This is the frustrating thing about diet research. Almost every diet works to help you lose weight, even the really stupid and unhealthy fad diets, but when a study is released about some diet, the media often reports that it doesn't seem to work very well, even if the differences are driven entirely by compliance.

I get that the research is often done from a medical or public health perspective, not a biological one, so compliance is an important factor to consider, but when I talk to people, I find the conclusion they draw from reading these results in the media is not that most people in these studies fail to follow the diet. The conclusion they draw is that a lot of people will not lose weight if they follow the diet successfully. This happens over and over again every time a new study comes out, and the belief a lot of people internalize from it is that we really have no fucking clue what the connection is between what people eat and whether they're overweight, and we don't know what if any change in how they eat will result in them losing weight.

That leaves them vulnerable to unscrupulous and/or unwitting opportunists hawking diet systems backed by complicated theories about toxins or hormones or genetic types.