Take a moment to consider what your reaction is before continuing.
...
The comments I'm reading here are diverse and fascinating. Weight loss, diet, and fitness are almost quasi-religious issues that people tend to have strong and personal reactions to. The unfit are desperate for a solution, especially an easy one. The very fit subconsciously resent the notion that people could achieve, with a pill, what they have achieved through discipline and hard work (or genetic luck). Others are keen to point out diverse evils of modern society that they believe are the true culprits which must be tackled instead of masking their effect with a pill.
Nutrition and fitness are classic examples of pseudo-science. Studies that would meet the bare minimum standards of scientific rigour in any other field are practically impossible. Getting a statistically significant sample of people to go on special diets or exercise regimens long term is just not feasible. Whenever an "expert" makes a tentative statement on what they think might be the case, media picks it up and amplifies it. Butter is bad for you. Butter is good for you. Blueberries are superfood. Keto diets. Crossfit. etc. Countless "experts", often with no credentials and no compelling data, are happy to write best-selling self-improvement books. They assume that what works for them (or didn't work, but seems like it should have) will work for everyone. Everyone wants to know how to be healthy, fit, and happy, so there is insatiable demand for books that are, by scientific standards, pure spit-balling.
Then medicine and drug research, which are legally required to be at last somewhat scientific but are always profit-motivated, enter the fray. They can prove a drug meets safety standards and quantify certain specific effects, but interactions with the pseudo-science of the greater health industry eventually become unavoidable.
Perhaps the first step to becoming more objective about drugs like this is to recognize that we really aren't.
*a hypothetical one, not the one being discussed here