TinaHashiRN said:

Most of what circulates confidently in this community traces back to one summary of one study, and the qualifier was dropped somewhere in the third…

Adding the part of the answer the thread has not reached. The useful move here is to separate what is established from what is widely repeated. Those two sets overlap less than the confident tone of most write-ups suggests, and the second set is where nearly all the disagreement on this board comes from.

Adding the numbers, since they settle part of this. Worth stating the units and the reference range whenever you post a number here. A large fraction of the apparent disagreement in these threads is two people using different units and both being right.

One thing that is still open after TinaHashiRN’s answer:

What did you change at the same time, and can you separate the two now?

Dr.PeteFamMed said:

Worth stating the units and the reference range whenever you post a number here.

Pushing back on Dr.PeteFamMed here. I think the framing smuggles in the conclusion. Ask it the other way round and the obvious answer reverses, which usually means the question is doing the work.

Closing the loop on my own question.

Follow-up — I put something in the gap where food used to be rather than waiting for the gap to close on its own. That was the part nobody told me.