alt Hacker News> Is coffee good for you? What about wine or chocolate? Scientists trying to answer these questions
There is a virtually infinite amount of cofounding variables, genetics, meal timing, fitness level, sedentarity, &c. . It's a 80/20 type of problem, do the 80, forget about the 20, you'll never be able to get your answers anyways.
If you look and feel like shit you're most likely eating like shit. If you look and feel good a glass of wine every now and then or a bite of chocolate after dinner won't do much.
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agos • 01/21/2025
or you're sleeping like shit. or you have an autoimmune disease. or you're depressed. or you have an ongoing inflammatory state from a lingering virus. etc
You reduce the uncertainty of the remaining 20 by substantially increasing sample size across a randomly selected sample.
Unfortunately for these studies you have multiple selection criteria that are nonrandom:
(1) interest in the study
(2) adherence to protocol of the study
(3) reporting back in
If nutrition science wants to be serious, their N should not be in the 10s but rather the 10,000s.
That has an expense, but for important things it is absolutely the right thing to do.