Dr.PainCLE said:

The RDA is the wrong reference and it is worth understanding why.

This answered a question I did not know how to ask. Sending this to two other people who asked me the same thing last week.

From the other side of the consultation, briefly. Order of operations matters more than any single choice here: establish a baseline, change one thing, wait long enough for it to express itself, then measure again under the same conditions.

Ask again with the specifics and you will get a better answer than this one.

anders_CPH said:

Start from the measurement rather than the conclusion.

I read this differently from anders_CPH, on substance rather than tone. Pushing back on the anecdote-stacking. Twenty people reporting the same thing is twenty samples from the same self-selected pool, not twenty independent confirmations.

One concrete data point for the thread. If you are comparing against somebody else’s result, check that you are comparing the same measurement taken the same way. Most of the apparent contradictions in these threads dissolve at that step.

Moderator note: leaving this open. It is being argued well and the disagreement is the useful part. Report rather than reply if it drifts again.