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Comment by sorenn111 | Hacker News Reader

I'm having deja vu. We had a top story on HN recently where either the article or the consensus of the comments was "you pretty much cannot believe any studies about food or nutrition."

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The problem is that humans are incredibly complex and diverse, react to stuff in wildly different ways, and you cannot A/B test on the same individual, as you cannot reseg it to the same starting state, you cannot run two experiments on them, and you cannot get two completely matching people.

And it's somewhat-to-entirely unethical and logistically impossible to conduct even uncontrolled studies over a human's entire lifespan, which is really what we're talking about here. I don't think anybody is worried that eating eggs every day will cause health problems for an otherwise-healthy 25-year-old.

That's too dramatic. If we were that different, research into medications would be a waste of time.

Example: any drug can have some side effects with some probability.

So basically an unknown set of people will have the side effect.

But there is no way for me to objectively test whether I will have the side effect.

The description of some drugs even contain: we have no idea how this works, it just does (for some people, also with unknown “parameters”).

Are you really concerned about the side-effects of eating broccoli?

I’m not sure what you are referring to. Could you please elaborate?

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