Why so much of this is marketed rather than studied

The dosing discussion in most places online is derived from animal work by arithmetic, and that arithmetic does not do what people think it does.

Nothing here is a recommendation. This circle exists to be honest about where the evidence runs out, not to fill the gap with confidence.

I found the discussion here refreshingly free of certainty, which is not true of anywhere else I have looked.

Nothing in this circle is medical advice and none of us is in a position to tell you what is safe for you.

Something worth knowing: a compound being widely discussed tells you about the discussion rather than about the compound.

I found that separating the mechanism claims from the outcome claims made the whole subject much easier to think about.

My reading of the published record on most of these is that it is early, small and mostly not in people.

What helped me was asking, for each compound, what the best single piece of human evidence actually is. Often the answer is very little.

Mable said something I want to sit with for a second.

Something I have noticed is that the confidence of the discussion is usually inversely proportional to the amount of evidence.

I would say be very careful with anything where the entire published record is animal work. That is a starting point, not a finding.

The honest answer to most questions in this circle is that nobody has run the study that would answer them.

What I keep coming back to is that a compound having a plausible mechanism and a compound having human outcome data are very different situations.

This is where the evidence thins out and I would rather this circle said so plainly than pretended otherwise.

Thank you for writing this down. It helped.

My honest experience is that the more I read here, the more conservative I have become about the whole category.

Thank you for coming back to update it. So many threads just stop.