scientific knowledge that has stood the test of time.
