"Not really. The real problem is that many claimed environmental/diet factors turn out to be statistical noise or complete bullshit when examined further."

No doubt this is true, especially in the case of meat and saturated fat. Usually this is the result of bad science, typically drawing cause and effect conclusions from epidemiological evidence (See Denise Minger's critique of The China Study here: http://rawfoodsos.com/2010/07/07/the-china-study-fact-or-fal...).

The problem with "interrupting the process" is that we still don't know much about the functioning of many (perhaps most) physiological processes. Disrupting the body's natural processes in one area can cause problems of equal or greater significance in other areas.

Also, studies proving the safety and effectiveness of drugs are, more often than not, highly flawed. Studies frequently exaggerate the improvements seen, fail to show that improvements are due to drugs, or are repeated until the results they are looking for are achieved.

For an excellent review of the flaws of medical research see Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science here: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-dam...) Here are but a few highlights:

"...much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed."

"researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views."

"even if a study managed to highlight a genuine health connection to some nutrient, you’re unlikely to benefit much from taking more of it, because we consume thousands of nutrients that act together as a sort of network, and changing intake of just one of them is bound to cause ripples throughout the network that are far too complex for these studies to detect, and that may be as likely to harm you as help you."

"Even if changing that one factor does bring on the claimed improvement, there’s still a good chance that it won’t do you much good in the long run, because these studies rarely go on long enough to track the decades-long course of disease and ultimately death. Instead, they track easily measurable health “markers” such as cholesterol levels, blood pressure, and blood-sugar levels, and meta-experts have shown that changes in these markers often don’t correlate as well with long-term health as we have been led to believe."

"The tests could turn up something, but they’re probably irrelevant. Just having a good talk with the patient and getting a close history is much more likely to tell me what’s wrong.” Of course, the doctors have all been trained to order these tests, she notes, and doing so is a lot quicker than a long bedside chat. They’re also trained to ply the patient with whatever drugs might help whack any errant test numbers back into line. What they’re not trained to do is to go back and look at the research papers that helped make these drugs the standard of care. “When you look the papers up, you often find the drugs didn’t even work better than a placebo."

I suppose I've strayed too far from the original topic, but I think I've made my point.