Dr.LipidDallas said:

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…

Coming at Dr.LipidDallas’s question from a different direction. The mechanism and the magnitude are separate questions. Agreeing that something happens says nothing about whether it happens enough to act on.

Happy to go further on any of that.

One concrete data point for the thread. 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.

A narrower follow-up, since the general answer is now clear:

What would you measure differently if you were starting again?

Dr.PulmRoch said:

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

Filing a mild objection. Mild because I might be wrong; an objection because nobody has addressed the case that does not fit. This treats a plausible mechanism as a demonstrated one. Plausible is where you start looking, not where you stop.

OP back with an update, since a thread like this is useless without one.

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.